This book meticulously recreates the most important episodes in Czech-German relations in what is now the Czech Republic. Drawing on extensive archival research, Stephen M. Thomas depicts the formation of the Czechoslovak Republic from the ruined Austro-Hungarian empire and examines political and public life between world wars via the ethnic rivalry between Germans and Czechs. He questions the nature, legitimacy and political viability of the nation state, and especially its relationship to ethnic minorities, such as the Slovaks. Confrontational nationalism and the use of ethnicity as a political tool are no less common today than they were in the 20th century. This book's radical contribution to studies of nationalism and ethnicity is that it juxtaposes German and Czech perspectives of power and oppression as part of the same story. This framework allows us to appreciate new complexities regarding the creation of Czechoslovakia and ponder them in 21st century terms.

This is the personal journal of a young American woman, living for six months amongst the Dodoth cattle-herdsmen in Northern Uganda. It is also an adventure story, for during this period the Dodoth were caught up in an escalating cycle of violence with their age-old rivals, the Turkana tribe. The animating tension of this feud was the tradition of cattle raiding, but it escalated to unprecedented levels of violence when the new nation states of Uganda and Kenya were drawn in to police these ancient clan frontiers. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas s total immersion in the life of this tribe in 1961 takes us with her, as with clarity and a lyrical eye for detail she brings their whole culture alive. For though she was not an academic herself, she had spent much time in the field with her mother, who was the world s leading authority on the Bushman of the Kalahari. So it was natural for Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to take her own young children on this adventure, where she proves herself such a brave, humane and unshockable witness to the life of the warrior herdsmen.

A literary ode to peace, presence, and fulfillment inspired by a walk taken with a most surprising creature.

"The demon of speed is often associated with forgetting, with avoidance ... and slowness with memory and confronting," observes Milan Kundera in his novel "Slowness." With that purpose in mind--a search for slowness and tranquility--Andy Merrifield sets out on a journey of the soul with a friend's donkey, Gribouille, to walk amid the ruins and spectacular vistas of southern France's Haute-Auvergne. As Merrifield contemplates literature, science, truth, and beauty amid the French countryside, Gribouille surprises him with his subtle wisdom, reminding him time and again that enlightenment is all around us if we but seek it.

The animal kingdom operates by ancient rules, and the deer in our woods and backyards can teach us many of them--but only if we take the time to notice.

In the fall of 2007 in southern New Hampshire, the acorn crop failed and the animals who depended on it faced starvation. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas began leaving food in small piles around her farmhouse. Soon she had over thirty deer coming to her fields, and her naturalist's eye was riveted. How did they know when to come, all together, and why did they sometimes cooperate, sometimes compete?

Throughout the next twelve months she observed the local deer families as they fought through a rough winter; bred fawns in the spring; fended off coyotes, a bobcat, a bear, and plenty of hunters; and made it to the next fall when the acorn crop was back to normal. As she hiked through her woods, spotting tree rubbings, deer beds, and deer yards, she discovered a vast hidden world. Deer families are run by their mothers. Local families arrange into a hierarchy. They adopt orphans; they occasionally reject a child; they use complex warnings to signal danger; they mark their territories; they master local microclimates to choose their beds; they send countless coded messages that we can read, if only we know what to look for.

Just as she did in her beloved books The Hidden Life of Dogs and Tribe of Tiger, Thomas describes a network of rules that have allowed earth's species to coexist for millions of years. Most of us have lost touch with these rules, yet they are a deep part of us, from our ancient evolutionary past. The Hidden Life of Deer is a narrative masterpiece and a naturalist's delight.

2017 is the 50th anniversary of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund and Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda. Three astounding women scientists have in recent years penetrated the jungles of Africa and Borneo to observe, nurture, and defend humanity's closest cousins. Jane Goodall has worked with the chimpanzees of Gombe for nearly 50 years; Diane Fossey died in 1985 defending the mountain gorillas of Rwanda; and Birute Galdikas lives in intimate proximity to the orangutans of Borneo. All three began their work as protegees of the great Anglo-African archeologist Louis Leakey, and each spent years in the field, allowing the apes to become their familiars--and ultimately waging battles to save them from extinction in the wild. Their combined accomplishments have been mind-blowing, as Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas forever changed how we think of our closest evolutionary relatives, of ourselves, and of how to conduct good science. From the personal to the primate, Sy Montgomery--acclaimed author of The Soul of an Octopus and The Good Good Pig--explores the science, wisdom, and living experience of three of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century.

