Profile Books strana 13 z 27

'Deirdre Mask's book was just up my Strasse, alley, avenue and boulevard.' -Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type 'Fascinating ... intelligent but thoroughly accessible ... full of surprises' - Sunday Times Starting with a simple question, 'what do street addresses do?', Deirdre Mask travels the world and back in time to work out how we describe where we live and what that says about us. From the chronological numbers of Tokyo to the naming of Bobby Sands Street in Iran, she explores how our address - or lack of one - expresses our politics, culture and technology. It affects our health and wealth, and it can even affect the working of our brains. From Ancient Rome to Kolkata today, from cholera epidemics to tax hungry monarchs, Mask discovers the different ways street names are created, celebrated, and in some cases, banned. Filled with fascinating people and histories, this incisive, entertaining book shows how addresses are about identity, class and race. But most of all they are about power: the power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn't, and why. 'A must read for urbanists and all those interested in cities and modern economic and social life.' - Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class

WINNER OF BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020: LEADERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE A Financial Times Business Book of the Month "A brilliant set of leadership tools that will help you succeed whatever your goal" - Sir Clive Woodward Leadership is not some special club, open only to elites. It's not a gold star given only to those with expensive degrees. Leadership is for everyone. Based on the author's hard-won experience, this smart, fun book delivers a step-by-step working manual on how to lead - for anyone. Full of principles and actionable steps that apply to every field, from small businesses to community initiatives, from sports teams to global enterprises, this book will transform your career and help you reach your goals. It demystifies an over-analysed subject to get to the heart of modern leadership: the life-changing power to get stuff done and make stuff better.

Rainforests are the lungs of our planet - regulators of the earth's temperature and weather. They are also home to 50 per cent of the world's animals and plants - which for centuries have been the source of many of our key medicines. And yet we've all heard of their systematic destruction; the raising of trees to make way for plantations of oil palms or cattle, the disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples, and the corruption that leads to illegal logging and pollution. But this is the full story you've never heard: an in depth, wide-ranging, first-hand narrative that not only looks at the state of the world's tropical rainforests today and the implications arising from their continuing decline, but also at what is being done, and can be done in future, to protect the forests and the 1.6 billion people that depend upon them. It is inspirational, too, in its descriptions of the rainforest's remarkable birds and plants ... and its indigenous people. Rainforest is a personal story, drawing on the author's many years' experience at the frontline of the fight to save the rainforests, explaining the science and history of the campaigns, and what it has felt like to be there, amid the conflicts and dilemmas.

Teenagers are tough and anyone who has their own needs help. Witty, enjoyable and genuinely insightful, Get Out of My Life is now updated with how to deal with everything from social media to online threats and porn, as well as looking at all the difficult issues of bringing up teenagers, school, sex, drugs and more. But it's the title of the second chapter, 'What They Do and Why' that best captures the book's spirit and technique, explaining how to translate teenage behaviour into its true, often less complicated meaning. One key mistake, for instance, is getting in no-win conflicts instead of having the wisdom to shut up when shutting up would be the most effective, albeit least satisfying, thing to do. Another is taking offence when the teenager views you, the adult, as idiotic. And there's advice on what to do when this happens. The message is clear: parenting adolescents is inherently difficult. Don't judge yourself too harshly!

Some people fear and mistrust numbers. Others want to use them for everything. After a long career as a statistician, Paul Goodwin has learned the hard way that the ones who want to use them for everything are a very good reason for the rest of us to fear and mistrust them. Something Doesn't Add Up is a fieldguide to the numbers that rule our world, even though they don't make sense. Wry, witty and humane, Goodwin explains mathematical subtleties so painlessly that you hardly need to think about numbers at all. He demonstrates how statistics that are meant to make life simpler often make it simpler than it actually is, but also reveals some of the ways we really can use maths to make better decisions. Enter the world of fitness tracking, the history of IQ testing, China's social credit system, Effective Altruism, and learn how someone should have noticed that Harold Shipman was killing his patients years before they actually did. In the right hands, maths is a useful tool. It's just a pity there are so many of the wrong hands about.

'Big and timely ... Coggan's account of the rise of the world economy is accessible and mercifully free of jargon' Sunday Times More tracks the development of the world economy, starting with the first obsidian blades that made their way from what is now Turkey to the Iran-Iraq border 7000 years before Christ, and ending with the Sino-American trade war that we are in right now. Taking history in great strides, More illustrates broad changes by examining details from the design of the standard medieval cottage to the stranglehold that Paris's three belt-buckle-making guilds exercised over innovation in the field of holding up trousers. Along the way Coggan reveals that historical economies were far more sophisticated than we might imagine - tied together by webs of credit and financial instruments much like the modern economy. Coggan shows how, at every step of our long journey, it was connections between people - allowing more trade, more specialisation, more ideas and more freedom - that always created the conditions of prosperity.

