Title: Lasso the Wind_ Away to the New West Author: Timothy Egan File Type: Mobi Subject:Travel Description:A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Mountains and Plains Book Sellers Association Award Sprawling in scope. . . . Mr. Egan uses the past powerfully to explain and give dimension to the present. --_The New York Times_ Fine reportage . . . honed and polished until it reads more like literature than journalism. --_Los Angeles Times_ They have tried to tame it, shave it, fence it, cut it, dam it, drain it, nuke it, poison it, pave it, and subdivide it, writes Timothy Egan of the West still, this regions hold on the American character has never seemed stronger. In this colorful and revealing journey through the eleven states west of the 100th meridian, Egan, a third-generation westerner, evokes a lovely and troubled country where land is religion and the holy war between preservers and possessors never ends. Egan leads us on an unconventional, freewheeling tour from Americas oldest continuously inhabited community, the Ancoma Pueblo in New Mexico, to the high kitsch of Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where London Bridge has been painstakingly rebuilt stone by stone from the fragile beauty of Idahos Bitterroot Range to the gross excess of Las Vegas, a city built as though in defiance of its arid environment. In a unique blend of travel writing, historical reflection, and passionate polemic, Egan has produced a moving study of the West how it became what it is, and where it is going. The writing is simply wonderful. From the opening paragraph, Egan seduces the reader. . . . Entertaining, thought provoking. br --_The Arizona Daily Star Weekly_ A western breeziness and love of open spaces shines through strongLasso the Windstrong. . . . The writing is simple and evocative.br --_The Economist_ From the Trade Paperback edition.

Title: Zoo Story_ Life in the Garden of Captive Author: Thomas French File Type: Mobi Subject:Non-fiction Description: Welcome to the savage and surprising world of *Zoo Story*, an unprecedented account of the secret life of a zoo and its inhabitants, both animal and human. Based on six years of research, the book follows a handful of unforgettable characters at Tampas Lowry Park Zoo an alpha chimp with a weakness for blondes, a ferocious tiger who revels in Obsession perfume, and a brilliant but tyrannical CEO known as El Diablo Blanco. *Zoo Story* crackles with issues of global urgency the shadow of extinction, humanitys role in the destruction or survival of other species. More than anything else, though, its a dramatic and moving true story of seduction and betrayal, exile and loss, and the limits of freedom on an overcrowded planet--all framed inside one zoo reinventing itself for the twenty-first century. Thomas French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, chronicles the action with vivid power Wild elephants soaring above the Atlantic on their way to captivity. Predators circling each other in a lethal mating dance. Primates plotting the overthrow of their king. The sweeping narrative takes the reader from the African savannah to the forests of Panama and deep into the inner workings of a place some describe as a sanctuary and others condemn as a prison. All of it comes to life in the books four-legged characters. Even animal lovers will be startled by the emotional charge of these creatures histories, which read as though they were co-written by Dickens and Darwin. *Zoo Story* shows us how these remarkable individuals live, how some die, and what their experiences reveal about the human desire to both exalt and control nature.