Paul Cartledge There is really no need for any special justification, let alone apology for a new history of Alexander; he is one of those very few iconic figures who remade the world and constantly inspire us to remake our own worlds. Born in 356BCE in Macedonia, present day Thessaloniki, Alexander led the army of his father, King Philip, conquering mainland Greece at the age of eighteen. Two years later, he was himself crowned king. Within the next twelve years Alexander conquered almost the entire known world, pushing the limits of Greek and Macedonian power to astonishing levels. Under his leadership, the Greeks defeated the Persians three times, including the world-shattering battle of Gaugamela at which 1 million Persians took to the field against his army. At the age of only 26 Alexander had made himself master of the once mighty Persian Empire and by the time of his death in 323 he was being worshipped as a god by the Greeks, both at Babylon, where he died, and further west, among the Greek cities of the Asiatic seaboard. Meticulously researched, vividly written and bringing to bear a lifetime's scholarship, this is an outstanding biography of one of the most remarkable rulers in history.

Helena Frith-Powell The allure of the Frenchwoman—sexy, sophisticated, flirtatious, and glamorous—is legendary. More than an eye for fashion or a taste for elegance, the French je ne sais quoi embodies the essential ingredients for looking and feeling beautiful.

With wit, whimsy, and wonder, British expatriate Helena Frith Powell uncovers the secrets of chic living in All You Need to Be Impossibly French, a cheeky guide to releasing your inner Frenchwoman. Delving deep into a mysterious realm of face creams, silk lingerie, and shopping-as-exercise, Powell reveals how French women stay impossibly thin and irresistibly sexy by achieving the maximum effect from the minimum amount of effort. Forget diet and inspiration books and style guides—this is all you need to embrace the wisdom of French living, and learn how to turn every day into la petite aventure.

Jane Eastoe An allotment is one of the best - and cheapest ways - of getting hold of valuable gardening space to grow you own. Plus it offers one of the most relaxing atmospheres with the chance to mix with fellow gardeners. Your allotment can provide enough fruit, veg and herbs to feed most small families (and cut flowers to adorn the kitchen table) - produce that will taste and look much better than anything shop bought. Jane Eastoe guides you through allotment life, from how to find an allotment, how to plan one out, what to grow, crop rotation, how to store your harvest plus some of the best recipes so you enjoy the fruits of your labour. Great gardening information is given for each crop - the obvious to the not so obvious - from potatoes and carrots to aubergines and chillies. What to grow when, what to grow where plus a calendar of work for the laziest to the most energetic allotment holder. With all the details on the cost of having an allotment, self-management, and protecting your allotment, this is the easiest guide to getting starting on allotment life. In addition to all the practical gardening techniques, the book has background information on local authority control, self-management options, and how to protect your allotment.

Leonard Shlain From the author of the bestselling "Art and Physics" comes a new book with breathtaking implications. Making remarkable connections across a wide range of subjects, including neurology, anthropology, history, and religion, "Leonard Shlain" argues that the development of alphabetic literacy itself reinforced the human brain's left hemisphere — linear, abstract, predominantly masculine — at the expense of its right — holistic, concrete, visual, feminine. "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" charts the connection between alphabetic literacy and monotheism; patriarchy and misogyny, and tracks the correlations between the rise and fall of literacy and the status of women in society, mythology, and religion.

Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck Oklahoma City, 9:02a.m., April 19, 1995.A virulent antigovenment radical. A homemade truck bomb. 168 people dead — including 19 children. More than 500 people injured. Now comes the whole shocking story of a day that lives in infamy —a story every american muct read.

Danièle Bott A lush visual selection from the Chanel archive—essential reading for fashionistas and design aficionados everywhere.Chanel's combination of tradition, originality, and style has always made it the most seductive of fashion labels. Here the House of Chanel opens its private archives, revealing a galaxy of brilliant designs created by Coco Chanel from 1920 onwards. Dazzling clothes, intricate accessories, beautiful models, and timeless design leave no doubt as to the lasting fame of her name and embody everything that has come to symbolize the magic of Chanel.

