Winged Obsession: The Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler
10 best books like Winged Obsession: The Pursuit of the World's Most Notorious Butterfly Smuggler (Jessica Speart): Tigers in the Snow, Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Mysterious Fish, Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art, Poseidon's Steed The Story of Seahorses, from Myth to Reality, Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly, An Obsession with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular Insect, The Last Great Ape: A Journey Through Africa and a Fight for the Heart of the Continent, The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists, Shell Games: Rogues, Smugglers, and the Hunt for Nature's Bounty, Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery
| Author | Peter Matthiessen |
| ISBN | 0865475962 |
No more than a few thousand tigers survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little-populated Russian Far East, a region that may offer the species' best hope for survival. But the implosion...
| Author | James Prosek |
| ISBN | 0060566116 |
Tour through the life history and cultural associations of the freshwater eel, exploring its biology in streams and epic migrations in the ocean, its myth and lore, its mystery and beauty. Prosek travels the globe to tell the story of the eel--from New York to New Zealand; from Europe to Japan and the...
Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through the Secret World of Stolen Art
| Author | Joshua Knelman |
| ISBN | 1935639382 |
Hot Art traces Knelman's five-year immersion in the shadowy world of art theft, where he uncovers a devious game that takes him from Egypt to Los Angeles, New York to London, and back again, through a web of deceit, violence, and corruption. With a cool, knowing eye, Knelman delves into the lives of professionals...
A fascinating journey with the sea creature that has captured human imagination for thousands of years
Poseidon's Steed trails the seahorse through secluded waters across the globe in a kaleidoscopic history that mirrors man?s centuries-old fascination with the animal, sweeping from...
Every autumn, the monarch butterflies east of the Rockies migrate from as far north as Canada to Mexico. Memory is not their guide — no one butterfly makes the round trip — but each year somehow find their way to the same fifty acres of forest on the high slopes of Mexico’s Neovolcanic Mountains,...
| Author | Sharman Apt Russell |
| ISBN | 0465071600 |
Butterflies have always served as a metaphor for resurrection and transformation, but as Sharman Apt Russell points out in this lyrical meditation, butterflies are above all objects of obsession. She reveals the logic behind our endless fascination with butterflies and introduces us to the legendary...
| Author | Ofir Drori |
| ISBN | 1605983276 |
Staging heart-pounding, espionage-style raids, Ofir Drori and his organization, The Last Great Ape (LAGA), have put countless poachers and traffickers of endangered species behind bars, and they have fought back against a Kafkaesque culture of corruption. Before Ofir arrived in Cameroon, no...
| Author | Peter Laufer |
| ISBN | 1599215551 |
The whole time I was reading this book I kept thinking that the author was looking for a story that wasn't there. He didn't necessarily invent anything to write this book, but I think his own ignorance and his entitled sense of poetic license meshed to create a sense of suspense and danger where it really...
| Author | Craig Welch |
| ISBN | 0061537136 |
A unique blend of natural history and crime drama, Shell Games by Craig Welch is a riveting tale of rogues, scoundrels, and the hunt for nature’s bounty in the tradition of The Orchid Thief. A stranger-than-fiction true story centered around a larger-than-life character who pursued a larger-than-life...
| Author | Jennie Erin Smith |
| ISBN | 0307381471 |
Tortoises disappear from a Madagascar reserve and reappear in the Bronx Zoo. A dead iguana floats in a jar, awaiting its unveiling in a Florida court. A viper causes mayhem from Ethiopia to Virginia. In Stolen World, Jennie Erin Smith takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a dark adventure over...
| Author | Errol Fuller |
| ISBN | 0691161372 |
A photograph of an extinct animal evokes a greater feeling of loss than any painting ever could. Often black and white or tinted sepia, these remarkable images have been taken mainly in zoos or wildlife parks, and in some cases depict the last known individual of the species. Lost Animals is a unique photographic...
| Author | Bryan Christy |
| ISBN | 0446580953 |
Ray Van Nostrand is nuts about reptiles. Even as a child, he bought and resold thousands of turtles, snakes, newts and other creepy crawly things. Before regulation of such trade began in the late 20th century (strange to phrase it that way) it was legal to import all sorts of endangered animals. Polio...
Butterfly People: An American Encounter with the Beauty of the World
| Author | William R. Leach |
| ISBN | 0375422935 |
With 32 pages of full-color inserts and black-and-white illustrations throughout.
From one of our most highly regarded historians, here is an original and engrossing chronicle of nineteenth-century America’s infatuation with butterflies, and the story of the naturalists who unveiled...
| Author | Scott Weidensaul |
| ISBN | 0865476683 |
"A thoughtful examination of the machinery of extinction . . . By turns harrowing and elegiac, thrilling and informative." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Three or four times an hour, eighty or more times a day, a unique species of plant or animal vanishes forever. And yet, every so...
| Author | Gordon Grice |
| ISBN | 0385318901 |
Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning...
The Illustrated Insectopedia
| Author | Hugh Raffles |
| ISBN | 0375423869 |
A New York Times Notable Book
A stunningly original exploration of the ties that bind us to the beautiful, ancient, astoundingly accomplished, largely unknown, and unfathomably different species with whom we share the world.
For as long as humans have existed, insects have been...
| Author | Claire Nouvian |
| ISBN | 0226595668 |
On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where...
| Author | Jim Robbins |
| ISBN | 1400069068 |
The Man Who Planted Trees is the inspiring story of David Milarch’s quest to clone the biggest trees on the planet in order to save our forests and ecosystem—as well as a hopeful lesson about how each of us has the ability to make a difference.
“When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty...
On June 23, 2000, the iron ore carrier MV Treasure foundered off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, spilling 1,300 tons of oil into the ocean and contaminating the habitat of 75,000 penguins—thus threatening to decimate 41 percent of the world’s population of African penguins. A massive rescue...
| Author | Robert Dinwiddie |
| ISBN | 0756622050 |
As the site where life first formed on Earth, a key element of the climate, and a continuing but fragile resource, oceans are of vital importance to our planet. From the geological and physical processes that affect the ocean floor to the key habitat zones, flora, and fauna, this is the definitive reference...
| Author | Jamie James |
| ISBN | 1401302130 |
Although it was still too dark to see well, Joe absentmindedly thrust his right hand into the sack to extract the specimen and have a look. Immediately, he winced with pain and yanked out his hand. A tiny black-and-white banded snake, less than ten inches long, was dangling limply from his middle finger,...
| Author | Bert Hölldobler |
| ISBN | 0393067041 |
The Superorganism promises to be one of the most important scientific works published in this decade. Coming eighteen years after the publication of The Ants, this new volume expands our knowledge of the social insects (among them, ants, bees, wasps, and termites) and is based on remarkable research...
The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States
| Author | Mark Fiege |
| ISBN | 0295991674 |
In the dramatic narratives that comprise The Republic of Nature, Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the simple but radical premise that nothing in the nation's past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. Revisiting historical...
