A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world.
'The real feat of this book is that it takes us on a ride-across the centuries and around the globe, through startling history and vivid first-person reporting.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain
The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet across the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike - and nearly everyone does.
In Two Wheels Good, writer and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dreamlife, and a flashpoint in culture wars for more for than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen unfolds the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a 'green machine' in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change.
Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.
Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés, while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel - a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.
'Love for two-wheeled transport runs through every sentence in the book' - Economist
'The best thing I've ever read on a single subject' - Lauren Collins, author of When in French
'This is social history as it ought to be written: funny, precise, surprising, anti-dogmatic and unafraid of following a story' - Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon
How do we talk to our children about racism?
How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better?
These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research into the scientific literature, his experiences as a father and reflections on his own difficult experiences as a student ultimately changed his mind.
In How to Raise an Antiracist he shows that we must all participate in the effort to raise young people as antiracists.
A vastly entertaining and unique history of spying and showbiz, from the Elizabethan age to the Cold War and beyond.
Throughout history, there has been a lively crossover between show business and espionage. While one relies on publicity and the other on secrecy both require high levels of creative thinking, improvisation, disguise and role-play. This crossover has produced some of the most extraordinary undercover agents and, occasionally, disastrous and dangerous failures.
Stars and Spies is the first history of the interplay between the two worlds, written by two experts in their fields. We travel back to the golden age of theatre and intelligence in the reign of Elizabeth I and onwards into the Restoration. We visit Civil War America, Tsarist Russia and fin de siècle Paris where some writers, actors and entertainers become vital agents, while others are put under surveillance.
And as the story moves through the twentieth century and beyond, showbiz provides essential cover for agents to gather information while hiding in plain sight. At the same time, spying enters mainstream popular culture, in books, film and on TV.
Starring an astonishing cast including Christopher Marlowe, Aphra Behn, Voltaire, Mata Hari, Harpo Marx, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Noel Coward, Alexander Korda, John le Carré and many others, Stars and Spies is a highly enjoyable examination of the fascinating links between the intelligence services and show business.
Through the sweeping, extraordinary story of his own and his father's lives, Ai Weiwei - one of the world's most famous artists and activists - tells an epic tale of China over the last 100 years.
Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design Beijing's iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium. But his political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father, whose own creativity was stifled.
Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as 'Little Siberia', where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labour cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America. With candour and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist - and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.
At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.
A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward authoritarianism.
Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather than clichéd phrases when arguing a point
In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action.
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.
A good life involves more than just pleasure. Suffering is essential too.
It seems obvious that pleasure leads to happiness - and pain does the opposite. And yet we are irresistibly drawn to a host of experiences that truly hurt, from the exhilarating fear of horror movies or extreme sport, to the wrenching sadness of a song or novel, to the gruelling challenges of exercise, work, creativity and having a family.
In The Sweet Spot, pre-eminent psychologist Paul Bloom explores the pleasures of suffering and explains why the activities that provide most satisfaction are often the ones that involve greatest sacrifice. He argues that embracing this truth is the key to a life well lived.
Drawing on ground-breaking findings from psychology and brain science, he shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure, and how pain itself can serve a variety of valuable functions: to distract us from our anxieties or even express them, to help us transcend the self or project our identity, or as a gateway to the joys of mastery and flow.
As Bloom argues, deep down we all aspire to lives of meaning and significance, and that means some amount of struggle, anxiety and loss. After all, if the things that mean most to us were easy, what would be the point?
Endlessly fascinating and counter-intuitive, this deeply humane and enlightening enquiry is packed with unexpected insight into the human condition.
'I loved this book' DERREN BROWN
What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get round to what counts?
We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.
Four Thousand Weeks is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made, as individuals and as a society. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview.
Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.
Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.
'A much-needed reality check on our culture's crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life'
MARK MANSON, bestselling author of THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK
'The most important book ever written about time management'
ADAM GRANT, bestselling author of THINK AGAIN
'A celebration of all that is most human... You'll emerge from his writing fortified by wonder'
DERREN BROWN, bestselling author of HAPPY
We were doing it more and more, anyway. Mindfulness and meditation are all the rage. Wellness tourism, yoga breaks, meditation apps, and spiritual boot camps have been booming - entry-level to hardcore.
Retreat investigates this human obsession, mining neuroscience, psychology and history to reveal why we seek solitude, what we get out of it, and what is going on in our brains and bodies when we achieve it. What has it meant to the world's great thinkers, and what does it mean, in our age, as an activity we pay for?
Is isolation a means of engaging more fully with reality, or evading it? And what has retreat meant at a time when humanity has - to an unprecedented extent - been forced to withdraw? Nat Segnit has felt the pull of solitude and the fear of it, as well as the warmth of company. To answer these questions, he has been on retreats around the world and met yogic scholars, cognitive and social scientists, religious leaders, philosophers and artists.