The book explores five central themes—the suit, the camellia, jewelry, makeup and perfume, the little black dress—and follows the threads from past to present to show how these key items have been rediscovered and reinvented by new designers. It includes many previously unpublished archive photographs and original drawings by Karl Lagerfeld, as well as glorious images from some of the greatest names in fashion photography. 139 illustrations, 83 in color

Bob Dylan "I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career. Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities — smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

David Wojnarowicz In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays — a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation — Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives — politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

The Dalai Lama This book offers a comprehensive view of the Dalai Lama, both his personal life and his thoughts on issues of global concern. An engaging picture emerges of man whose goodwill, understanding and practically have brought him respect from world leaders and the acclaim of millions around the world.

Gerald Jonas The literature of dance history has been enhanced with the publication of this extensively researched, well-written, and richly illustrated title, which is the companion volume to an eight-part series scheduled for public television beginning in April 1993. Rhoda Grauer, executive producer for the series, enlisted the assistance of many scholars, performers, advisers, and researchers, as well as the talents of Jonas, a veteran staff writer for The New Yorker , in this collaborative effort. The result combines history/criticism, traditionally applied to Western dance, with ethnology/anthropology, traditionally applied to non-Western dance, and draws cross-cultural comparisons based upon the way in which dance functions in societies (e.g., as an expression of religious worship, social order, or classical art). The examples span six continents and include Japanese kabuki and bugaku , Balinese wayang wong , Native American tribal dance, Indian bharata natyam , ballet, and modern dance . The expansive research is underscored by 275 illustrations, nearly half of which are in color. With innovative research and visuals to be savored, Dancing is highly recommended for both general and specific collections.

Thomas Moore Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vitaland the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference.

Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these “dark nights” in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul’s deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life’s meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:

• The healing power of melancholy
• The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
• Finding solace during illness and in aging
• Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
• Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
• Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.

Elizabeth Gilbert This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. Setting out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures, Gilbert explored the art of pleasure in Italy and the art of devotion in India, and then a balance between the two on the Indonesian island of Bali. By turns rapturous and rueful, this wise and funny author (whom Booklist calls “Anne Lamott’s hip, yoga- practicing, footloose younger sister”) is poised to garner yet more adoring fans.

Robert Kuttner Zeroing in on such realms as health care and the workplace, the commercialization of sports and the arts, the chaotic deregulation of airlines, S&Ls, and telecommunications, and the buying and selling of public offices, Kuttner shows how markets can fail precisely those whom they are supposed to serve. Asking the crucial question, "What should not be for sale?", Kuttner shows why a society conceived as a grand auction block would not be a democracy worth having. 416 pp. Author tour. 25,000 print.

Sergio González Rodríguez In Ciudad Juarez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn't just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guarantee impunity for those crimes and even legalize them. A lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis. The facts speak for themselves. — from The Femicide Machine

Best known to American readers for his cameo appearances as The Journalist in Roberto Bolano's 2666 and as a literary detective in Javier Marías's nove l Dark Back of Time, Sergio González Rodríguez is one of Mexico's most important contemporary writers. He is the author of Bones in the Desert, the most definitive work on the murders of women and girls in Juárez, Mexico, as well as The Headless Man, a sharp meditation on the recurrent uses of symbolic violence; Infectious, a novel; and Original Evil, a long essay. The Femicide Machine is the first book by González Rodríguez to appear in English translation.

Written especially for Semiotext(e) Intervention series, The Femicide Machine synthesizes González Rodríguez's documentation of the Juárez crimes, his analysis of the unique urban conditions in which they take place, and a discussion of the terror techniques of narco-warfare that have spread to both sides of the border. The result is a gripping polemic. The Femicide Machine probes the anarchic confluence of global capital with corrupt national politics and displaced, transient labor, and introduces the work of one of Mexico's most eminent writers to American readers.

Mireille Guiliano From the author of French Women Don't Get Fat, the #1 National Bestseller, comes an essential guide to the art of joyful living—in moderation, in season, and, above all, with pleasure.

