Alan Lee

The standard hardcover edition of the second volume of The Lord of the Rings includes a large format fold-out map. Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the wizard, Gandalf, in a battle in the Mines of Moria. And Boromir, seduced by the power of the Ring, tried to seize it by force....

"This stand-alone is easy to read and difficult to put down." - Bookzilla "Fun, fast, fresh!" - BookJunkie Imagine your favorite teachers from high school are dying, being mysteriously murdered one by one soon after the arrival of the new English instructor... Mackenzie August is starting a new life. After a successful but destructive career as a high-profile California homicide detective, and then a less successful and even more destructive stint...

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, in a fully illustrated volume. This new, definitive collection of works -- which had appeared separately, in various formats, between 1949 and 1998 -- comes with a brand-new foreword and endmatter, and with a...

In southern Siberia resides Mavrik, the size of a sheepdog, who wags his tail, rolls on his back, and pants in anticipation of human attention. He's as docile and playful as any lapdog. And yet he is a fox, the result of the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted. More than a half century ago, a Soviet biologist named Dmitry Belyaev decided to gather up 130 foxes from Siberian fox farms and figure out just how long it would take to...

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...

The quest for power in animals is so much richer, so much more nuanced than who wins what knock-down, drag-out fight. Indeed, power struggles among animals often look more like an opera than a boxing match. Tracing the path to power for over thirty different species on six continents, writer and behavioral ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin takes us on a journey around the globe, shepherded by leading researchers who have discovered that in everything from...

One of the three 'Great Tales' of the Elder Days, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin takes place in Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The Children of Húrin is the first complete book by Tolkien since the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion. Six thousand years before the One Ring is destroyed, Middle-earth lies under the shadow of the Dark Lord Morgoth.

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"Filled with advice for the home gardener and the more seasoned horticulturist alike, The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving provides straightforward instruction on collecting and saving seed from your favorite heirloom and open-pollinated plants. Seed Savers Exchange and the Organic Seed Alliance bring together decades of knowledge to demystify the time honored tradition of saving seeds using lush photographs, clear instructions, and...

A man, his business partner, and his wife are enlisted to transport an unknown object from a Russian military base, only to discover that the object is a giant, genetically-altered python.

What if a person could change everything they thought was not as they hoped in life? That's what's offered to Stewart when he's at his lowest point. He could have been the football hero, the TV star, the investment king, and the perfect dad and husband. Faced with losing his father's toy factory to a greedy business mogul, Stewart discovers a ticket for a special one-night-only train ride with a mysterious conductor to visit his past, present, and...