Her Oasis of Calm in a Difficult Time Janet prefers cats to people. The endless variety of personalities, voices, colors, and cuddles keep her calm in a hectic world. So when the world begins to close down, volunteering to care for cats makes sense. But Janet learns sometimes people need care too. And cats know how to help. An excerpt from In Service to a Superior Species: Offering Comfort in the Best Way Possible After stopping to send up his perky greeting to each of the relatively happy cats, Bitu stopped in front of Moxie's home away from home. Rather than raising his head and calling out his version of "Good morning," he sat, wrapping his tail around his feet. He purred softly, watching the bars the whole time. Janet walked over just as quietly, peering inside instead of reaching for the bars right away. Moxie had scooted her bright pink cushion as far away from the front as she could get it, nearly blocking the door to the litter box area. She'd piled a purple fuzzy blanket up on one edge like a tiny barricade, so only a hint of sleek, pure black showed. After a few seconds, Moxie raised her head. One orange eye opened, then the other. She slow-blinked at Janet, lifted her slender tail in a dainty greeting, and snuggled down behind the blanket again.

From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s history told not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize. Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone. Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is a diverse and intersectional collection which examines human and more-than-human animal relations, as well as the interconnectedness of human and animal oppressions through various lenses. Comprising fifty chapters, the book explores a range of debates and scholarship within important contemporary topics such as companion animals, hunting, agriculture, and animal activist strategies. It also offers timely analyses of zoonotic disease pandemics, mass extinction, and the climate catastrophe, using perspectives including feminist, critical race, anti-colonial, critical disability, and masculinities studies. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals is an essential reference for students in gender studies, sexuality studies, human-animal studies, cultural studies, sociology, and environmental studies.