 

Together with a bounty of new dining ideas and menus, Mireille Guiliano offers us fresh, cunning tips on style, grooming, and entertaining. Here are four seasons' worth of strategies for shopping, cooking, and exercising, as well as some pointers for looking effortlessly chic. Taking us from her childhood in Alsace-Lorraine to her summers in Provence and her busy life in New York and Paris, this wise and witty book shows how anyone anywhere can develop a healthy, holistic lifestyle.

Dava Sobel Galileo Galilei's telescopes allowed him to discover a new reality in the heavens. But for publicly declaring his astounding argument—that the earth revolves around the sun—he was accused of heresy and put under house arrest by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Living a far different life, Galileo's daughter Virginia, a cloistered nun, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength through the difficult years of his trial and persecution.

Drawing upon the remarkable surviving letters that Virginia wrote to her father, Dava Sobel has written a fascinating history of Medici—era Italy, a mesmerizing account of Galileo's scientific discoveries and his trial by Church authorities, and a touching portrayal of a father—daughter relationship. Galileo's Daughter is a profoundly moving portrait of the man who forever changed the way we see the universe.

• Winner of the Christopher Award and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award

• Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and the American Library Association

Sloane Crosley Wry, hilarious, and profoundly genuine, this debut collection of literary essays is a celebration of fallibility and haplessness in all their glory. From despoiling an exhibit at the Natural History Museum to provoking the ire of her first boss to siccing the cops on her mysterious neighbor, Crosley can do no right despite the best of intentions-or perhaps because of them. Together, these essays create a startlingly funny and revealing portrait of a complex and utterly recognizable character that's aiming for the stars but hits the ceiling, and the inimitable city that has helped shape who she is. I Was Told There'd Be Cake introduces a strikingly original voice, chronicling the struggles and unexpected beauty of modern urban life.

Sheldon B. Kopp

Sudhir Kakar In this fascinating psycho-analytic study of Hindu childhood and society, Sudhir Kakar uses anthropological evidence, clinical data, mythology and folklore to open the door on to the daily lives of the Hindu family and the shadowy world of collective fantasy. It explores the developmental significance of Hindu infancy and childhood, and its influence on identity formation. It will be of interest to all who are interested in Indian society and its myths, rituals, fables and arts, but will be particularly rewarding for anyone concerned with the psychological study of societies and the relevance and validity of psycho-analytic concepts in Indian culture and society.

THEODORE ZELDIN

Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger The third and final jewel in the crown of Viking's acclaimed three-volume centenary edition of Borges's collected works in English

Though best known in the United States for his short fictions and poems Jorge Luis Borges is just as revered in Latin America as an immensely prolific writer of nonfiction prose. Now, following on the success of the critically acclaimed Fictions, Viking's Selected Non-Fictions brings more than 150 of Borges's most brilliant writings together for the first time in one volume—all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been translated into English.

Even Borges aficionados are sure to be amazed to discover the extent of the master's interests. Like the Aleph in his famous story—the magical point in a certain basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges's unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his nonfiction, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe. He was equally at home with Schopenhauer and Ellery Queen, King Kong and the Kabbalists, James Joyce or Alfred Hitchcock, Flaubert, the Buddha, and the Dionne Quints!

The first comprehensive selection of this work in any language, the Selected Non-Fictions presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe.

Per Wastberg 'I have spent too long on plants and animals. Now it is time for human beings'. This haunting novel is based on the life of Anders Sparrman, the Swedish naturalist, who in the second half of the eighteenth century, became the last and youngest disciple of the scientist Carl Linnaeus. In his quest for new animal and plant specimens, Sparrman sailed to China at seventeen, joined Captain Cook on his second voyage to Antarctica and Tahiti, and made a pioneering journey on foot into the South African interior. In South Africa Sparrman witnessed the terrible cruelties of slavery, which made him a staunch abolitionist for the rest of his life. Wastberg uses his own extensive knowledge of South Africa and Sweden to create a strange, almost mystical narrative, that weaves passages from Sparrman's letters and journals into his own spare prose. As he follows Sparrman from innocent student to sceptical adventurer to dedicated botanist to militant abolitionist, he evokes the beauty of the Swedish countryside, the squalid conditions on board ship, the dangers and geographical wonders of Africa and, finally, the late flowering passion that overtakes Sparrman's life. In this magical, poetic novel, set between the end of the Enlightenment and the dawn of Romanticism, Wastberg's narrative combines intellectual precision with emotional power.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Alice Sebold In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit-as she struggles for understanding ("After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes"); as her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support; and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit and coincidence to help secure her attacker's arrest and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring, Alice Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: "You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

