Sharks!

Dun dun dun dun... Shark week!

Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks by Juliet Eilperin - A   group of traders huddles around a pile of dried shark fins on a gleaming white floor in Hong Kong. A Papua New Guinean elder shoves off in his hand-carved canoe, ready to summon a shark with ancient magic. A scientist finds a rare shark in Indonesia and forges a deal with villagers so it and other species can survive.
In this eye-opening adventure that spans the globe, Juliet Eilperin investigates the fascinating ways different individuals and cultures relate to the ocean's top predator. Along the way, she reminds us why, after millions of years, sharks remain among nature's most awe-inspiring creatures.
From Belize to South Africa, from Shanghai to Bimini, we see that sharks are still the object of an obsession that may eventually lead to their extinction. This is why movie stars and professional athletes go shark hunting in Miami and why shark's fin soup remains a coveted status symbol in China. Yet we also see glimpses of how people and sharks can exist alongside one another: surfers tolerating their presence off Cape Town and ecotourists swimming with sharks that locals in the Yucatan no longer have to hunt.
With a reporter's instinct for a good story and a scientist's curiosity, Eilperin offers us an up-close understanding of these extraordinary, mysterious creatures in the most entertaining and illuminating shark encounter you're likely to find outside a steel cage.

The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks by Susan Casey - A journalist's obsession brings her to a remote island off the California coast, home to the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators-and the strange band of surfer-scientists who follow them.
Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white sharks of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small motorboat in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas, some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to count; even more incredible, this congregation was taking place just twenty-seven miles off the coast of San Francisco.
In a matter of months, Casey was being hoisted out of the early-winter swells on a crane, up a cliff face to the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island-dubbed by sailors in the 1850s the "devil's teeth." There she joined Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, the two biologists who bunk down during shark season each fall in the island's one habitable building, a haunted, 135-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Two days later, she got her first glimpse of the famous, terrifying jaws up close and she was instantly hooked; her fascination soon yielded to obsession-and an invitation to return for a full season. But as Casey readied herself for the eight-week stint, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands that have banished every campaign for civilization in the past two hundred years.

Emperors of the Deep: Sharks -- The Ocean's Most Mysterious, Most Misunderstood, and Most Important Guardians by William McKeever - In this remarkable groundbreaking book, a documentarian and conservationist, determined to dispel misplaced fear and correct common misconceptions, explores in-depth the secret lives of sharks -- magnificent creatures who play an integral part in maintaining the health of the world's oceans and ultimately the planet. From the Jaws blockbusters to Shark Week, we are conditioned to see sharks as terrifying cold-blooded underwater predators. But as Safeguard the Seas founder William McKeever reveals, sharks are evolutionary marvels essential to maintaining a balanced ecosystem. We can learn much from sharks, he argues, and our knowledge about them continues to grow. The first book to reveal in full the hidden lives of sharks, Emperors of the Deep examines four species -- Mako, Tiger, Hammerhead, and Great White -- as never before, and includes fascinating details such as: Sharks are 50-million years older than trees; Sharks have survived five extinction level events, including the one that killed off the dinosaurs; Sharks have electroreception, a sixth-sense that lets them pick up on electric fields generated by living things; Sharks can dive 4,000 feet below the surface; Sharks account for only 6 human fatalities per year, while humans kill 100 million sharks per year. McKeever goes back through time to probe the shark's pre-historic secrets and how it has become the world's most feared and most misunderstood predator, and takes us on a pulse-pounding tour around the world and deep under the water's surface, from the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle to the coral reefs of the tropical Central Pacific, to see sharks up close in their natural habitat. He also interviews ecologists, conservationists, and world-renowned shark experts, including the founders of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, the head of the Massachusetts Shark Research Program, and the self-professed "last great shark hunter." At once a deep-dive into the misunderstood world of sharks and an urgent call to protect them, Emperors of the Deep celebrates this wild species that hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the ocean -- if we can prevent their extinction from climate change and human hunters.

