Atlantic Books strana 15 z 31

Have you heard that you should plant trees to save the planet? Or buy carbon offsets when you fly? Or recycle plastic? Go vegan? Or not have children? What if all these actions were a distraction, no matter how well-intentioned? In this provocative manifesto, Assaad Razzouk shows that for too long our ideas about what's best for the environment have been unfocused and distracted, trying to go in too many directions and concentrating on individual behaviour. While some of these things can be useful, they are dwarfed by one big thing that simply has to happen very soon if we're to avoid major environmental breakdown: curtailing the activities of the fossil fuel industry. Full of counter-intuitive statistics and positive suggestions for individual and collective action, this ingenious book will change how you view the climate crisis.

We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic. It is tempting to switch off the news, tune out and hope things will get back to normal. Except, this is the new normal, and our democracy can only work if enough people stay engaged without getting enraged. But how? To answer that question, award-winning journalist Rafael Behr takes the reader on a personal journey from despair at the state of politics to hope that there is a better way of doing things, with insights drawn from three decades as a political commentator and foreign correspondent.

After his dramatic rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. Beginning with the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August and the historic landslide election victory later that year, Johnson was barely through the door of No. 10 when Britain was engulfed by a series of crises that will define its place in the world for decades to come. From the agonising upheaval of Brexit and the devastating Covid-19 pandemic to the nerve-shredding crisis in Afghanistan and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Johnson's government ultimately unravelled after just three years. This gripping behind-the-scenes work of contemporary history maps Johnson's time in power from start to finish and sheds new light on the most divisive Prime Minister to have led the United Kingdom since Thatcher. Based on more than 200 interviews with key aides, allies and insiders, Johnson at 10 gives the first full account of Johnson's premiership, the shockwaves of which are still felt today.

This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media. As a child, Anna Wintour was a tomboy with no apparent interest in clothing but, seduced by the miniskirts and bob haircuts of swinging 1960s London, she grew into a fashion-obsessed teenager. Her father, the influential editor of the Evening Standard, loomed large in her life, and once he decided she should become editor in chief of Vogue, she never looked back. Impatient to start her career, she left high school and got a job at a fashionable boutique in London - an experience that would be the first of many defeats. Undeterred, she found work in the competitive world of magazines, eventually moving to New York. Before long, Anna's journey to Vogue became a battle to ascend, no matter who or what stood in her way. Once she was crowned editor in chief - in one of the stormiest transitions in fashion magazine history - she continued the fight to retain her enviable position, ultimately rising to dominate all of Conde Nast. Based on extensive interviews with Anna Wintour's closest friends and collaborators, including some of the biggest names in fashion, journalist Amy Odell has crafted the most revealing portrait of Wintour ever published. Weaving Anna's personal story into a larger narrative about the hierarchical dynamics of the fashion industry and the complex world of Conde Nast, Anna charts the relentless ambition of the woman who would become an icon.

Inside the corrupt and secret business of global shipping, the explosive true story of a notorious international fraud and murder In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked the vessel and set her ablaze. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for the ship's insurer Lloyd's of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. Soon after he started his investigation, Mockett was killed by a car bomb. Through first-hand accounts - from members of the crew who survived the hijacking to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett's murder - award-winning reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the explosive true story behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history.

The story of the pioneering anthropologists and their adventures among civilisations that were first thought of as being primitive and savage. What they discovered, however, would change the way we think about ourselves. In the late nineteenth century, when non-European societies were seen as 'living fossils' offering an insight into how Western civilisation had evolved, anthropology was a thrilling new discipline which attracted the brightest minds of the academic world. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, colonialism was recognised as being inextricably linked to exploitation and outdated labels like 'savage' were inconceivable when so-called 'civilised' man had wreaked such devastation across two world wars. Focusing on twelve key European and American anthropologists working in the field, from Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s to Claude Levi-Strauss in Brazil fifty years later, Lucy Moore explores the brief flowering of anthropology as a quasi-scientific area of study with all its insights and ambivalence. In Search of Us tells the story of the men and women whose observations of the 'other' would transform attitudes about race, gender equality, sexual liberation, parenting and tolerance in ways they had never anticipated. In an enthralling, perceptive narrative, Moore shows how these radical anthropologists were inspired by their time in the furthest-flung reaches of the known world, becoming pioneers of a new way of thinking. In the end, their legacy is less about understanding foreign cultures and more about their attempts to persuade human beings to look at one another with eyes washed free from prejudice. Their intention may have been to explain what they saw as the primitive world to the civilised one but they ended up changing the way people viewed themselves - at least for a time.

Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash. It wasn't always like this though. Once Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place, where only the bravest and most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama and incident, populated by a set of larger than life characters straight out of Boys Own and Indiana Jones. The expedition ended in tragedy when, on their third bid for the top, Mallory's party was hit by an avalanche that left seven men dead. Using diaries, letters, published and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey creates a rich character driven narrative, exploring the motivations and private dramas of key individuals and detailing the back room politics and bitter rivalries that lay behind this epic adventure.

An 'essential book for 2023', as selected by the Irish Examiner It is generally accepted that the European Renaissance began in Italy. However, a historical transformation of similar magnitude also took place in northern Europe at the same time. This 'Other Renaissance' was initially centred on the city of Bruges in Flanders (modern Belgium), but its influence was soon being felt in France, the German states, England, and even in Italy itself. Following a sequence of major figures, including Copernicus, Gutenberg, Luther, Catherine de Medici, Rabelais, van Eyck and Shakespeare, Paul Strathern tells the fascinating story of how this 'Other Renaissance' played as significant a role as the Italian renaissance in bringing our modern world into being.

When is the last time you were stung by a wasp? Or were followed by a cloud of midges? Or saw a butterfly? All these normal occurrences are becoming much rarer. A groundswell of research suggests insect numbers are in serious decline all over the world - in some places by over 90%. The Insect Crisis explores this hidden emergency, arguing that its consequences could even rival climate change. We rely on insect pollination for the bulk of our agriculture, they are a prime food source for birds and fish, and they are a key strut holding up life on Earth, especially our own. In a compelling and entertaining investigation spanning the globe, Milman speaks to the scientists and entomologists studying this catastrophe and asks why these extraordinary creatures are disappearing. Part warning, part celebration of the incredible variety of insects, this book highlights why we need to wake up to this impending environmental disaster.

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos. Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars, In Ascension is a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how – no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope – we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.

More than one fifth of children want to become influencers and it's easy to understand why. What if you could escape economic uncertainty by winning the internet's attention? What if you could turn the adoration of your social media followers into a lucrative livelihood? But as Symeon Brown explores in this searing exposé, the reality is much murkier. From IRL streamers in LA to Brazilian butt lifts, from sex workers on OnlyFans to fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes, these are the incredible stories that lurk behind the filtered selfies and gleaming smiles. Exposing the fraud, exploitation, bribery, and dishonesty at the core of the influencer model, Get Rich or Lie Trying asks if our digital rat race is costing us too much. Revealing a broken economy resembling a pyramid scheme, this incredible blend of reportage and analysis will captivate and horrify you in equal measure.

Perfect for readers of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and Zero to One by Peter Theil Out of PayPal's ranks have come household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman. Since leaving Paypal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. Yet for all their influence, the incredible story of where they started has gone largely untold. In The Founders, award-winning author Jimmy Soni narrates how a once-in-a-generation collaboration turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time. Facing bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s, their success was anything but certain. But they would go on to change our world forever. Informed by hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, The Founders explores how the seeds of so much of what drives the internet today were planted two decades ago.

Are we in the middle of a generational war? Are Millennials really entitled 'snowflakes'? Are Baby Boomers stealing their children's futures? Are Generation X the saddest generation? Will Generation Z fix the climate crisis? Revealing and informative, The Generation Divide provides a bold new framework for understanding the most divisive issues raging today: from culture wars to climate change and mental health to housing. Including data from all over the globe, and with powerful implications for humanity's future, this big-thinking book will transform how you view the world. Previously published as Generations.

A delightful and witty treasure trove of utterly useless information by the author of The Things That Nobody Knows. Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere. The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain's views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness.

Have you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human. In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. In explaining whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds while others can last a lifetime, we're shown the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). Remember shows us how to create a better relationship with our memory - so we no longer have to fear it any more, which can be life-changing.

Never before available in hardback, this is a lavish edition of one of the greatest love stories of our time. The perfect gift for anyone captivated by Elio and Oliver. A sudden and powerful romance blossoms between Elio, an adolescent boy, and Oliver, his parents' guest, over the course of one summer. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the hot restless weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.