'A dark jewel reflecting something startling - familiar and strange' Guardian 'Ravishingly beautiful' Observer 'Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative' Irish Times 'Provocative and rich' Economist 'Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read' Esquire 'An absolute must-read for 2020' Stylist In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be. Winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Non-fiction and the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Non-Fiction

'A fascinating new analysis of human violence, filled with fresh ideas and gripping evidence from our primate cousins, historical forebears, and contemporary neighbors' Steven Pinker 'A brilliant analysis of the role of aggression in our evolutionary history' Jane Goodall It may not always seem so, but day-to-day interactions between individual humans are extraordinarily peaceful. That is not to say that we are perfect, just far less violent than most animals, especially our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and their legendarily docile cousins, the Bonobo. Perhaps surprisingly, we rape, maim, and kill many fewer of our neighbours than all other primates and almost all undomesticated animals. But there is one form of violence that humans exceed all other animals in by several degrees: organized proactive violence against other groups of humans. It seems, we are the only animal that goes to war. In the Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham wrestles with this paradox at the heart of human behaviour. Drawing on new research by geneticists, neuroscientists, primatologists, and archaeologists, he shows that what domesticated our species was nothing less than the invention of capital punishment which eliminated the least cooperative and most aggressive among us. But that development is exactly what laid the groundwork for the worst of our atrocities.

November 1932. With the German economy in ruins and street battles raging between political factions, the Weimar Republic is in its death throes. Its elderly president Paul von Hindenburg floats above the fray, inscrutably haunting the halls of the Reichstag. In the shadows, would-be saviours of the nation vie for control. The great rivals are the chancellors Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. Both are tarnished by the republic's all-too-evident failures. Each man believes he can steal a march on the other by harnessing the increasingly popular National Socialists - while reining in their most alarming elements, naturally. Adolf Hitler has ideas of his own. But if he can't impose discipline on his own rebellious foot-soldiers, if he can't even control his rages, what chance does he have of seizing power? In The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic, Barth and Friedrichs draw on a vast array of primary sources to render the last days of the Weimar Republic in urgent, kaleidoscopic detail. Despite its precarious state, Germany was by no means fated to plunge into the abyss. The lesson of its final descent is both terrible and timely.

If you were to master the twenty languages discussed in Babel, you could talk with three quarters of the world's population. But what makes these languages stand out amid the world's estimated 6,500 tongues? Gaston Dorren delves deep into the linguistic oddities and extraordinary stories of these diverse lingua francas, tracing their origins and their sometimes bloody rise to greatness. He deciphers their bewildering array of scripts, presents the gems and gaps in their vocabularies and charts their coinages and loans. He even explains how their grammars order their speakers' worldview. Combining linguistics and cultural history, Babel takes us on an intriguing tour of the world, addressing such questions as how tiny Portugal spawned a major world language and Holland didn't, why Japanese women talk differently from men, what it means for Russian to be 'related' to English, and how non-alphabetic scripts, such as those of India and China, do the same job as our 26 letters. Not to mention the conundrums of why Vietnamese has four forms for 'I', or how Tamil pronouns keep humans and deities apart. Babel will change the way you look at the world and how we all speak.

When barefoot running guru Christopher McDougall takes in a neglected donkey, his aim is to get Sherman back to reasonable health. But Sherman is ill-tempered, obstinate and uncooperative - and it's clear his poor treatment has made him deeply fearful of humans. Chris knows that donkeys need a purpose - they are working, pack animals - and so when he learns of the sport of Burro Racing or running with donkeys, he sets out to give Sherman something worth living for. With the aid of Chris's menagerie on his farm in rural Pennsylvania, his wife Mika and their friends and neighbours including the local Amish population, Sherman begins to build trust in Chris. To give him a purpose, they start to run together. But what Sherman gains in confidence and meaning is something we all need: a connection with nature, the outdoors, with movement. And as Chris learns, the side benefits of exercise and animal contact are surprising, helping with mental and physical health in unexpected ways.

Since prehistory, dogs have served as man's best friend, giving us loyalty, assistance and boundless inspiration. Dogs offer comfort and amusement to their owners; they provide solace when we're sad, entertaining antics when we're bored and affection every day. To poets in particular, these beloved creatures are the most bountiful muses, as they bark, yip, hunt, fetch, growl and slumber, reflecting back at us our most heartfelt tenderness and often rewarding us with unconditional love we scarcely deserve. Dog Poems offers a litter of verses in celebration of our most faithful companions by some of the greatest poets of all time.

Currently in Bill Gates's bookbag and FT Books of 2018 Increasingly, the demands of identity direct the world's politics. Nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, gender: these categories have overtaken broader, inclusive ideas of who we are. We have built walls rather than bridges. The result: increasing in anti-immigrant sentiment, rioting on college campuses, and the return of open white supremacy to our politics. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American and global institutions were in a state of decay, as the state was captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatens to destabilise the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to 'the people', who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Identity is an urgent and necessary book: a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continual conflict.

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year Award 2019 'Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn't at least familarised themselves with Zuboff's central ideas.' - Zadie Smith, The Guardian The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us. The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future? Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Irreverently funny ... kept me giggling all week.' Scotland on Sunday "Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?" Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measure, Confessions of a Bookseller will reunite readers with the characters they've come to know and love.

Lyndon Baines Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Donald Trump: each had different motivations, methods, and paths, but they all sought the highest office. And yet when they reached their goal, they often found that the power they had imagined was illusory. Their sweeping visions of reform faltered. They faced bureaucratic obstructions, but often the biggest obstruction was their own character. However, their personalities could help them as much as hurt them. Arguably the most successful of them, LBJ showed little indication that he supported what he is best known for - the Civil Rights Act - but his grit, resolve, and brute political skill saw him bend Congress to his will. David Runciman tackles the limitations of high office and how the personal histories of those who achieved the very pinnacles of power helped to define their successes and failures in office. These portraits show what characters are most effective in these offices. Could this be a blueprint for good and effective leadership in an age lacking good leaders?