Rosemary Parkinson Nyam Jamaica takes up the slack from the highly acclaimed Culinaria: The Caribbean, beginning the first in a series of culinary reality travel books up the hills and down the dales of some of our major Caribbean islands. This is a documentation, a photograhic wonderous experience of the many people author Rosemary Parkinson meets, has interaction with, or merely gets to know about; the many places visited, parish to parish, during her years on the island. 'Cotching' a ride on her bumpy but delicious culinary travel, on occasion, are Jamaican friends, Norma Shirley and Cookie Kinkead. A must read for lovers of Jamaica.

Gail Sher Based on the Zen philosophy that we learn more from our failures than from our successes, One Continuous Mistake teaches a refreshing new method for writing as spiritual practice. In this unique guide for writers of all levels, Gail Sher — a poet who is also a widely respected teacher of creative writing — combines the inspirational value of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way with the spiritual focus of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Here she introduces a method of discipline that applies specific Zen practices to enhance and clarify creative work. She also discusses bodily postures that support writing, how to set up the appropriate writing regimen, and how to discover one's own "learning personality".

In the tradition of such classics as Writing Down the Bones and If You Want to Write, One Continuous Mistake will help beginning writers gain access to their creative capabilities while serving as a perennial reference that working writers can turn to again and again for inspiration and direction.

Wes Moore Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other. Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

"The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his."

Ines de la Fressange, Sophie Gachet Celebrity model Inès de la Fressange shares the well-kept secrets of how Parisian women maintain effortless glamour and a timeless allure. Inès de la Fressange—France’s icon of chic—shares her personal tips for living with style and charm, gleaned from decades in the fashion industry.

She offers specific pointers on how to dress like a Parisian, including how to mix affordable basics with high-fashion touches, and how to accessorize. Her step-by-step do’s and don’ts are accompanied by fashion photography, and the book is personalized with her charming drawings. Inès also shares how to bring Parisian chic into your home, and how to insert your signature style into any space—even the office.

The ultrachic volume is wrapped with a three-quarter-height removable jacket and features offset aquarelle paper and a ribbon page marker. Complete with her favorite addresses for finding the ultimate fashion and decorating items, this is a must-have for any woman who wants to add a touch of Paris to her own style.

Frederic Gros "It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth."—Nietzsche

In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B — the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble — and reveals what they say about us.

Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau’s eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.

Susan Sontag Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today.

How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity—from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world’s seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model.
 
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt politi-cal movements? Activists or -careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.

Tillie Olsen A study of the crucial relationship between circumstances - of sex, economic class, colour, the times and climate into which one is born - and creativity. The book draws on the lives, letters, diaries and testimonies of writers such as Melville, Hardy, Blake and Rimbaud. Tillie Olsen focuses on the financial and cultural pressures which obstructed, or silenced, their work. She then turns to those who have lost most: women writers, their energies deflected into domesticity and motherhood; black American writers, only 11 of whom published more than two novels from 1850-1950.

Edward Ball NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"[A] LANDMARK BOOK."

—San Francisco Chronicle

"POWERFUL."

—The New York Times Book Review

"GRIPPING."

—The Boston Sunday Globe

"BRILLIANT."

—The New Yorker

"EVERYONE SHOULD READ AND LEARN FROM THIS LUMINOUS BOOK...Like Alex Haley's Roots, through which African American history came into national focus...Slaves in the Family has the potential for creating a perceptual shift in the American mind...The book is not only honest in its scrupulous reporting but also personal narrative at its finest."  

—San Francisco Chronicle

"BALL IS A FIRST-RATE SCHOLAR-JOURNALIST...He's also a good detective, tracking down the many descendants of Ball slaves from New York to California and back in the South and coaxing them, often with some difficulty, to tell their stories...Outside Faulkner, it will be hard to find a more poignant, powerful account of a white man struggling with his and his nation's past."