Now a Major Motion Picture

The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardlythought of himself as a dog lover when, well into middleage, he came into possession of a German shepherd. Tohis surprise, she turned out to be the love of his life, the"ideal friend" he had been searching for in vain for years. "My Dog Tulip" is a bittersweet retrospective account of theirsixteen-year companionship, as well as a profound andsubtle meditation on the strangeness that lies at the heartof all relationships. In vivid and sometimes startling detail, Ackerley tells of Tulip's often erratic behavior and very canine tastes, and of his own fumbling but determinedefforts to ensure for her an existence of perfect happiness.

"My Dog Tulip "has been adapted to screen as a major animated feature film with a cast that includes the voices of Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave, and Isabella Rossellini. It has been heralded as "A stroke of genius" by "New York Magazine" and "The love story of the year" by "Vanity Fair."

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, chronicling the customs of pre-contact hunter-gatherers and the secret lives of deer and dogs. In this book, the capstone of her long career, Thomas, now 88, turns her keen eye to her own life. The result is an account of growing old that is at once funny and charming, intimate and profound - both a memoir and a life-affirming map all of us may follow to embrace our later years with grace and dignity. Growing Old explores a wide range of issues connected with ageing, from stereotypes of the elderly as burdensome to the methods of burial that humans have used throughout history to how to deal with a concerned neighbour who assumes you're buying cat food to eat for dinner. Written with wit and compassion, this book is an expansive and deeply personal paean to the beauty and the brevity of life that offers understanding for everyone, regardless of age.

Extraordinary new insights into the minds and lives of our fellow creatures from two of the world's top animal authors, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Sy Montgomery. A Mail on Sunday "Critic's Pick" Best Read of the Year "In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures."-from the foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company Tamed and Untamed a collection of essays penned by two of the world's most celebrated animal writers, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals as diverse as snails, house cats, hawks, sharks, dogs, lions, and even octopuses. Drawing on stories of animals both wild and domestic, the two authors, also best friends, created this book to put humans back into the animal world. The more we learn about what other animals think and do, they explain, the more we understand ourselves as animals, too. Writes Montgomery, "The list of attributes once thought to be unique to our species from using tools to waging war is not only rapidly shrinking, but starting to sound less and less impressive when we compare them with other animals' powers." With humor, empathy, and introspection, Montgomery and Thomas look into the lives of all kinds of creatures from man's best friend to the great white shark and examine the ways we connect with our fellow species. Both authors have devoted their lives to sharing the animal kingdom's magic with others, and their combined wisdom is an indispensable contribution to the field of animal literature. The book contains a foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of the bestseller Elephant Company.

New York Times Bestseller Now in paperback, Nancy Cowan's memoir gives us a new perspective on the relationship between humans and the natural world. In spirited prose, Cowan shares her experiences running a world-famous falconry school, and the lessons she's learned from her birds. Peregrine Spring carries her readers along, so they, too, meet hawks and falcons in ways they never imagined possible.

Long before the Dog Whisperer, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas revealed to readers the nature of pack dynamics, leading to a completely new understanding of dogs and their desires.
In this fascinating account, based on thirty years of living with and observing dogs, we meet Misha, a friend's husky, whom Thomas followed on his daily rounds of more than 130 square miles, and who ultimately provided the simple and surprising answer to the question What do dogs want most? Not food, not sex, but other dogs. We also meet Maria, who adored Misha, bore his puppies, and clearly mourned when he moved away; the brave pug Bingo and his little wife, Violet; the dingo Viva; and the remaining dogs and pups that constitute the pack.
"Instead of training and obedience, Thomas] offers as an alternative a world of 'trust and mutual obligation'" ("Los Angeles Times Book Review"). When it was first published in hardcover, "The Hidden Life of Dogs" spent over a year on the "New York Times" Bestseller list. This Mariner paperback edition will include a new afterword by the author.

As the popularity of "Marley & Me" attests, people love their dogs-and everyone else's too. For all the time spent on grooming, petting, and other care-it's as if owning a dog is a religion unto itself. Woof! brings together original essays from acclaimed writers ruminating on the sometimes tumultuous, often selfless love affair between human and dog. Alternately poignant and hilarious, these collected stories of mutts and purebreds alike will win the hearts of the millions who've ever loved a member of the world's most loyal species.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was nineteen when her father took his family to live among the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Fifty years later, after a life of writing and study, Thomas returns to her experiences with the Bushmen, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on earth, and discovers among them an essential link to the origins of all human society.
Humans lived for 1,500 centuries as roving clans, adapting daily to changes in environment and food supply, living for the most part like their animal ancestors. Those origins are not so easily abandoned, Thomas suggests, and our modern society has plenty still to learn from the Bushmen.
Through her vivid, empathic account, Thomas reveals a template for the lives and societies of all humankind.

