'Man-Eaters of Kumaon' is the best known of Corbett's books, one which offers ten fascinating and spine-tingling tales of pursuing and shooting tigers in the Indian Himalayas during the early years of this 19th Century. The stories also offer first-hand information about the exotic flora, fauna, and village life in this obscure and treacherous region of India, making it as interesting a travelogue as it is a compelling look at a bygone era of hunting. No one understood the ways of the Indian jungle better than Corbett. A skilled tracker, he preferred to hunt alone and on foot, sometimes accompanied by his small dog Robin. Corbett derived intense happiness from observing wildlife and he was a fervent conservationist as well as a tracker. He empathised with the impoverished people amongst whom he lived, in what is today Uttarakhand, and he established India's first tiger sanctuary there. Corbett's writing is as immediate and accessible today as it was when first published in 1944.
This is the first longer-format, middle-grade collection from #1 New York Times-bestselling author-illustrator Calef Brown. Moving away from the picture book format offers Calef the opportunity to tackle a variety of themes and poetry styles as well as reach a slightly older audience. Hypnotize a Tiger is chock-full of Calef's zany black-and-white artwork and features his wonderfully inventive characters and worlds-from the "completely nonviolent and silent" Lou Gnome to Percival, the impetuous (and none-too-sensible) lad who believes he is invincible, to Hugh Jarm (who has a huge arm, natch!). It's a whimsical world: creative, fun, and inspiring!
It's December 1997 and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. To their horrified astonishment it emerges that the attacks are not random: the tiger is engaged in a vendetta. Injured and starving, it must be found before it strikes again, and the story becomes a battle for survival between the two main characters: Yuri Trush, the lead tracker, and the tiger itself. As John Vaillant vividly recreates the extraordinary events of that winter, he also gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spectacularly beautiful region where plants and animals exist that are found nowhere else on earth, and where the once great Siberian Tiger - the largest of its species, which can weigh over 600 lbs at more than 10 feet long - ranges daily over vast territories of forest and mountain, its numbers diminished to a fraction of what they once were. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers - even sharing their kills with them - in a natural balance. We witness the first arrival of settlers, soldiers and hunters in the tiger's territory in the 19th century and 20th century, many fleeing Stalinism. And we come to know the Russians of today - such as the poacher Vladimir Markov - who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching for the corrupt, high-paying Chinese markets. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters and how early Homo sapiens may have once fit seamlessly into the tiger's ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator, and the grave threat it faces as logging and poaching reduce its habitat and numbers - and force it to turn at bay. Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger is a gripping tale of man and nature in collision, that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the Siberian forest.
Tigers retract their claws but never their fury. Surprise them when they are eating or sleeping, and you'll likely become the meal and be put to sleep permanently! When it comes to the orange and black beast that is the tiger, it's best to show respect by keeping your distance. You sure don't want to be part of an attack story like those described in this book.
The acclaimed journalist’s New York Times–bestselling essay collection: “hilarious, nimble, and thoroughly illuminating” (Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad). In this highly anticipated debut collection, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here—five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces—go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities. They explore the interconnectedness of the globalized world, the consequences of history, the power of myth, and the ways people attempt to find meaning. Phillips searches for tigers in India, and uncovers a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon and his niece turned stepdaughter turned wife in the Oklahoma town where he grew up. Dogged and self-aware, Phillips is an exhilarating guide to the confusion and wonder of the world today. If John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead was the last great collection of New Journalism from the print era, Impossible Owls is the first of the digital age.
This is a fictionalized story about a circus and my great-aunt Marie, who was a lion tamer during the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. She worked for the Al G. Barnes Circus and, later, Barnum and Bailey. She traveled across the United States and Europe, performing with the big cats, as well as with dancing bears, giant dogs, and other animals. She was known as the best-dressed woman in the circus and was often billed as Princess Florines. She was injured countless times but returned to the work she loved with animals despite her injuries. She was in many creative acts, and in most she played a little girl. Being of small stature and very beautiful, she played fairy-tale characters in many of her acts.
One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015 One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016 A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place. "Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis
The jolly and exciting tale of the little boy who lost his red coat and his blue trousers and his purple shoes but who was saved from the tigers to eat 169 pancakes for his supper, has been universally loved by generations of children. First written in 1899, the story has become a childhood classic and the authorized American edition with the original drawings by the author has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Little Black Sambo is a book that speaks the common language of all nations, and has added more to the joy of little children than perhaps any other story. They love to hear it again and again; to read it to themselves; to act it out in their play.
The author who revealed the secret lives of dogs in the best-selling The Hidden Life of Dogs offers a journey into the hidden life of cats and reports that cats, surprisingly, are not solitary beings. Reissue.