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"A MASTERPIECE...REMARKABLE...It is a work about slaves in the family.  But it is also a large omnium gatherum of enchanting fireside anecdotes, secrets teased out of reluctant fragments from the remote past, the real lives of blacks and whites whose stories had been lost in the disintegrating churn of time until Edward Ball's patient reconstructions."  

—The Raleigh News & Observer

"A TOUR DE FORCE...The heart of this remarkable book consists of his sleuthing—tracking down and interviewing the descendants of former Ball slaves across the country... Part oral history, this unique family saga is a catharsis and a searching inventory of racially divided American society."

—Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

"A PAGEANTRY OF PASSIONS AND STRUGGLES."

—African Sun Times

Matthew Parker The contemporary image of the West Indies as paradise islands conceals a turbulent, dramatic and shocking history. For 200 years after 1650, the West Indies witnessed one of the greatest power struggles of the age, as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar - a commodity so lucrative that it was known as white gold. This compelling book tells how the islands became by far most valuable and important colonies in the British Empire. How Barbados, scene of the sugar revolution that made the English a nation of voracious consumers, was transformed from a backward outpost into England's richest colony, powered by the human misery of tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. How this model of coercion and exploitation was exported around the region, producing huge wealth for a few, but creating a society poisoned by war, disease, cruelty and corruption. How Jamaican opulence reached its zenith, and its subsequent calamitous decline; and the growing revulsion against slavery that led to emancipation. At the heart of "The Sugar Barons" are the human stories of the families whose fortunes rose and fell with those of the West Indian empire: the family of James Drax, the first sugar baron, who introduced sugar cultivation to Barbados, as well as extensive slavery; the Codringtons, the most powerful family in the Leeward Islands, who struggled to fashion a workable society in the Caribbean but in the end succumbed to corruption and decadence; and the Beckfords, Jamaica's leading planters, who amassed the greatest sugar fortune of all, only to see it frittered away through the most extraordinary profligacy. "The Sugar Barons" reveals how the importance of the West Indies made a crucial contribution to the loss of the North American colonies, and explores the impact of the empire on Britain, where it still constitutes perhaps the darkest episode in our history.

Andrea Stuart In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.

As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

Dr. Germaine Greer For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Everywhere I had ever travelled across the vast expanse of the fabulous country where I was born I had seen devastation, denuded hills, eroded slopes, weeds from all over the world, feral animals, open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans...One bright day in December 2001, sixty-two-year-old Germaine Greer found herself confronted by an irresistible challenge in the shape of sixty hectares of dairy farm, one of many in south-east Queensland that, after a century of logging, clearing and downright devastation, had been abandoned to their fate. She didn't think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart's ease. Beyond the acres of exotic pasture grass and soft weed and the impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes there were Macadamias dangling their strings of unripe nuts, and Black Beans with red and yellow pea flowers growing on their branches . and the few remaining White Beeches, stupendous trees up to forty metres in height, logged out within forty years of the arrival of the first white settlers. To have turned down even a faint chance of bringing them back to their old haunts would have been to succumb to despair. Once the process of rehabilitation had begun, the chance proved to be a dead certainty. When the first replanting shot up to make a forest and rare caterpillars turned up to feed on the leaves of the new young trees, she knew beyond doubt that at least here biodepletion could be reversed. Greer describes herself as an old dog who succeeded in learning a load of new tricks, inspired and rejuvenated by her passionate love of Australia and of Earth, most exuberant of small planets.

JUNG CHANG Memoir, Asian Studies, Chinese Studies

Thomas L. Friedman A New Edition of the Phenomenal #1 Bestseller
 
"One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal," the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times reviewing The World Is Flat in 2005. In this new edition, Thomas L. Friedman includes fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. Weaving new information into his overall thesis, and answering the questions he has been most frequently asked by parents across the country, this third edition also includes two new chapters—on how to be a political activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world; and on the more troubling question of how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all becoming publishers and public figures.
 
The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks—environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Kei Miller When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

Diane Ackerman The New York Times bestseller: a true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these "guests," and human names for the animals, it's no wonder that the zoo's code name became "The House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story—sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008 Orion Award. 8 pages of illustrations