The best present I got this Christmas was The Bear: History of a Fallen King, by Michel Pastoureau, a French cultural historian previously unknown to me. I'm about halfway through, and while it can get a bit academic at times, I have found it wildly fascinating. It is less about bears as bears than it is about the way the Church, as part of its campaign to eradicate pagan ritual, deposed the animal as king of the beasts. (You'll find a much more informative review here. Anyway, if bears and Christianity and cultural histories translated from French are your thing, consider this a recommendation.
If environmental histories about furry predators are your thing, you should look at "Vicious: Wolves and Men in America" (link). It's about how wolf lore from Old Europe entered American culture and was eventually exploited by ranchers to exterminate them. Bonus fact: there has never been a recorded killing of a person by a wolf in North America.