A story of the explosive and redemptive powers of the imagination, set during the year Rudyard Kipling lived in Vermont and wrote The Jungle Books. In 1892, at the age of twenty-six, Rudyard Kipling arrived in Vermont virtually penniless, with a newly pregnant wife and the germ of a story about a feral child who was raised by a pack of wolves. Having fled the literary high life in London, he hoped to find a quiet corner in which to raise a family and work, where he might build a sanctuary that could offer him refuge from the scrutiny incurred by his burgeoning fame and the wounds of his own troubled past. From this literary footnote, Victoria Vinton brings to life Kipling’s early years in Bombay, where he lived as the pampered son of a well-connected British family, and explores the repercussions of the abandonment he felt when, at age six, he was severed from his family and sent to live in a foster home in England that he later dubbed “The House of Desolation.” She shows how those experiences formed the basis of his art, how from this cauldron of comfort and pain he wrote The Jungle Books and created his most enduring character, Mowgli. Mixing fact and invention, Vinton parallels Kipling’s story with that of his neighbors, the Connollys, who are forced to question the decisions they have made in the wake of Kipling’s presence in their lives. There is eleven-year-old Joe Connolly, who finds himself drawn to Kipling and his stories, seeing in the adventures of Mowgli a template for his own escape. There is Jack, his father, who views Kipling’s influence over his son as a challenge to his very sense of self. And there is Addie, Jack’s wife, who must embrace and assimilate these changes in order to hold on to her family, confronted by the unsettling power of the imagination.

The gripping story of one American lawyer’s obsessive crusade—waged at any cost—against Big Oil on behalf of the poor farmers and indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest. Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding class action lawsuit against multinational Texaco (which later merged with Chevron to become the third-largest corporation in America). The suit sought reparations for the Ecuadorian peasants and tribes people whose lives were affected by decades of oil production near their villages and fields. During twenty years of legal hostilities in federal courts in Manhattan and remote provincial tribunals in the Ecuadorian jungle, Donziger and Chevron’s lawyers followed fierce no-holds-barred rules. Donziger, a larger-than-life, loud-mouthed showman, proved himself a master orchestrator of the media, Hollywood, and public opinion. He cajoled and coerced Ecuadorian judges on the theory that his noble ends justified any means of persuasion. And in the end, he won an unlikely victory, a $19 billion judgment against Chevon--the biggest environmental damages award in history. But the company refused to surrender or compromise. Instead, Chevron targeted Donziger personally, and its counter-attack revealed damning evidence of his politicking and manipulation of evidence. Suddenly the verdict, and decades of Donziger’s single-minded pursuit of the case, began to unravel. Written with the texture and flair of the best narrative nonfiction, Law of the Jungle is an unputdownable story in which there are countless victims, a vast region of ruined rivers and polluted rainforest, but very few heroes.