On September 21, 2012, twenty-five year old David Villalobos purchased a pass for the Bronx Zoo and a ticket for a ride on the Bengali Express Monorail. Biding his time, he waited until the monorail was just near the enclosure of a four hundred pound Siberian tiger named Bashuta before leaping into it. They spent ten long minutes together in the tiger s cage before nature took its course, with one exception: The tiger did not kill him. David s only response: It s a spiritual thing. I wanted to be at one with the tiger. One with The Tiger: On Savagery and Intimacy uses David s story, and other moments of violent encounters between humans and predators, to explore the line between human and animal. Exposing what the author defines as the shared liminal space between peace and violence, Church posits that the animal is always encroaching on the civilization and those seeking its wildness are in fact searching for an ecstatic moment that can define what it means to be human. Using examples from Timothy Treadwell to Mike Tyson, or such television icons as Grizzly Adams and The Incredible Hulk, Church shows how this ecstasy can seep its way into the less natural world of popular culture, proving time and again that each of us can be our own worst predator."

Steven Church grew up in the 1970s and '80s in Lawrence, Kansas, a town whose predictable daily rhythms give way easily to anxiety--and a place that, since Civil War times, has been a canvas for sporadic scenes of havoc and violence in the popular imagination. Childhood was quiet on the surface, but Steven grew up scared--scared of killer tornadoes, winged monkeys, violent movies, authority figures, the dissolution of his parents' marriage, and most of all in Reagan's America, nuclear war. His fantasies of nuclear meltdown, genetic mutation, and post-apocalyptic survival find a focal point in 1982 when filming begins in Lawrence for The Day After, a film which would go on to become the second-highest Nielsen-rated TV movie. Despite cheesy special effects, melodramatic plotlines, and the presence of Steve Guttenberg, the movie had an instant and lasting impact on Church, and an entire generation. Combining interview, personal essay, film criticism, fact, and flights of imagination, Church's richly layered and darkly comic memoir explores the meaning of Cold War fears for his generation and their resonance today.

King John (1166-1216) has long been seen as the epitome of bad kings. The son of the most charismatic couple of the middle ages, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and younger brother of the heroic crusader king, Richard the Lionheart, John lived much of his life in the shadow of his family. When in 1199 he became ruler of his family's lands in England and France, John proved unequal to the task of keeping them together. Early in his reign he lost much of his continental possessions, and over the next decade would come perilously close to losing his English kingdom, too. In King John, medieval historian Stephen Church argues that John's reign, for all its failings, would prove to be a crucial turning point in English history. Though he was a masterful political manipulator, John's traditional ideas of unchecked sovereign power were becoming increasingly unpopular among his subjects, resulting in frequent confrontations. Nor was he willing to tolerate any challenges to his authority. For six long years, John and the pope struggled over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a clash that led to the king's excommunication. As king of England, John taxed his people heavily to fund his futile attempt to reconquer the lands lost to the king of France. The cost to his people of this failure was great, but it was greater still for John. In 1215, his subjects rose in rebellion against their king and forced upon him a new constitution by which he was to rule. The principles underlying this constitution--enshrined in the terms of Magna Carta--would go on to shape democratic constitutions across the globe, including our own. In this authoritative biography, Church describes how it was that a king famous for his misrule gave rise to Magna Carta, the blueprint for good governance.

'Most contemporaries would have argued that it was a king's job to put in peril his soul for the good of his Church and of his people. But Henry was too determined to live a life of a saint' Henry III, the son of King John, was catapulted onto the throne aged just nine and reigned for fifty-six years, during which time his self-conscious piety often put him at odds with those around him. Yet as this sparkling account makes clear, he deserves to be better known: for the birth of Parliament, the building of Westminster Abbey, and the development of a kingdom that still recognizably exists today.