Craig Childs

At the height of summer a dark shadow falls across Exmoor. Children are being stolen. Each disappearance is marked only by a terse note - a brutal accusation. There are no explanations, no ransom demands ... and no hope. Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he's to stand any chance of catching him. But - still reeling from a personal tragedy - is Jonas really up to the task? Because there's at least one person on Exmoor who thinks that, when it comes to being the first line of defence, Jonas Holly may be the last man to trust ..."--Back cover.

"An ordinary woman flees the scene of a murder--and realizes it's not just the law that may be coming after her"--Provided by publisher. So as not to jeopardize her case for child custody, Lake Warren is forced to lie to the police after having just been intimate with the flirtatious Dr. Keaton who has been murdered. Wanting to protect herself from being charged with the crime, she begins her own search for the truth--not realizing that she is dangerously close to dark secrets, both about Keaton and the advanced fertility clinic they've been working for.

From one of the finest nature writers at work in America today-a lyrical, dramatic, illuminating tour of the hidden domain of wild animals. Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom

Scientists squabble over the locations and dates for human arrival in the New World. The first explorers were few, encampments fleeting. At some point in time, between twenty and forty thousand years ago, sea levels were low enough that a vast land bridge was exposed between Asia and North America-- but was not the only way across. Childs provides an unsparing, vivid, revelatory travelogue through prehistory that traces the arrival of the First People in North America twenty thousand years ago, the megafauna they found here, and the artifacts that enable us to imagine their lives and fates. -- adapted from publisher info

John Grade's drawings, sculptures and installations are weathered, marked, worn and disintegrated. Made of reclaimed wood or paper, the works are buried for termites to devour, sunk into a bay to collect barnacles, or hung in forest trees for birds to eat. Grade's work represents our changing environment. An attraction to travel and to the land shapes the work, mirroring pattern s found in nature, such as wasp nests, erosion, honeycombs, rocks, trees and the passage of time. Grade invites natural forces to erode and change the work and its material, exploring both control and disruption and risk and measured thought. The works beg in from an experience - a reaction to place and history or a trek into the landscape, whether it is the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest or the hills of Iceland.

"[A] deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons--a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in a dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Writer and adventurer Craig Childs delves into the primacy of our starkest landscapes and the profound nature of the more-than-human."-- Back cover.

The greatest "unsolved mystery" of the American Southwest is the fate of the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the eleventh century converged on Chaco Canyon (in today's southwestern New Mexico) and built what has been called the Las Vegas of its day, a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments - in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture, and in engineering - were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America. By the thirteenth century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. Vanished. What was it that brought about the rapid collapse of their civilization? Was it drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? For many years conflicting theories have abounded. Craig Childs draws on the latest scholarly research, as well as on a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the most forbidding landscapes of the American Southwest, to shed new light on this compelling mystery.

Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.

This work traces the history and cultural impact of the elements on humankind, and examines why people have long sought to identify the substances around them.