Try something different
Many books are published, few attract reviews.
Here are some titles recently acquired by your library service which you may not have come across, but which offer an interesting and rewarding read.
Melanie Challenger On Extinction: how we became estranged from Nature
The destruction of nature as a consequence of modern human lifestyles, industries and agriculture is leading to the Earth's sixth great extinction of species. Current estimates suggest that the rate of extinction is now thousands of times that counted in the fossil record before the emergence of modern man. At the same time, human societies themselves are in a cultural extinction crisis, with experts anticipating that of the world's nearly seven thousand languages as few as ten percent may survive into the next century. Melanie Challenger's book is an exploration of how we might live to resist these extinctions and why such disappearances must be of concern to us. Adventurous, curious and passionate about her subject, Challenger takes us on a very personal journey as she tries to restore her own relationship with nature. The narrative unfolds through a series of landscapes haunted by extinction. From the ruined tin mines of Cornwall and the abandoned whaling stations of South Georgia to the Inuit camps of the Arctic and the white heart of Antarctica, she probes the critical relationship between human activities and environmental collapse. This is the first book to weave together the strands of cultural, biological and industrial extinctions into a meditation on the way we live beside nature in the modern world.
W.M. Ormrod Edward III
Edward III (1312-1377) was the most successful European ruler of his age. Reigning for over fifty years, he achieved spectacular military triumphs and overcame grave threats to his authority, from parliamentary revolt to the Black Death. Revered by his subjects as a chivalric dynamo, he initiated the Hundred Years War and gloriously led his men into battle against the Scots and the French. In this illuminating biography, W. Mark Ormrod takes a deeper look at Edward to reveal the man beneath the military muscle. What emerges is Edward's clear sense of his duty to rebuild the prestige of the Crown, and through military gains and shifting diplomacy, to secure a legacy for posterity. New details of the splendour of Edward's court, lavish national celebrations, and innovative use of imagery establish the king's instinctive understanding of the bond between ruler and people. With fresh emphasis on how Edward's rule was affected by his family relationships - including his roles as traumatized son, loving husband, and dutiful father - Ormrod gives a valuable new dimension to our understanding of this remarkable warrior king.
Emma Christopher A Merciless Place: the lost story of Britain’s convict disaster in Africa
This is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost as soon as it was over. In the wake of its defeat in the America War of Independence, the British Government began shipping its criminals to West Africa. Some were transported aboard ships going to pick up their other human cargo: African slaves. When they arrived, soldiers and even convicts were forced to work in the slave-trading forts guarding the human merchandise. In a few short years the scheme brought death, wholesale desertions, mutiny, piracy and even murder. Some of the worst crimes were not committed by the exported criminals but by those sent out to guard them. Acts of wanton desperation added to rash transgressions as those whom society had already thrown out realised that they had nothing left to lose. As jails and prison hulks overflowed, and as every other alternative settlement proved unsuitable, the British Government gambled and decided to send its criminals as far away as possible, to the great south land sighted years before by Captain James Cook. Out of the embers of the African debacle came the modern nation of Australia. The extraordinary tale is now being told for the first time - how a small band of good-for-nothing members of the British Empire spanned the world from America, to Africa, and on to Australia, profoundly if unwittingly changing history.
Martyn Lyons Books: a living history
This lavishly illustrated volume explores one of the most versatile, useful and enduring technologies ever invented: the book. It charts the evolution and influence of books around the world, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer through the development of movable type and the emergence of the modern information revolution. A feast for traditional book-lovers, as well as an inspiration for those excited by new electronic technologies, this beautifully produced volume celebrates the enduring power and magic of books.
John R. Searle Making the Social World: the structure of human civilization
Philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? He explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-pound note, I got married in London, etc. And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits - mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of mere physical facts? In answering this question, the author avoids postulating different realms of being, mental and physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality, and Searle shows how the human reality fits into it. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. He explains how language creates and maintains the structures of human social institutions which serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible, yet provide the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how our social world is a world created and maintained by language.
Stewart Lansley The Cost of Inequality: three decades of the super-rich and the economy
Why does the modern economy consist of two tracks: a fast one for the super-rich and a stalled one for everyone else? What decisions led to this split three decades ago, and were their goals realised? What is the cost of a two-track economy? Have the real solutions to the 2008-9 crisis been missed? This book, based on years of research, seeks to answer these questions and provide the hard evidence: - for the economic case for dismantling the economy for the super-rich; - that deregulation failed to deliver innovation and economic revival; - for new policies that avoid the looming permanent recession. At a time when top investors such as Warren Buffett call for an end to the coddling of billionaires, this urgent, provocative book provides a radical new way of thinking for ending the economic deadlock.
