Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America’s Most Fearsome Predator

In this eye-opening report, Grange (Wild Rescues), a paramedic and former Yellowstone park ranger, recounts traveling the U.S. to better understand grizzly bears and humanity’s relationship with them. He describes watching a grizzly force its way into a cooler during a product test and stresses the importance of ensuring bears don’t become reliant on human food, explaining that their preying on sick elk helps herds thrive by stemming the spread of disease. His nerve-wracking accounts of encountering grizzlies in the wild shed light on how to read the animals’ body language. For instance, he recalls standing his ground after coming across a bear on Kodiak Island, Alaska, because the bear wasn’t “huffing, clacking, or popping his jaws,” indicating the creature was more curious than aggressive. Elsewhere, Grange discusses visiting a Utah ranch for training animal actors and attending a workshop on reducing human-bear conflict. Grange’s elegant prose conveys the fearsome majesty of his subjects (he describes Kodiak grizzlies as “hulking bruins whose bellies nearly dragged on the dirt and who ambled with wide, prehistoric gaits”), and he provides enlightening trivia on their behavior and abilities (despite grizzlies’ reputation as apex predators, they “prefer a mostly vegetarian diet with the occasional side of meat or salmon”). This will change how readers view “the largest terrestrial predators on earth.” Agent: Jane Dystel, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Sept.)