True Animal

Great Horse Racing Mysteries digs beneath the surface of some of the sport's most intriguing cases.

A young man is murdered for his prized pet fish. An Asian tycoon buys a single specimen for $150,000. Meanwhile, a pet detective chases smugglers through the streets of New York. Delving into an outlandish realm of obsession, paranoia, and criminality, The Dragon Behind the Glass tells the story of a fish like none other: a powerful predator dating to the age of the dinosaurs.

Slowly, slowly, slowly...that's how the sloth lives. He hangs upside-down from the branch of a tree, night and day, in the sun and in the rain, while the other animals of the rain forest rush past him. "Why are you so slow? Why are you so quiet? Why are you so lazy?" the others ask the sloth. And, after a long, long, long time, the sloth finally tells them! Set in the lush world of the tropical rain forest, this original book has a meaningful message: Slow down! Take time to enjoy your world.

Charming, faithful, heroic dogs lead you to see God’s hand working in your own life. They’ll help you to understand how God is watching over you at all times, nudging you to be at the right place at the right time to meet the very people he wants you to meet, always keeping you on his GPS.

As Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago, the differences between animals and humans are of degree and not of kind. Not long ago, ethologists denied that animals had emotions or true intelligence. Now, we know that rats laugh when tickled, magpies mourn as they cover the departed with greenery, female whales travel thousands of miles for annual reunions with their gal pals, seals navigate by the stars, bears hum when happy, and crows slide down snowy rooftops for fun.

In the midst of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound off the Massachusetts coast. When the Coast Guard heard the Mayday calls, they immediately dispatched a patrol rescue boat. But within an hour, the Coast Guard rescue boat was in as much trouble as the tanker - both paralyzed in unrelenting seas. Enter Captain Frank Quirk, who was compelled to act. Gathering his crew of four, Quirk plunged his 49-foot steel boat, the Can Do, into the blizzard.

A stirring, inspiring book with the power to change the way we understand and communicate with our dogs. Few people are more qualified to speak about the abilities and potential of dogs than Jennifer Arnold, who for the past twenty years has trained service dogs for people with physical disabilities and special needs.

No Better Friend tells the incredible true story of Frank Williams, a radarman in Britain's Royal Air Force, and Judy, a purebred pointer, who met as prisoners of war during World War II. Judy, who became the war's only official canine POW, was a fiercely loyal dog who sensed danger - warning her fellow prisoners of imminent attacks and protecting them from brutal beatings. Frank and Judy's friendship, an unbreakable bond forged in the worst circumstances, is one of the great recently unearthed stories of World War II.

In 2002, a young orca was discovered near Seattle - lost, alone, and 300 miles away from home. Six months later she was rescued, rehabilitated and reunited with her family on the north end of Vancouver Island. Today Springer is thriving, with two calves of her own. It's the only successful orca reunion in history!

Bob Barker, former game-show host, springs a bear named Ben from bear jail. Angel, a rescued dog, has a psychic connection with her owner even from 180 miles away. A therapy horse becomes the only confidante for an abused little girl. These are only a few of the captivating, heartwarming and inspiring true animal rescue stories in Finding a Forever Home.

Poor Lenore! None of the other animals at Bedlam Farm welcome her. Even Rose the border collie is too busy to play. But Lenore refuses to give up, and when she licks a grumpy ram named Brutus - right on the nose! - an unexpected friendship begins.

“Sharks are as timid as rabbits,” says a superintendent of the Coast Guard, dismissing the possibility that a shark could be the culprit in an unprecedented fatal attack at the Jersey Shore. It’s July, and swimming in the sea is a popular new pastime, but people up and down the East Coast are shocked and mystified by the swimmer’s death. A prominent surgeon at the shore, Dr. Edwin Halsey is the one who examines the victim, and the only one who believes the perpetrator was a shark—and that it will strike again.

In the rolling green hills of Kaipara, Scottish vet Rory Dean and his two fox terriers, Scrappy and Alfie, are on call day and night for whichever animal emergency awaits. In Adventures of a Country Vet, Rory shares stories of the livestock and pets he's cared for as a rural vet in New Zealand and southwest England. From calving in a blizzard to a dog wounded in a pig-hunt, a horse castration gone wrong and warming a baby alpaca in the footwell of his ute, life as a vet is all-go.

Travel Tales: Wild Animals is a collection of wildlife-viewing stories including some very scary tales of often coming close to serious trouble with wild animals in your travels but managing to just barely escape. It is also a collection of the fearful sorts of things that can and do happen to travelers, but, mostly, these will not happen to you. But if they do, you get to experience real raw fear, including sometimes fear for your very own life. These are very unsettling occasions that may pop up now and again in your travels.

All year long Lily and Liam look forward to Christmas on their grandparents' farm. It's always the perfect trip -- walking to the lilac library, trimming the tree, giving gifts. But this year, thanks to a white cow alone in the meadow, things will be different. This Christmas, Lily and Liam will find out the meaning of a true gift.

Joe Barboza knew that there were two requirements for getting inducted into the Mafia. You had to be Sicilian. And you had to commit a contract killing. The New Bedford-born mobster was a proud Portuguese, not Sicilian, but his dream to be part of La Cosa Nostra proved so strong that he thought he could create a loophole. Barboza’s legacy, buried for years thanks to the murders or deaths of its participants, is finally coming to light and being told in its unvarnished brutality by one of America’s most respected true crime writers.

Two dozen Navy SEALs descended on Osama bin Laden’s compound in May 2011. After the mission, only one name was made public: Cairo, a Belgian Malinois and military working dog. Warrior Dog the story of Cairo and his handler, Will Chesney, a member of SEAL Team Six whose life would be irrevocably tied to Cairo's, specially adapted for young listeners from Chesney and Joe Layden's No Ordinary Dog.

Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the East Berlin zoo was spacious and lush, a socialist utopia where everything was perfectly planned...and then rarely successfully finished. Berlin’s two zoos quickly became symbols of the divided city’s two halves. So no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race - rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, competing to have the most pandas and hippos.

It's science-project time, which is bad news for Hank. He loves doing science experiments, but writing a whole report is another story. Finally, Hank comes up with a science project: he'll take apart the cable box and figure out how it works. But Hank wasn't counting on his sister Emily's iguana laying 18 eggs inside the cable box! How will Hank finish his project now and will he ever be able to watch TV again?

What do stories about humpback whales protecting a biologist from a shark, a pride of lions rescuing a girl from kidnappers, gorillas working together to dismantle poacher snares, a parrot warding off an attacker in a park, a chimpanzee consoling a human, and an elephant trying to rescue a baby rhino tell us about animal nature? And what might they suggest about our very own human nature?