QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
Refugee Boy
Brief Summary
Alem is on holiday with his father for a few days in London. He has never been out of Ethiopia before and is very excited. They have a great few days together until one morning when Alem wakes up in the bed and breakfast they are staying at to find the unthinkable. His father has left him.
It is only when the owner of the bed and breakfast hands him a letter that Alem is given an explanation. Alem's father admits that because of the political problems in Ethiopia both he and Alem's mother felt Alem would be safer in London - even though it is breaking their hearts to do this.
Alem is now on his own, in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council. He lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear from his father, and in particular about his mother, who has now gone missing... A powerful, gripping new novel from the popular Benjamin Zephaniah.
ISBN:9780747550860
Author:Benjamin Zephaniah
The Crack
Brief Summary
Gentle but highly strung, Janet must support her Afrikaner husband in his new job as a plain-clothes policeman and specialist interrogator. Hector-Jan heads off to work on New Year’s Day, aware that he is unbearably close to a bloody drama about to unfold.
As Janet’s world tightens and threatens to fracture, she must look to her children and cling to the support of Alice, her black maid, and Solomon, her ever-faithful gardener. All too conscious of her own emotional fragility, Janet watches her mother slip into the folds of "Old Timers” disease, and next door, the lurking, unfathomable Doug is up to no good.
As the crack in the swimming pool widens, can Janet bridge the gaps that threaten them all? Written with tenderness and disquieting power, The Crack exposes a brutal center that cannot hold, revealing how, in apartheid South Africa, things must crack and fall apart.
ISBN:9781780743998
Author:Christopher Radmann
Feminism is for Everybody Passionate ...
Brief Summary
Acclaimed cultural critic bell hooks offers an open-hearted and welcoming vision of gender, sexuality, and society in this inspiring and accessible volume. In engaging and provocative style, bell hooks introduces a popular theory of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience.
Hers is a vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality, mutual respect, and justice. hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race, class, and work.
With her customary insight and unsparing honesty, hooks calls for a feminism free from barriers but rich with rigorous debate. In language both eye-opening and optimistic, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to patriarchal, racist, and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different future.
ISBN:9780896086289
Author:bell hooks
The Feminine Mystique
Brief Summary
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name”: the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home.
Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives.
Part social chronicle, part manifesto, The Feminine Mystique is filled with fascinating anecdotes and interviews as well as insights that continue to inspire. This 50th–anniversary edition features an afterword by best-selling author Anna Quindlen as well as a new introduction by Gail Collins.
ISBN:9780393346787
Author:Betty Friedan
Male Daughters Female Husbands Gender...
Brief Summary
Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society
Challenging the received orthodoxies of social anthropology, Ifi Amadiume argues that in precolonial society, sex and gender did not necessarily coincide. Examining the structures that enabled women to achieve power, she shows that roles were neither rigidly masculinized nor feminized.
Economic changes in colonial times undermined women’s status and reduced their political role and Dr Amadiume maintains, patriarchal tendencies introduced by colonialism persist today, to the detriment of women. Critical of the chauvinist stereotypes established by colonial anthropology, the author stresses the importance of recognizing women’s economic activities as essential basis of their power. She is also critical of those western feminists who, when relating to African women, tend to accept the same outmoded projections.
ISBN:9780862325954
Author:Ifi Amadiume
Another Day of Life
Brief Summary
In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda—once famed as Africa’s Rio de Janeiro—and chaos.
Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese. It had belonged to Portugal since before there were English-speakers in North America. After the collapse of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Angola was brusquely cut loose, spurring the catastrophe of a still-ongoing civil war.
Kapuscinski plunged right into the middle of the drama, driving past thousands of haphazardly placed check-points, where using the wrong shibboleth was a matter of life and death; recording his impressions of the young soldiers—from Cuba, Angola, South Africa, Portugal—fighting a nebulous war with global repercussions; and examining the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its newfound freedom.
Translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.
ISBN:9780141186788
Author:Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Age of Revolution 1789-1848
Brief Summary
This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance.
Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.
ISBN:9780679772538
Author:Eric Hobsbawm
Americas Secret War
Brief Summary
America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between the United States and its Enemies.
George Friedman's company, STRATFOR (Strategic Forecasting), has received incredible accolades for working ahead of the news media and being right on the pulse of political and military action as it unfolds across the globe.
A private intelligence agency, it provides commercial organizations with the most up-to-date information about world events which they in turn use to assess their business options. This incredible book, written by the founder of STRATFOR himself, details the secret battles and shock operations that have been taking place beyond the reaches of conventional information networks.