Edward Bawden Edward Bawden’s London
This beautiful book, with almost 200 striking images, shows London as represented by the painter, designer and graphic artist Edward Bawden (1903-1989) in prints, posters, drawings, paintings, murals and advertising material produced during his long career. The wide range of illustrations includes early work executed whilst a student in the early 1920s; the Morley College murals carried out in partnership with Eric Ravilious; advertising work for London Transport, Fortnum & Mason, Twinings Teas, Shell, Westminster Bank; the mural for the Lion & Unicorn Pavilion at the1951 Festival of Britain; and a varied selection of his finest series of linocuts - including London Monuments and London Markets.
Peter Sarris Empires of Faith: the fall of Rome to the rise of Islam, 500 – 700
Drawing on the latest historical and archaeological research, Dr Sarris provides a panoramic account of the history of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East in this period. The formation of a new social and economic order in western Europe in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, and the ascendancy across the West of a new culture of military lordship, are placed in the context of on-going connections and influence radiating outwards from the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from the great imperial capital of Constantinople. The East Roman Emperor Justinian's attempts to revive imperial fortunes, restore the empire's power in the West, and face down Constantinople's great rival, the Sasanian Empire of Persia, are charted, as too are the ways in which the escalating warfare between Rome and Persia paved the way for the development of new concepts of 'holy war', the emergence of Islam, and the Arab conquests of the Near East. Processes of religious and cultural change are explained through examination of social, economic, and military upheavals, and the formation of early medieval European society is placed in a broader context of changes that swept across the world of Eurasia from Manchuria to the Rhine. Warfare and plague, holy men and kings, emperors, shahs, caliphs, and peasants all play their part in this compelling narrative.
Anna Von der Golz Hindenburg: power, myth and the rise of the Nazis
Hindenburg explores how a previously little-known general, whose career to normal retirement age had provided no real foretaste of his heroic status, became a national icon and living myth in Germany after the First World War, capturing the imagination of millions. In a period characterized by rupture and fragmentation, the legend surrounding Paul von Hindenburg brought together a broad coalition of Germans and became one of the most potent forces in Weimar politics. Charting the origins of the myth, from Hindenburg's decisive victory at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914 to his death in Nazi Germany and beyond, the author explains why the presence of Hindenburg's name on the ballot mesmerized an overwhelming number of voters in the presidential elections of 1925. His myth, an ever-evolving phenomenon, increasingly transcended the dividing lines of interwar politics, and helped him secure re-election by left-wing and moderate voters. Hindenburg even managed to defeat Hitler in 1932, making him the Nazi leader's final arbiter; it was he who made the fateful decision to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in 1933.
Marjorie E. Wieseman Vermeer’s Women: secrets and silence
Centring on the extraordinary "Lacemaker" from the Louvre, this beautiful book investigates the subtle and enigmatic paintings by Johannes Vermeer that celebrate the intimacy of the Dutch household. Moments frozen in paint that reveal young women sewing, reading or playing musical instruments, captured in Vermeer's uniquely luminous style, recreate a silent and often mysterious domestic realm, closed to the outside world, and inhabited almost exclusively by women and children. Three internationally recognized experts in the field explain why women engaged in mundane domestic tasks, or in pleasurable pastimes such as music making, writing letters, or adjusting their toilette, comprise some of the most popular Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. Among the most intriguing of these compositions are those that consciously avoid any engagement with the viewer. Rather than acknowledging our presence, figures avert their gazes or turn their backs upon us; they stare moodily into space or focus intently on the activities at hand. In viewing these paintings, we have the impression that we have stumbled upon a private world kept hidden from casual regard. The ravishingly beautiful paintings of Vermeer are perhaps the most poetic evocations of this secretive world, but other Dutch painters sought to imbue simple domestic scenes with an air of silent mystery, and the book features also works by some of the most important masters of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting among them Gerard ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter de Hooch, Nicolaes Maes, and Jan Steen.
Andrew Wilson Belarus: the last European dictatorship
This book is the first in English to explore both Belarus' complicated road to nationhood and to examine in detail its politics and economics since 1991, the nation's first year of true independence. Andrew Wilson focuses particular attention on Aliaksandr Lukashenka's surprising longevity as president, despite human rights abuses and involvement in yet another rigged election in December 2010. Wilson looks at Belarusian history as a series of false starts in the medieval and pre-modern periods, and at the many rival versions of Belarusian identity, culminating with the Soviet Belarusian project and the establishment of Belarus' current borders during World War II. He also addresses Belarus' on-off relationship with Russia, its simultaneous attempts to play a game of balance in the no-man's-land between Russia and the West, and how, paradoxically, Belarus is at last becoming a true nation under the rule of Europe's "last dictator".
