About
I write nonfiction books about how animals are treated in the U.S.
I spent 26 years as a newspaper reporter in my home state of Tennessee, New York, DC and Montana before studying Animal Law as a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2004. Afterward I began work on my first book: Saving Gracie: How one dog escaped the shadowy world of American puppy mill (Wiley, 2010). My second book was the story of a rescued circus elephant, Last Chain on Billie: How One Extraordinary Elephant Escaped the Big Top (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). My third book is Twisting in Air: The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Stunt Horse (Bison Books, 2024).
Featured Work
Twisting in Air: The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Falling Horse
Twisting in Air (Bison Books, 2024) explores the dark early history of stunt horses in movies and tells how an elite group of horses — especially an intrepid mount named Cocaine — learned to fall on cue, doubling for John Wayne’s horses and appearing in a number of Westerns directed by John Ford.
