Rick Bass cares very, very much about the rhinoceros. Yet his travel account The Black Rhinos of Namibia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25) is also about the wolves and grizzly bears back home in Montana and all other top-line predators and massive species that, until man’s belated arrival on the planet, had unchecked supremacy of their habitats. Why is the black rhino nearly blind? Because, Bass explains, it didn’t need to see approaching threats far away in the grass. There were none. Natural selection had, over millennia, made the rhino impervious to assault. Stalking the creature with the fellow conservationists whom he celebrates in his book, Bass marvels that, “It is all but impossible to imagine this animal being afraid of any other creature, or even any other force, on Earth.” But The Black Rhinos also relates how modern weaponry and the Asian demand for so-called traditional medicine has depleted their numbers and restricted their range to a few small conservation zones. Still, Bass tries to hope for the black rhino that this recent slaughter “has occurred so fast, relative to his evolutionary scale, as to seem like a single brief dream, a nightmare from which he will emerge at any second, blinking.” (Also: Eagle Harbor Books, 3 p.m. Sun.) BRIAN MILLER

Fri., Aug. 17, 7 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 19, 3 p.m., 2012