100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens . How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future. ''Here is a simple reason why Sapiens has risen explosively to the ranks of an international bestseller. It tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language. You will love it!'' - Jared Diamond
A devastating appraisal of the policies of Russia's current head of state by the country's leading radical journalist. An expose of mafia dealings and scandals in the provinces, of corruption in the military and the judiciary, of the decline of the dissident intelligentsia and more.
'On Beauty' is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.
In 1963, Mimi Beardsley was a naive young American girl, very much a product of her class and time - she had attended the same exclusive girls' school as Jackie Bouvier, now installed in the White House as the president's wife. Which is also where Mimi found herself, as an 18-year-old intern. The JFK White House was a place for which she was not remotely prepared, dominated by the charismatic and sexually rapacious figure of the president. Within days, they had started a relationship.
There are several extraordinary things about Mimi's story. One is that she has evaded notice from any of the biographers of JFK and other chroniclers of the heady days and sexual shenanigans of Camelot. Only by chance did a reporter in 2006 follow up a mention of her name in a book about JFK, and doorstep her - now a married grandmother living quietly in New York - to find out whether she was the Mimi Beardsely mentioned in a passing reference.
This is all the more surprising given the length of time the affair continued - 18 months - and the fact that it was ended only by his assassination.
Mimi Beardsley Alford has decided, after 40 years of silence and deep reflection, to tell her story. But this is not just a personal memoir of a young woman of her generation and class coming of age in the 1960s, and her relationship with JFK. She also examines the significant impact it had on her life and relationships since, why she has chosen to remainsilent for so long, and why she feels that this is the moment to speak out.
Italian literary theorist and novelist Umberto Eco includes nine essays in this title concerning: the general significance of literature; major authors of the Western canon; the poetic qualities of Dante's "Paradiso"; the style of the "Communist Manifesto"; Joyce's views on language; and more.
Tracing the history of Europe, the author spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent. This work is an account of that journey, including diaries, newspaper reports and memoirs, and the voices of prominent figures and unknown players. It describes what he sees at places that have become Europe's well-springs of memory.
A collection of essays by one of the intellectuals which explains the steps backwards that have been taken since the end of the last millennium. After the Cold War, the 'Hot War' has made its comeback in Afghanistan and Iraq. It proposes not so much that we resume a forward march, but at the very least that we cease marching backwards.
Istanbul's Galata Bridge connects the old city with the more Western districts to the north. But the bridge is a city in itself, peopled by merchants, petty thieves, tourists, fishermen, and at the same time a microcosmic reflection of Turkey as the link between Asia and Europe. This work presents stories of the bridge's denizens.
Covers various topics on which the author has written and lectured over the years, from the discussion of ideas that have inspired his novels - exploring lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world in the process - to a disquisition on the theme that runs through his novel, "The Prague Cemetery", that every country needs an enemy.
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box documents belonging to his late aunt he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him. The Priscilla he remembered was very different from the glamorous, morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the many love letters and journals.
A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist. Arabella Kurtz and J. M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship? The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors have to be accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, they offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.
Stranger Shores, a collection of J.M. Coetzee's essays from 1986 to 1999 was followed by Inner Workings, which contained those from 2000 to 2005. Late Essays gathers together Coetzee's literary essays since 2006.
The subjects covered range from Daniel Defoe in the early eighteenth century to Coetzee's contemporary Philip Roth. Coetzee has had a long-standing interest in German literature and here he engages with the work of Goethe, Holderlin, Kleist and Walser. There are four fascinating essays on fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett and he looks at the work of three Australian writers: Patrick White, Les Murray and Gerald Murnane. There are essays too on Tolstoy's great novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, on Flaubert's masterpiece Madame Bovary, and on the Argentine modernist Antonio Di Benedetto.
J.M. Coetzee, a great novelist himself, is a wise and insightful guide to these works of international literature that span three centuries.
