Books like Belly Up by Phillip L. Zweig

A devoted dog reflects on life, love, and racing while watching his owner, a race car driver, navigate family trials and professional ambition.

Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 National Book Award winner chronicles the harrowing ordeal of the Essex whale ship crew that survived a near-sinking and subsequent harrowing journey on the ocean's surface.

A young woman defends her faith and freedom in a polygamous Mormon community while hunting her captors in the rugged American West.

When a beloved hippo is found dead at the city's zoo, 13‑year‑old Danny takes on a thrilling investigation to uncover the killer and restore safety to the animal sanctuary.

For more than two centuries, Baring Brothers dominated the global financial markets. It underwrote the Louisiana Purchase, funded the Napoleonic Wars, and rescued many a British firm during the Great Depression. It was Her Majesty's indestructible frigate, ever guarding known waters while charting new ones. In 1992 Barings sent a young would-be trader named Nick Leeson to run its newly formed derivatives unit. By 1995 the twenty-eight-year-old had sunk the 250-year-old ship. Total Risk is a tale close to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in which one man runs amok when left to his own devices. Rawnsley, an accomplished journalist and novelist, plunges fearlessly into the middle of the crisis, with the sequence of scandalous events beginning on February 23, 1995, as rumors of Barings' financial distress rock the international markets.

In The Horse God Built Lawrence Scanlan gives the reader a groom's-eye view of the most exciting time in racing history. But more than anything else, it is a moving portrait of the powerful bond between human and horse.