Drawing on a wide network of contacts in governments, intelligence agencies and military organizations throughout the world, AMERICA'S SECRET WAR will open readers' eyes to an astonishing world of covert operations that - praise it or fear it - is the nature of this US administration.
Compelling, surprising, written with all the pace of an action/adventure thriller, AMERICA'S SECRET WAR documents a terrifying world previously unknown to the general public.
ISBN:9780349118925
Author:George Friedman
Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh An...
A Suitable Boy
Brief Summary
Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry.
Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves.
A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multi ethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.
ISBN:9780060786526
Author:Vikram Seth
The Fall of the House of Fifa
Brief Summary
The Fall of the House of Fifa: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer
When Sepp Blatter joined FIFA in 1975 it had just twelve employees. Forty years later, the FBI have accused 14 executives of 47 counts of money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion linked to kickbacks totaling more than $150m.
There's a fascinating story to be told here: how football got big, how FIFA got corrupt and what this means for soccer fans around the world. David Conn, who covered the scandal for The Guardian is the man for the job, putting the recent uproar in the context of FIFA's history and showing how far the organization has strayed from its humble beginnings.
The narrative will cover the story up to now, covering everything that happened since the scandal broke - the FBI's investigation, what happened to Blatter and Platini, enquiries into the 2022 World Cup, the comedy of errors surrounding who should take over the presidency and so on. Conn's previous book was called Searching for the Soul of Football--he sees this book as an expansion of that book: an inquiry into the soul of soccer on the global scale, as we take stock of this shocking scandal and try to return the original spirit to the beautiful game.
ISBN:9781478950097
Author:David Conn
The Euro And its Threat to the Future...
Brief Summary
Solidarity and prosperity fostered by economic integration: this principle has underpinned the European project from the start, and the establishment of a common currency was supposed to be its most audacious and tangible achievement. Since 2008, however, the European Union has ricocheted between stagnation and crisis. The inability of the eurozone to match the recovery in the USA and UK has exposed its governing structures, institutions and policies as dysfunctional and called into question the viability of a common currency shared by such different economies as Germany and Greece.
Designed to bring the European Union closer together, the euro has actually done the opposite: after nearly a decade without growth, unity has been replaced with dissent and enlargements with prospective exits. Joseph Stiglitz argues that Europe's stagnation and bleak outlook are a direct result of the fundamental flaws inherent in the euro project - economic integration outpacing political integration with a structure that promotes divergence rather than convergence. Money relentlessly leaves the weaker member states and goes to the strong, with debt accumulating in a few ill-favoured countries. The question then is: Can the euro be saved?
Laying bare the European Central Bank's misguided inflation-only mandate and explaining why austerity has condemned Europe to unending stagnation, Stiglitz outlines the fundamental reforms necessary to the structure of the eurozone and the policies imposed on the member countries suffering the most. But the same lack of sufficient political solidarity that led to the creation of a flawed euro twenty years ago suggests that these reforms are unlikely to be adopted. Hoping to avoid the huge costs associated with current policies, Stiglitz proposes two other alternatives: a well-managed end to the common currency; or a bold, new system dubbed 'the flexible euro.' This important book, by one of the world's leading economists, addresses the euro-crisis on a bigger intellectual scale than any predecessor.
ISBN:9780241258156
Author:Joseph Stiglitz
The Evolution of Everything How Ideas...
Brief Summary
The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimistand Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.
The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch—the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, for direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics and philosophy, Matt Ridley’s wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high, whether in government, business, academia, or morality.
On the contrary, our most important achievements develop from the bottom up. Patterns emerge, trends evolve. Just as skeins of geese form Vs in the sky without meaning to, and termites build mud cathedrals without architects, so brains take shape without brain-makers, learning can happen without teaching and morality changes without a plan.
Although we neglect, defy and ignore them, bottom-up trends shape the world. The growth of technology, the sanitation-driven health revolution, the quadrupling of farm yields so that more land can be released for nature—these were largely emergent phenomena, as were the Internet, the mobile phone revolution, and the rise of Asia. Ridley demolishes the arguments for design and effectively makes the case for evolution in the universe, morality, genes, the economy, culture, technology, the mind, personality, population, education, history, government, God, money, and the future.
As compelling as it is controversial, authoritative as it is ambitious, Ridley’s stunning perspective will revolutionize the way we think about our world and how it works.
ISBN:9780062296009
Author:Matt Ridley
Talk of the Devil Encounters with Sev...