Great White: The Majesty of Sharks by Chris Fallows - For most people, sharks and fear go hand in hand. Renowned photographer and conservationist Chris Fallows maintains a more nuanced relationship with the superpredator. Gasp-inducing in their immediacy and surprise, Fallows's brilliant photographs present these mighty creatures in a different light.Great Whitethe first publication to collect Fallows's workreveals the sublime beauty of sharks and provides a rare glimpse into the largely unseen world of great whites, hammerheads, and other breeds. Fallows captures these fearsome creatures both above water, as they intersect with humanity, and below, in their mysterious underwater domain. A one-of-a-kind portrait of the shark and a superlative study of the nature photographer's art, this book is bound to turn heads and elicit a deep appreciation for the creatures that inhabit our oceans.

Resurrecting the Shark: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil by Susan Ewing - In 1993, Alaskan artist and paleo-shark enthusiast Ray Troll stumbled upon the weirdest fossil he had ever seen--a platter-sized spiral of tightly wound shark teeth. This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll's obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time.
In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth whorl once and for all.
Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw--a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time.
Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature--and made important new discoveries.
In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned--pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science.

The Secret Life of Sharks: A Leading Marine Biologist Reveals the Mysteries of Shark Behavior by A. Peter Klimley - An authoritative and fascinating account of the true nature of sharks by one of the world's experts on shark behavior. Anyone who has ever watched Shark Week or is fascinated by sharks will be enthralled by this first-person account of the world of sharks.

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark From a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean by Morten Strøksnes - In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature--from a tiny rubber boat. Together, the two men tackle existential questions, survive the world's most powerful maelstrom, and, yes, get drunk, as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their own, sometimes intoxicated, observations.

The Shark Handbook: The Essential Guide for Understanding the Sharks of the World by Gregory Skomal - Greg Skomal is one of the world's leading shark experts: many thousands of viewers know him as the "Shark Guy" on Discovery Channel and he's affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. So if you're dreaming of swimming with sharks, there's no one better to take you--and that's exactly what he does in this comprehensive, stunning field guide.  In addition to an awesome gatefold poster of a Great White (with all its distinguishing features shown in detail), plus amazing original images from Skomal and award-winning National Geographic photographer Nick Caloyianis, it contains a complete listing of every known shark in existence as well as some extinct species.  Learn about sharks from their birth to death, their anatomy, how to distinguish one shark from the next, how their teeth are developed, how they hunt and attack, and their importance and purpose within our eco system.

The Shark-Watcher's Handbook: A Guide to Sharks and Where to See Them by Mark Carwardine - The Shark-Watcher's Handbook covers everything you need to know about sharks and shark watching: the history, techniques, risks and controversies; a thorough overview of shark natural history and biology; the many threats facing sharks and how snorkelers and divers can help; and even how to get good shark photographs, safely. There is also an extensive, fully illustrated directory of the twenty-four species most commonly encountered by shark watchers. Each entry includes important information on natural history, classification, diet, reproduction, behavior and range; and there are special sections on identification, the potential danger to divers and good places for a close encounter.
The book includes the first detailed directory of more than 250 of the world's shark-watching hotspots, with a detailed description of each site and information on everything from the species most likely to be seen and the best time of year to visit to contact details for further information and travel notes.
Whether you're a professional diver, someone contemplating your first close encounter with a shark, or the sort of person who prefers to view these extraordinary animals in the pages of a book, The Shark-Watcher's Handbook is an attractive, invaluable, and utterly fascinating guide to the underwater world of sharks.

Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board by Bethany Hamilton - They say Bethany Hamilton has saltwater in her veins. How else could one explain the tremendous passion that drives her to surf? How else could one explain that nothing - not even the loss of her arm in a horrific shark attack - could come between her and the waves? That Halloween morning in Kauai, Hawaii Bethany responded to the shark's stealth with a calmness beyond belief. Pushing pain and panic aside, she immediately thought: 'Get to the beach...' Rushed to the hospital, where her father, Ted Hamilton, was about to undergo knee surgery, Bethany found herself taking his spot in the operating theatre. When the first thing Bethany wanted to know after surgery was 'When can I surf again?' it became clear that her unfaltering spirit and determination were part of a greater story - a tale of courage and faith that this modest and soft-spoken girl would come to share with the world.