A study of primitive people which, for beauty of...style and concept, would be hard to match." -- The New York Times Book Review

In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization -- with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol -- swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own.

"The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own....The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing."

-- The Atlantic

The absorbing chronicle of an expedition to the tribesmen of northern Uganda.

The Dodoth—a tall, handsome people of the northern tip of Uganda—are a tribe in transition. They are proud, often cruel, warrior herdsmen whose oldest members live just as they did hundreds of years ago, but whose younger members sometimes learn to read and write and have brushed against the modern world. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas accompanied three anthropological expeditions to Africa and lived among the Dodoth. She displays a remarkable ability to communicate with the tribespeople and describe their lives and customs.

"Mrs. Thomas is an exceedingly useful sort of person, a kind of 'half-professional' who has developed a flair for talking anthropology to a general audience and thus bridging the gap between overspecialized 'expert' and the ordinary layman. . . . The book does not read like an anthropological account at all. It contains few ethnographic facts of the more conventional sort, it is more life the personal journal of an exciting adventure and it has a lightness of touch which makes it everybody's reading. Yet the underlying anthropological understanding is there. . . . The Dodoth are real people of the twentieth century caught up in the trials and tribulations of emergent Africa." —Edmund Leach, New York Review of Books

"Warrior Herdsmen is written with the same clarity of tone, the same selflessness and the same extraordinary sense of human dignity that marked Mrs. Thomas's earlier book." —Virgilia Peterson, New York Times Book Review

"The reader is instantly charmed by her warm humanity on the one hand, and the lyrical quality of her writing on the other." —James Wellard, Nation

An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards. Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution-that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships-Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of "Gaia's creatures," from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting "anthropodenial," the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren't really as special as we think we are-and that it doesn't take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things. A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.

From the plains of Africa to her very own backyard, noted author and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explores the world of cats, both large and small in this classic bestseller. Inspired by her own feline's instinct to hunt and supported by her studies abroad, Thomas examines the life actions, as well as the similarities and differences of these majestic creatures. Lions, tigers, pumas and housecats: Her observations shed light on their social lives, thought processes, eating habits, and communication techniques, and reveal how they survive and coexist with each other and with humans.

Pets play a greater role in our emotional and physical health than ever before, says the Purdue University professor who is co-author of his revised edition of Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship. The book by Alan M. Beck of Purdue's School of Veterinary Medicine and Aaron H. Katcher, psychiatrist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, explores the emotional and physical benefits of owning a pet and analyzes the complex relationship between people and pets. "The study of the importance of the relationship between people and animals is a growing field and has the potential to be part of the whole human-health field," says Beck, director of Purdue's Center for Applied Ethology and Human-Animal Interaction. "The social milieu on where animals fit into society has really changed in the last 13 years. We've gone from recognizing the potential of animals being a significant positive contribution to certain populations, such as the elderly, to actual documentation." Beck and Katcher note a 1992 study by an Australian cardiologist of 5,000 people who visited a clinic to find ways to reduce heart disease. The study found that people with pets had lower blood pressure and lower blood fat levels than those without pets, even though the two groups were alike in diet and exercise. The authors also point to the trend by nursing homes to incorporate animals into the routine and environment for patients. For example, in the early 1980s nursing homes typically did not allow pets to visit patients, while today nearly half of the homes have an organized program for animal therapy, Beck says. In addition to exploring physical benefits, the book covers such topics as pets as family members, pets as therapists, talking to pets, and how pets can teach us to become better companions to friends and family. The book also has a list of Web sites by such organizations as Canine Companions for Independence and the American Kennel Club. While pets provide health benefits, they can create problems, Beck and Katcher say. "There is no medicine that doesn't have some side effects," Beck says. For example, more pet ownership has public-health implications such as more dog bites, he notes. And some people whose pets die grieve to the point of illness, he says. But grief over the loss of an animal is not new, Beck says. Ancient Egyptians shaved their eyebrows after their cats died, and the Roman emperor Caligula had his horse entombed.