Nature Biography

Hangdog Days vividly chronicles the era when rock climbing exploded in popularity, attracting a new generation of talented climbers eager to reach new heights via harder routes and faster ascents. This contentious, often entertaining period gave rise to sport climbing, climbing gyms, and competitive climbing-indelibly transforming the sport. Jeff Smoot was one of those brash young climbers, and here he traces the development of traditional climbing "rules," enforced first through peer pressure, then later through intimidation and sabotage.

Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of 13. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disability and lead a fulfilling and exciting life. In this poignant and inspiring memoir, he shares his struggle to push past the limits imposed on him by his visual impairment - and by a seeing world.

When Jerry Moffatt burst onto the scene as a brash 17-year-old, rock climbing had never seen anyone like him before. Fiercely ambitious, even as a boy Moffatt was focused on one thing: being the best in the world. This is the story of his meteoric rise to stardom and how he overcame injury to stay at the top for over two decades. Top sport climber, brilliant competitor, and a pioneer in the new game of bouldering, Moffatt's story is that of climbing itself in the last 30 years. Yet Jerry Moffatt is more than a dedicated athlete.

Crimson Arrows: A Bowhunting Odyssey is narrated from the heart and soul of a bowhunter. Spanning three decades of his adventures, Eyad Yehyawi takes you through the emotions, heartbreaks, and successes from his earliest years in Iowa, to physically and psychologically challenging backcountry hunts in Alaska and Canada, to a breathtaking African safari. Every setback and missed opportunity is revealed, along with the rewards earned through hard work and perseverance.

Bass Wars: A Story of Fishing, Fame, and Fortune follows professional B.A.S.S fisherman for a year in 1986. The book provides an insider's view of the tournament circuit, the star fishermen, and the want-to-be stars as they compete to catch bass and win big prizes. The book also tells the story of how Ray Scott founded the Bass Angler Sportsman Society (B.A.S.S.) and launched a series of tournaments that created a new brand of sports hero: the professional bass fisherman.

Coyote Peterson, YouTube star, animal enthusiast, and creator of the Brave Adventure series, has tracked down some of the world's most painfully stinging insects and chronicled getting stung by each of them on his YouTube channel. Coyote has saved the best - or possibly the worst - for last, and he's finally ready to share his experience with the most painful sting in the world: the Executioner Wasp. Packed with facts about nature's most misunderstood creatures, The King of Sting is a dream book for any kid that loves animals, bugs, outdoor exploration, and danger!

In The Plant Hunter, Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean - all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs.

Wild animals are beautiful creatures, but they can turn dangerous in a heartbeat. Follow along as survivors use their wit, strength, and sheer will to battle these deadly beasts.

Hans Florine is a big-wall climbing legend in his own time. He holds the speed record on the Nose route of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite cliff in Yosemite Valley that's considered the Everest of the rock-climbing world. But Florine's story is not one of super-human athletic prowess; it's one of persistence and dogged determination. In 30 years of climbing, he's ascended the Nose a mind-blowing, death-defying 100 times, more than anyone else ever has, and most likely ever will. In On the Nose, Florine describes the most dangerous, pivotal, and inspirational of those climbs.

This gripping account of courage, achievement, and heartbreaking loss tells the story of Bonington's Boys, a band of climbers who reinvented mountaineering during the three decades after Everest's first ascent. The boyish, fanatically driven Chris Bonington's inner circle included a dozen of the most renowned climbers, who took increasingly terrible risks on now legendary expeditions to the world's most fearsome peaks, and paid an enormous price. Most of them died in the mountains, leaving behind the hardest question of all: Was it worth it?

Taking risks and exploring the unknown are as vital to human beings as our need for air, for growth, for affirmation, for something. These 19 stories reach deep into humanity's compulsion for the rush of new experiences.

On 30 January, 1981 Joe Tasker and Ade Burgess stood at 24,000 feet on the west ridge of Mount Everest. Below them were their companions, some exhausted, some crippled by illness, all virtually incapacitated. Further progress seemed impossible. Everest the Cruel Way is Joe Tasker's story of an attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth - an attempt which pushed a group of Britain's finest mountaineers to their limits. The goal had been to climb Mount Everest at its hardest: via the infamous west ridge, without supplementary oxygen and in winter.

In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, and their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in Southwest Montana. The Sun's 20,000 acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of Southwest Montana - a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly, Dead Man, and Bad Luck.

I am floating in the middle of the night, and nobody in the world even knows I am missing. Nobody is looking for me. You can't get more alone than that. You can't be more lost. I've got too many people who love me. There's no way I'm dying like this. In the dead of night on July 24, 2013, John Aldridge was thrown off the back of the Anna Mary while his fishing partner, Anthony Sosinski, slept below. As desperate hours ticked by, Sosinski, the families, the local fishing community, and the US Coast Guard in three states mobilized in an unprecedented search effort.

Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, her days spent at crime scenes collecting samples, standing over dead bodies in a mortuary, or looking down her microscope for evidence. Working at the interface of where the criminal and natural world interact, Patricia has been involved in some of the most high-profile murder cases. Now, through a study of her most infamous, and fascinating cases—including the murder of Sarah Payne, and the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman—Patricia will show us how she finds the answers to some of the worst crimes imaginable.

After a nearly fatal bout of appendicitis, Hal Borland decided to leave the city behind and move with his wife to a farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Their new home on one hundred acres inspired Borland to return to nature. In this masterpiece of American nature writing, he describes such wonders as the peace of a sky full of stars, the breathless beauty of blossoming plants, the way rain swishes as it hits a river, and the invigorating renewal brought by the changing seasons. The delights of nature as Borland observes them seem boundless, and his sense of awe is contagious.

Chronicling the great hunters of America - beginning with the Plains Indians and moving through legendary hunters like Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Lyndon Johnson, and more - American Hunter honors the heroes and traditions that have built America.

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At 26 feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.

A Force for Nature is a biography of Nancy Russell and her successful campaign to establish and protect the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Bowen Blair tells the story of the activist who fought one of the most fiercely contested conservation battles of the 1980s, interweaving it with the natural and political history of the legendary landscape that inspired her.

Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of young scientists, under the guidance of Dr. George Church, the most brilliant geneticist of our time, works to make fantasy reality by sequencing the DNA of a frozen woolly mammoth harvested from above the Arctic Circle and splicing elements of that sequence into the DNA of a modern elephant.