Christopher Lane The Age of Doubt: tracing the roots of our religious uncertainty
The Victorian era was the first great 'Age of Doubt' and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In "The Age of Doubt", scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly. In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Bronte to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity. The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians' crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the 'new atheism' that has evolved today. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty. By contrast, a look at today's extremes - from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the dogmatic rigidity of Richard Dawkins' atheism - highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt.
Deborah M. Valenze Milk: a local and global history
How did an animal product that spoils easily, carries disease, and causes digestive trouble for many of its consumers become a near-universal symbol of modern nutrition? In the first cultural history of milk, historian Deborah Valenze traces the rituals and beliefs that have governed its production and consumption since the earliest societies. Covering the span of human history, Milk reveals how developments in technology, public health, and nutritional science made this once-rare elixir a modern-day staple. The book looks at the religious meanings of milk, and its association with pastoral life, which made it an object of mystery and suspicion during medieval and Renaissance times. As early modern societies refined agricultural techniques, cow's milk became crucial to improving diets and economies, launching milk production and consumption into a more modern phase. When business and science transformed the product in the 19th and 20th centuries, commercial milk became not only a widely available commodity but also a source of uncertainty when used in place of human breast milk for infant feeding. The author also examines the dairy culture of the developing world, looking at the example of India, currently the world's largest milk producer. Ultimately, milk's surprising history teaches us how to think about our relationship to food in the present, as well as in the past. It reveals that although milk may be a product of nature, it has also always been an artefact of culture.
Alan Borg Vauxhall Gardens: a history
From their early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria's reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dream-world filled with visual arts and music, and finally into a commercial site of mass entertainment. A social magnet for Londoners and tourists, they also became a dynamic centre for the arts in Britain. By the 18th century, when the Gardens were owned and managed by Jonathan Tyers - friend of Handel, Hogarth and Fielding - they were crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society. In the first book on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the teeming life, the spectacular art and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. In the 19th century the Gardens remained a popular attraction, but faced increasing c ht up to their closure in 1859. This historical exposition of the entire history of the foremost pleasure garden of 18th and 19th century London makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class and ideology, and puts into a very particular context an unusual combination of subjects. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.
John Minnis Britain’s Lost Railways: the twentieth-century destruction of our finest railway architecture
A striking photographic record of how the Beeching cuts and modernisation saw our grand terminal stations, soaring viaducts and cavernous locomotive works wiped from the landscape The current restoration of St Pancras Station and its Midland Hotel is a glorious exception to a melancholy rule – that the finer our railway architecture, the more likely it was to be demolished in the name of progress. Who would know that the ugly, low concrete bunker of Birmingham New Street station replaced a handsome glass-roofed train shed, or that until the 1960s the stupendously high Belah viaduct swept across a remote Cumbrian valley – or that the outlet mall in Swindon selling cheap designer clothing used to be he great GWR locomotive works? – or that on little bucolic branch lines in the West Country or Essex an old bus body was the waiting-room? In over 200 fascinating and often rare images John Minnis documents the remarkably rich architectural heritage of our railways, from quaint country halts to distinguished railway hotels – all of which exists now only in photographs.
Martin Gayford A Bigger Message: conversation with David Hockney
In this remarkable book, a record of a decade of private conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, David Hockney reveals via reflection, anecdote, passion and humour the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. These conversations are punctuated by wise and witty observations from both parties on numerous other artists, and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney spent so many years, and Yorkshire, the birthplace to which he has returned. Some of the diverse people he has encountered along the way from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder make entertaining entries into the dialogue.
Nancy Goldstone The Maid and the Queen: the secret history of Joan of Arc and Yolande of Aragon
How did an illiterate 17-year-old peasant girl manage to become one of histories most salient females? It is almost 600 years since Joan of Arc heard the voices of angels that would change her life forever: in a breathtaking story her quest saved France from English domination and restored France's hereditary monarchy. Just thirteen when her life changed forever, Joan's holy guidance led her on an arduous eleven-day journey into the unknown, restoring the Dauphin to his original birthright in an official coronation where he was able to resume his rule as France's legitimate king. Joan summoned and led an impressive army of French loyalists against the English, making the lifting of the siege of Orleans an exhilarating defeat of the English that would liberate the spirit of France. The following year witnessed Joan's capture by the enemy. After a series of heroic endeavours to escape cruel adversaries, she was subjected to trial by inquisition and then in Rouen, the heart of France, her courageous journey came to a heartbreaking conclusion. This is the story at the core of centuries of myth-making. But what if we no longer accept this tale at face value? What if we question whether the Heavens and their angels were truly Joan's only source of strength and power? What if we look for a different narrative? This biography unearths the secular and verifiable basis for Joan's heroic exploits: Yolande of Aragon, a forgotten mentor who is known to have financed Joan’s army. This is a story of not one life, but two; two lives that together were intertwined in the restoration of France's greatness.