“I’d somehow assumed that my quest was to let the animals show how much they are like us. My task …. is to see who animals are —like us or not.” This skillful adaptation of the author’s adult book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, focuses solely on elephants and killer whales (orcas). Safina describes his time with researchers in the field learning about the two animals’ behavior, social relationships, and threats to survival (for elephants, ivory hunters followed by disappearing habitat; for whales, reduced populations of fish and other food sources, and pollution, including sonar sound pollution from the military). Balancing scientific information with ample and compelling anecdotes, Safina has written an account that is always fascinating, sometimes astounding, and often deeply moving. (Age 10 and older)

A young reader’s adaptation of The New York Times bestseller

Follow researcher Carl Safina as he treks with a herd of elephants across the Kenyan landscape, then travel with him to the Pacific Northwest to track and monitor whales in their ocean home. Along the way, find out more about the interior lives of these giants of land and sea—how they play, how they fight, and how they communicate with one another, and sometimes with us, too.

Weaving decades of field research with exciting new discoveries about the brain and featuring astonishing photographs taken by the author, Beyond Words: What Elephants and Whales Think and Feel gives readers an intimate and extraordinary look at what makes these animals different from us, but more important, what makes us all similar.