Brief Summary
Inspired by newspaper clippings he had kept about two former African dictators accused of cannibalism, journalist Riccardo Orizio set out to track down tyrants around the world who had fallen from power?to see if they had gained any perspective on their actions, or if their lives and thoughts could shed any light on our own.
The seven encounters chronicled in Talk of the Devil reveal Orizio's gift as an observer and his skill at getting people to reveal themselves. They are also, each of them, memorable stories in their own right.
Thanks to his conversion to Islam, the unrepentant Idi Amin lives in exile in Saudi Arabia and laughs off his murderous past while still attempting to meddle in Uganda. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the bloody former emperor of Central Africa, boasts astonishingly that Pope Paul VI had nominated him as the thirteenth apostle of the Catholic Church. Nexhmije Hoxha defends her husband's brutal Stalinist regime from her Albanian prison cell and proudly explains how it worked.
Paris-based Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier?in his first interview since fleeing Haiti in 1986?speaks about voodoo and the women of his life, and laments the loss of his fortune. Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam of Ethiopia, Mira Markovic (Slobodan Milosevic's wife), and General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Polish head of state, all claim, in one way or another, that history will do them justice.
By turns chilling and comical, rational and absurd, Talk of the Devil brings back into focus forgotten history and people we have viewed as evil incarnate. Stripped of their power and titles, they are oddly human, and in Orizio's hands, their stories, and his own, are compulsively readable.
ISBN:9780802714169
Author:Riccardo Orizio
Great Dialogues of Plato
The Modern Law of Trusts
Brief Summary
Setting out the underlying principles which govern this area of law and exploring the administration of trusts, this book provides the reader with an accessible guide to the law and the overall function of trusts.
It is useful for teachers and students at undergraduate level, vocational students and practitioners.
ISBN:9780421945906
Author:A. J. Oakley
Dark Matter
Brief Summary
"Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.
Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.
Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend.”
In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.
Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.
From the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human—a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.
ISBN:9781101904220
Author:Blake Crouch
Little Fires Everywhere
Brief Summary
Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardson’s. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs. Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family – and Mia's.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood-and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.
"
Jump Take the Leap of Faith to Achieve
Brief Summary
On January 13, 2016, at the close of a taping of Family Feud, Steve Harvey spontaneously began to speak. Not knowing that the cameras were still rolling, the $100 million-dollar host offered his studio audience insights into his own happiness and success. His staff, also moved by Steve’s passionate words, shared the riveting six-minute video on social media. The clip immediately went viral, with more than 58 million views worldwide!
In this very personal and illuminating guide, the #1 New York Times bestselling author elaborates on those spontaneous remarks. His message is simple: You need to JUMP like your life depends on it—because it does—if you truly want a life of peace and abundance.
Jump explores seven vulnerable "seasons” in the Emmy Award-winner life: being homeless and living out of his car, flunking out of college, enduring the emotional turmoil of a second failed marriage, risking stability to pursue his dream of television stardom, overcoming the Miss Universe mishap, blending his family, and owing the Internal Revenue Service $20 million. Steve uses these uncomfortable moments to explain his core principles and teach you what it means to JUMP:
• Identifying the lesson and the blessing in all that life brings our way;
• Isolating particular moments when we must be still and when we must take action;
• Implementing "humble aggression” to achieve our dreams;
• Placing past mistakes in our rearview mirror and creating a fresh life story;
• Letting go of people who are weighing us down;
• Taking responsibility in the face of adversity.
At the heart of this mesmerizing read is faith—the confidence in knowing that leaping will elevate our lives, and that we will be caught when we fall. Don’t stand on the cliff of life and watch others soar by, Steve tells us. If you take a leap of faith, God will open your parachute and "Give you life more abundantly.”
Life is an incredible journey. It’s not good enough to exist—you need to live. You need to JUMP—to take a leap of faith, a risk toward the rich life God has planned for you.
ISBN:9781441723239
Author:Steve Harvey
The Complete Book of Rules
Brief Summary
The very best advice from "The Rules" and "The Rules 2" is brought together to provide the ultimate guide to successful dating. The notorious dating handbook comprises many tips such as "Never call a man first" (designed to make "Mr Right" hungry for more) which, although old-fashioned, has been found effective by millions of women worldwide.
Other essential advice offered: always end the first date - it will leave him desperate for more; don't call him - it will make him desire you more; never accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday - it will encourage him to phone sooner; always end the telephone conversation first -it will leave him wanting more; don't rush into sex - let his passion build.
ISBN:9780722539743
Author:Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider
