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Bible Puzzle by Brigid Nasimiyu
Equipoise: 2020 Anthology of the Nair...
Brief Summary
Ten new stories from Kenya. Herein are to be found vampires and gods; sex toys and exhibitionists; divorces and soon-to-be divorcees; heart attacks and heartbreaks; grief unending, bad decisions and unexpected salvation; the unemployed, troubled expatriates, hustlers and conmen; adventures in Nairobi, Dar es Salam, Mt. Elgon and everywhere in between; friends who are not just friends, unruly relatives and beloved but complicated parents.
Featured authors are:
- Miriam Amoit
- Rumona Apiyo
- Nyasili Atetwe
- Clarie Gor
- Alvin Kathembe
- Duncan Mwangi
- Aggrey Oriwo
- Gladwell Pamba
- Natalie Sifuma
- Kiprono Tonui
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind...
A pioneering researcher and one of the world’s foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing.
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children.
Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring—specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy—and a way to reclaim lives.
The Ultimate Question 2.0 : How Net P...
Brief Summary
In the first edition of this landmark book, business loyalty guru Fred Reichheld revealed the question most critical to your company’s future: Would you recommend us to a friend?” By asking customers this question, you identify detractors, who sully your firm’s reputation and readily switch to competitors, and promoters, who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth.
You also generate a vital metric: your Net Promoter Score. Since the book was first published, Net Promoter has transformed companies, across industries and sectors, constituting a game-changing system and ethos that rivals Six Sigma in its power.
In this thoroughly updated and expanded edition, Reichheld, with Bain colleague Rob Markey, explains how practitioners have built Net Promoter into a full-fledged management system that drives extraordinary financial and competitive results. With his trademark clarity, Reichheld:
- Defines the fundamental concept of Net Promoter, explaining its connection to your company’s growth and sustained success
- Presents the closed-loop feedback process and demonstrates its power to energize employees and delight customers
- Shares new and compelling stories of companies that have transformed their performance by putting Net Promoter at the center of their business
Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putti...
Brief Summary
Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance – for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship.
In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.
The authors reveal a transformed view of service, presenting an operating model built on tough choices organizations must make:
• How do customers define “excellence” in your offering? Is it convenience? Friendliness? Flexible choices? Price?
• How will you get paid for that excellence? Will you charge customers more? Get them to handle more service tasks themselves?
• How will you empower your employees to deliver excellence? What will your recruiting, selection, training, and job design practices look like? What about your organizational culture?
• How will you get your customers to behave? For example, what do you need to do to get them to treat your employees with respect? Do you need to make it easier for them to use new technology?
Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service as a means of boosting productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.
Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder...
Brief Summary
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was virtually unknown until 1919, when he took the lead in thwarting the victorious Allies' plan to partition the Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire.
He divided the Allies, defeated the last Sultan, and secured the territory of the Turkish national state, becoming the first president of the new republic in 1923, fast creating his own legend.
Andrew Mango's revealing portrait of Atatürk throws light on matters of great importance today-resurgent nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and the reality of democracy.
Stealing from the Saracens: How Islam...
Brief Summary
Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly airbrushing from history their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But this legacy lives on in some of Europe's most recognizable buildings, from Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament.
This beautifully illustrated book reveals the Arab and Islamic roots of Europe's architectural heritage. Diana Darke traces ideas and styles from vibrant Middle Eastern centers like Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo, via Muslim Spain, Venice and Sicily into Europe. She describes how medieval crusaders,
pilgrims and merchants encountered Arab Muslim culture on their way to the Holy Land; and explores more recent artistic interaction between Ottoman and Western cultures, including Sir Christopher Wren's inspirations in the "Saracen" style of Gothic architecture.
Recovering this long yet overlooked history of architectural "borrowing," Stealing from the Saracens is a rich tale of cultural exchange, shedding new light on Europe's greatest landmarks.
Vision Or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the...
Brief Summary
Something extraordinary is happening in Saudi Arabia. A traditional, tribal society once known for its lack of tolerance is rapidly implementing significant economic and social reforms. An army of foreign consultants is rewriting the social contract, King Salman has cracked down hard on corruption, and his dynamic though inexperienced son, the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is promoting a more tolerant Islam. But is all this a new vision for Saudi Arabia or merely a mirage likely to dissolve into Iranian-style revolution?
David Rundell - one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential reading for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab World.
The Man Who Stole Himself: The Slave ...
Brief Summary
The island nation of Iceland is known for many things—majestic landscapes, volcanic eruptions, distinctive seafood—but racial diversity is not one of them. So the little-known story of Hans Jonathan, a free black man who lived and raised a family in early nineteenth-century Iceland, is improbable and compelling, the stuff of novels.
In The Man Who Stole Himself, Gisli Palsson lays out the story of Hans Jonathan (also known as Hans Jónatan) in stunning detail. Born into slavery in St. Croix in 1784, Hans was taken as a slave to Denmark, where he eventually enlisted in the navy and fought on behalf of the country in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen.
After the war, he declared himself a free man, believing that he was due freedom not only because of his patriotic service, but because while slavery remained legal in the colonies, it was outlawed in Denmark itself. He thus became the subject of one of the most notorious slavery cases in European history, which he lost. Then Hans ran away—never to be heard from in Denmark again, his fate unknown for more than two hundred years. It’s now known that Hans fled to Iceland, where he became a merchant and peasant farmer, married, and raised two children. Today, he has become something of an Icelandic icon, claimed as a proud and daring ancestor both there and among his descendants in America.
The Man Who Stole Himself brilliantly intertwines Hans Jonathan’s adventurous travels with a portrait of the Danish slave trade, legal arguments over slavery, and the state of nineteenth-century race relations in the Northern Atlantic world. Throughout the book, Palsson traces themes of imperial dreams, colonialism, human rights, and globalization, which all come together in the life of a single, remarkable man. Hans literally led a life like no other. His is the story of a man who had the temerity—the courage—to steal himself.
Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
Brief Summary
Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
Unspoken Feelings of a Gentleman by P...
Brief Summary
A beautiful mind is priceless, but so often our most intimate and untainted thoughts go unheard. This is a passionate unfiltered story of a man stricken with pain, confused with guilt, filled with remorse, and faced with many obstacles. In this book you will enter a realm never visited. As you turn the pages, untold events will captivate your emotions and a story of the fight a man faces with finding himself and experiencing love is sure to leave your mind blown. It is those things that often go untold that can be life changing.
The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatche...
Brief Summary
Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times’s most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals.
On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis—a chieftain readying for war at his desert fort, a retired spy skulking through the borderlands, and a crusading lawyer risking death for her beliefs, among others. Through these “nine lives” he describes a country on the brink—a place of creeping extremism and political chaos, but also personal bravery and dogged idealism that defy easy stereotypes.
Unbeknownst to Walsh, however, an intelligence agent was tracking him. Written in the aftermath of Walsh’s abrupt deportation, The Nine Lives of Pakistan concludes with an astonishing encounter with that agent, and his revelations about Pakistan’s powerful security state. Intimate and complex, attuned to the centrifugal forces of history, identity, and faith, The Nine Lives of Pakistan offers an unflinching account of life in a precarious, vital country.
Bank 4.0: Banking Everywhere, Never a...
Brief Summary
In the final book in the digital “BANK” series, Brett King tackles the topic of whether banks have a future at all in the emerging, technology embedded world of the 21st century. In 30-50 years when cash is gone, cards are gone and all vestiges of the traditional banking system have been re-engineered in real-time, what exactly will a bank look like? How will we reimagine a bank account, identity, value, assets, investments?
hen stepping back from this vision of the future, King and his cadre of ‘disruptors’ and Fintech mafia chronicle the foundations of this new banking ecosystem today. From selfie-pay in China, blockchain in Africa, self-driving cars with their own bank accounts and augmented reality tech that informs the future design of banking systems, this proves once and for all that we’re not in Wall Street anymore Toto. Bank 4.0 is what banking will become.
The Russian edition of Bank 4.0 was recognised as the best book by a foreign author (2019) at the Business Book of the Year Award organised by PwC Russia.
Beyond Capitalism and Socialism in Ke...
Kenyan capitalists, the State, and de...
Brief Summary
Himbara argues that the literature on Kenyan capitalism largely misses the mark because it either omits or misconceptualises as ""Asian capital"" the principal segment of the domestic bourgeoisie. He demonstrates the leading role that Kenya's Indian entrepreneurs have played in her development.
Scars Of A Nation: Survivor Of Kiamba...
Brief Summary
A true Story about victims of the 2007/08 Post election Violence in Kenya, their suffering and the search for their Justice at The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The lies, intrigues, machinations and skullduggery during the ICC process.
The author is a victim of the Kiambaa Church Massacre.
Quote from the book:
“Today, when you walk into the Kenya Assemblies of God Church in Kiambaa Eldoret, thirty-six graves are conspicuously visible. They stick out as a monument of that massacre - a powerful reminder of the consequences of prejudice, negative ethnicity, hate and the greed of a few individuals, who do not care that innocent citizens have to die from artificially generated conflicts, as long as this enables them to negotiate for political power, so as to satiate their individual greed, with ill-gotten wealth, and soothe their ego, with fame and prestige”
In Naivasha “the attackers came to the home of Mr. Bernard Ndege, a man from the Luo tribe, and locked his entire family inside their house then set it ablaze and killed nine of his children and two wives”
“having a President coming from your ethniccity is usually just a feel-good attitude only, and can be quite deceptive to think that one is privileged, because, it does not necessarily translate into tangible personal gains when ‘one of our own is the President’ Only a good governance system can guarantee equality for all”
N/B Buy the book to support and encourage Kenyan authors.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Brief Summary
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.
The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Brief Summary
Told in Kvothe's own voice, this is the tale of the magically gifted young man who grows to be the most notorious wizard his world has ever seen.
The intimate narrative of his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, his years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, and his life as a fugitive after the murder of a king form a gripping coming-of-age story unrivaled in recent literature.
A high-action story written with a poet's hand, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that will transport readers into the body and mind of a wizard.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Brief Summary
Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: a sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born.
A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder.
