‘You would not think it to look at you, but your voice, when you use it: akin to a god’s. You must be careful what you do with it.’ Exiled Jacob Kitara takes in injured compatriots and nurses them in a boarded-up building. Social unrest has emptied the streets of London, movement into and out of the country has been suspended, and those who remain are in hiding. When a young man makes his appearance, insisting that he is Jacob’s son – a man presumed dead, torn from Jacob’s life by war and guilt over the fate of the boy’s mother – Jacob is driven to anger. But can this stranger offer Jacob a chance to reach back to a different continent, to the foot of Africa from where he has been banished, to atone for the past? The Weight of Skin is a poignant tale of personal and political responsibility, and of the intricate narratives of family and nationality that bind us.
He is a man who lied, who told a story, a wild, fanciful story, about the death of a child, a hard and unyielding story. It is that, he finds, that he hates most. The story that was told.' In 1983 Paul Hyde, aged ten, dies falling from a ledge in the mountains of the Karoo. His older brother Peter, who falls at the same time, survives but loses all memory of the event. The youngest brother, John, is the only witness. Many years later, John is living in London. He and his wife Rachel, who knows nothing of the tragedy of his past and nothing of his family, make plans to have children of their own. Their life together is disrupted when Peter arrives in London and claims his memory is returning. Pulled back in spite of himself, John returns to South Africa and the home he grew up in. His return makes him question his recollection of the tragedy. Can we ever be certain of events that happened that far in the past, certain we have not completely changed their meaning and our part in them?
In a world all but drowned, a man called Bran has been living on an island for ten years. He was sent there in exile by those whose leader he was, and he tallies on the wall of his cave the days as they pass. Until the day when something happens that kindles in Bran such memories and longing that he persuades himself to return, even if it means execution. His reception is so unexpected, so mystifying that he casts about unsure of what is real and what imaginary. Only the friendship of a child consoles him as he retraces the terrible deeds for which he is answerable, and as he tries to reach back, over his biggest betrayal, to the one he loved. Wall of Days is a moving parable about guilt, loss and remembering.
This book won the New Zealand 2016 National Ashton-Wylie Literary Award. It is considered a break though science book that provides "solid" science (i.e. experimental work carried out by mainly the world's most outstanding quantum physicists and cosmologists to validate the areas covered by the title.
A groundbreaking new theory of the real rules of politics: leaders do whatever keeps them in power, regardless of the national interest. As featured on the viral video Rules for Rulers, which has been viewed over 3 million times. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith's canonical book on political science turned conventional wisdom on its head. They started from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don't care about the "national interest"-or even their subjects-unless they have to. This clever and accessible book shows that democracy is essentially just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.
The authors of this ambitious book address a fundamental political question: why are leaders who produce peace and prosperity turned out of office while those who preside over corruption, war, and misery endure? Considering this political puzzle, they also answer the related economic question of why some countries experience successful economic development and others do not. The authors construct a provocative theory on the selection of leaders and present specific formal models from which their central claims can be deduced. They show how political leaders allocate resources and how institutions for selecting leaders create incentives for leaders to pursue good and bad public policy. They also extend the model to explain the consequences of war on political survival. Throughout the book, they provide illustrations from history, ranging from ancient Sparta to Vichy France, and test the model against statistics gathered from cross-national data. The authors explain the political intuition underlying their theory in nontechnical language, reserving formal proofs for chapter appendixes. They conclude by presenting policy prescriptions based on what has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically.
A group of scruffy lunatics and their under powered but valiant vehicles navigate ⅓ of the globe, attempting a journey conceived by people who have heard of the words ‘stupid’ and ‘dangerous’ but haven’t really understood their meaning. Setting off from various points across the globe, Teams: Away From Keyboard, Don’t Smell My Shoes, Two Fake Yanks and a Scot, Rally McRally Face, Mini Adventurers and Cunning Stunts unite to create Convoi Exceptionnel Could a Mongol Rally Convoy be better named? The convoy was largely formed in Calais UK where the aforementioned lunatics easily spotted each other via their glorious car decorations which included smelly old shoes and garden gnomes among others. Little did the people in this blossoming group know of the horrors and wonders, the friendships and hardships that lay before them as they attempted to drive through 19 countries, over 10,000 miles to Mongolia. The journey was long and perilous but they were Exceptionnel.
It's striking how many of the presidents Americans venerate--Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, to name a few--oversaw some of the republic's bloodiest years. Perhaps it's because they looked out for important political causes. Or maybe they just looked out for themselves. This ... book puts some of America's greatest leaders under the microscope, [positing that] their calls for war, usually remembered as brave and noble, were in fact selfish and convenient"--
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) published an extraordinary number of works during his lifetime, but he left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Volume 2 of this 11-volume edition of Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks includes materials from 1836 to 1846, a period that takes Kierkegaard from his student days to the peak of his activity as an author. In addition to containing hundreds of Kierkegaard's reflections on philosophy, theology, literature, and his own personal life, these journals are the seedbed of many ideas and passages that later surfaced in Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life's Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and a number of Edifying Discourses.
The whole of the royal family has agreed to be photographed for this new updated, lengthened and revised edition. The book spectacularly combines photographs of holders of ancient offices, wearing the appropriate dress, with a fascinating text on the history of Britain.
Britain's rich history comes alive in this fascinating compilation of the oldest everything throughout the British Isles-from people to commerce, society to nature, and transportation to the military. Visit London's Ram Brewery, still standing where it was founded in 1581. Step aboard the Empire's oldest commissioned warship HMS Victory, a veteran of Trafalgar. And meet the Baron of Bachuil, holder of the oldest title in British aristocracy. These and hundreds more "oldests" are detailed in this testament to Britain's extraordinary legacy.
For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term "diaries." By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects--philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure--but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially (or almost entirely) completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Volume 5 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard's important "NB" journals (Journals NB6 through NB10), covering the months from summer 1848 through early May 1849. This was a turbulent period both in the history of Denmark--which was experiencing the immediate aftermath of revolution and the fall of absolutism, a continuing war with the German states, and the replacement of the State Church with the Danish People's Church--and for Kierkegaard personally. The journals in the present volume include Kierkegaard's reactions to the political upheaval, a retrospective account of his audiences with King Christian VIII, deliberations about publishing an autobiographical explanation of his writings, and an increasingly harsh critique of the Danish Church. These journals also reflect Kierkegaard's deep concern over his collision with the satirical journal Corsair, an experience that helped radicalize his view of "essential Christianity" and caused him to ponder the meaning of martyrdom. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced.
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