Alan Lee

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But despite appearances, these are not dogs-they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken-imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, starting with...

“In the Tale of The Fall of Gondolin are two of the greatest powers in the world. There is Morgoth of the uttermost evil, unseen in this story but ruling over a vast military power from his fortress of Angband. Deeply opposed to Morgoth is Ulmo, second in might only to Manwë, chief of the Valar: he is called the Lord of Waters, of all seas, lakes, and rivers under the sky. But he works in secret in Middle-earth to support the Noldor, the kindred...

"Hermit crabs might not be the first example that comes to mind when thinking about power in animal relationships, but they are representative of the costs, benefits, assessment, and struggles that animal behaviorist Lee Dugatkin explains in Power in the Wild. Besides learning that researchers can evict all crabs from their shells by tickling their abdomens with paintbrushes, readers discover that attacker crabs can assess both the quality of shells...

Lee Alan Dugatkin is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Louisville. He is the author of many books, including the popular Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees: The Nature of Cooperation in Animals and Humans and Model Systems in Behavioral Ecology (Princeton). In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s...

J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told. And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, including the forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-dûr and the rise of Sauron. It was not until Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion...

"Lurking in the shadows, away from any government oversight, a secret partnership has been formed between an Israeli spymaster pulling the strings of the most efficient killing machine the Mossad has to offer and an exclusive billionaire boys club that wants to dictate the New World Order. In their pocket is a powerful U.S. senator who aspires to the presidency. Success means vast wealth and increased power, and they'll stop at nothing to succeed"--Amazon.com....

Never before published in a single volume, Tolkien's four novellas (Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, and Roverandom) and one book of poems (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) are gathered together for the first time. This new, definitive collection of works — which had appeared separately, in various formats, between 1949 and 1998 — comes with an illuminating introduction from esteemed author and Tolkien expert...

Identifies and pictures all the faery types including elves, gnomes, pixies, leprechauns, and dryads, drawing from Celtic stories, the English-language oral tradition, and the works of poets to illuminate their ways of life.