Tails & Tales: Nonfiction


To accompany this year’s Summer Reading theme, we’ve curated nonfiction works celebrating animals, and their human companions and advocates.


The Complete Cat Breed Book

DK

Choose the perfect cat for you From Siamese to Sphynx cats, The Complete Cat Breed Book will help you choose the perfect companion for you. Fully illustrated and featuring over 150 of the world's best-loved cat breeds, this is the only cat breed

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Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Frans de Waal

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? explores the oddities and complexities of animal cognition—in crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, chimpanzees, and bonobos—to reveal how smart animals really are, and how we’ve undere

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The Photo Ark

Joel Sartore

This lush book of photography represents National Geographic's Photo Ark, a major cross-platform initiative and lifelong project by photographer Joel Sartore to make portraits of the world's animals-especially those that are endangered. His

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Photo Ark Vanishing

Joel Sartore

Celebrated National Geographic photojournalist Sartore continues his Photo Ark quest, photographing species around the world that are escaping extinction thanks to human efforts. The animals featured in these pages are either destined for extinction

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My Old Dog

Laura T. Coffey

The story of photographer Lori Fusaro’s work with senior shelter pets. While generally calm, easy, and already house-trained, these animals often represent the highest-risk population at shelters. With gorgeous, joyful photographs and sweet, funny,

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Secret Service Dogs

Maria Goodavage

US members of state are protected by service dogs and their handlers. Secret Service Dogs shines a spotlight on some of these canine heroes, from Hurricane, a Belgian Malinois with four titanium teeth, to Roadee, a little terrier mix with a big attit

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The Artful Bird

Abigail Patner Glassenberg

Join the flock! Create your own aviary of charming, beautifully detailed, one-of-a-kind fabric bird sculptures with basic machineand handsewing, embroidery, and mixed-media craft techniques. The Artful Bird presents 16 incredibly charming, quirky, pe

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A Street Cat Named Bob

James Bowen

Traces the story of an impoverished London street musician who after saving an injured and highly intelligent cat found his life profoundly changed in unexpected ways.

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How to Draw Cute Animals

Angela Nguyen

Don't believe seagulls and stingrays can be cute? Think again! Enter planet CUTE! This follow-up to How to Draw Cute Stuff teaches kids how to draw a menagerie of adorable creatures, from cats, dogs, hedgehogs, and hamsters to dolphins, bunnies,

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Between Two Kingdoms

Suleika Jaouad

When Suleika finally walked out of the hospital--after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant--she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing end

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The Perfect Horse

Elizabeth Letts

In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find—his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm

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Michigan Nature Set

James Kavanagh

The Michigan Nature Set offers the best in wildlife and plant identification for The Great Lakes State. The set includes three Pocket Naturalist Guides to Michigan, Trees & Wildflowers, Birds, and Wildlife, and is attractively packaged in an acet

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H Is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald

Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive." H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debu

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Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light - these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the ag

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Crochet Cute Critters

Sarah Zimmerman

Crochet a zoo full of adorable animal friends with ease. Discover how simple crafting your own crochet plush animals can be. From alligators to zebras, Crochet Cute Critters features 26 beginner-friendly patterns for creating all kinds of cuddly comp

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The Sixth Extinction

Elizabeth Kolbert

A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctio

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