Retreat is endlessly enlightening, sceptical and open-minded. It is about seeking happiness, fulfilment, a change of perspective, and relief from stress and anxiety. And it is surprisingly, joyously, full of human encounter. Ultimately, it is about the discovery that retreat is a mental state that can be achieved anywhere, in a monastery or shopping centre, a cave or a crowd.
In 1965 the German journalist Horst Krüger attended the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, where 22 former camp guards were put on trial for the systematic murder of over 1 million men, women and children. Twenty years after the end of the war, this was the first time that the German people were confronted with the horrific details of the Holocaust executed by 'ordinary men' still living in their midst.
The trial sent Krüger back to his childhood in the 1930s, in an attempt to understand 'how it really was, that incomprehensible time'. He had grown up in a Berlin suburb, among a community of decent, lower-middle-class homeowners. This was not the world of torch-lit processions and endless ranks of marching SA men. Here, people lived ordinary, non-political lives, believed in God and obeyed the law, but were gradually seduced and intoxicated by the promises of Nazism. He had been, Krüger realised, 'the typical child of innocuous Germans who were never Nazis, and without whom the Nazis would never have been able to do their work'.
This world of respectability, order and duty began to crumble when tragedy struck. Krüger's older sister decided to take her own life, leaving the parents struggling to come to terms with the inexplicable. The author's teenage rebellion, his desire to escape the stifling conformity of family life, made him join an anti-Nazi resistance group. He narrowly escaped imprisonment only to be sent to war as Hitler embarked on the conquest of Europe. Step by step, a family that had fallen under the spell of Nazism was being destroyed by it.
Written in accomplished prose of lingering beauty, The Broken House is a moving coming-of-age story that provides an unforgettable portrait of life under the Nazis. Yet the book's themes also chime with our own times - how the promise of an 'era of greatness' by a populist leader intoxicates an entire nation, how thin is the veneer of civilisation, and what makes one person a collaborator and another a resister.
In a single volume, the seminal writings of the world's leading philosopher, linguist and critic, and author of the bestselling Who Rules the World 'The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know' Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky's writings on politics and language have established him as one of the most original and wide-ranging political and social critics of our time, and as perhaps the leading dissident voice in the United States. The Essential Chomsky brings together selections from his most important writings, from his groundbreaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his bestselling works Hegemony or Survival and Failed States, concerning subjects ranging from critiques of corporate media and U.S. interventionism to intellectual freedom and the political economy of human rights. Featuring a collection of twenty-five pieces of writing spanning six decades, this is an unparalleled and comprehensive overview of Chomsky's thought.
We can't stop shopping but we must stop shopping - the consumer dilemma that defines our lives and our future. What would happen if we did?
We are using up the planet at almost double the rate it can regenerate. To support our economies, we're told we must shop now like we've never shopped before. And whilst we can do it more responsibly, the scale of our consumption remains the biggest factor in the ruination of the planet. Yet our reliance on stuff continues to grow.
But what would our world look like if we stopped? Would civilisation collapse? Would the planet's ecology be reborn? What would happen to the way we think, make products, use time, express our individuality? Would life be better - or worse?
Visiting places where economies have experienced temporary shut-downs, artisan producers, zero-consumption societies and bringing together a host of expert views, this is both a deeply reported thought-experiment, a history of our relationship with consumption, and a story about the future.
Our private choices are putting the world in peril. The Day the World Stops Shopping is an essential exploration of who we are and what we use, and a vision of a more sustainable world.
'The definitive, scrupulously researched biography of a life steeped in mystery' Observer
The definitive biography of one contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures - musical revolutionary, Nobel Prize-winner, chart-topping recording artist
In 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin - author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone) - to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa - as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office - so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers - Dylan himself included - have said is wrong; often as not, a case of, Print the Legend.
With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. That other story will be told in Volume 2, to be published in autumn 2022.
Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.
'Terrifying yet funny, surprising yet predictable, simple yet poignant' Chris Packham
A shocking but informative, eye-catching and witty book of maps that illustrate the perilous state of our planet.
The maps in this book are often shocking, sometimes amusing, and packed with essential information:
· Did you know that just 67 companies worldwide are responsible for 67 per cent of global greenhouse emissions?
· Or that keeping a horse has the same carbon footprint as a 23,500-kilometre road trip?
· Did you know how many countries use less energy than is consumed globally by downloading porn from the internet?
· Do you know how much of the earth's surface has been concreted over?
· Or how many trees would we have to plant to make our planet carbon-neutral?
Presenting a wealth of innovative scientific research and data in stunning, beautiful infographics, 99 Maps to Save the Planet provides us with instant snapshots of the destruction of our environment. At one glance, we can see the precarious state of our planet - but also realise how easy it would be to improve it
Enlightening, a bit frightening, but definitely inspiring, 99 Maps to Save the Planet doesn't provide practical tips on how to save our planet: it just presents the facts. And the facts speak for themselves. Once we know them, what excuse do we have for failing to act?
A virus is not human, but the reaction to it is a measure of humanity.
America has not measured up well. Tens of thousands are dead for no reason. America is supposed to be about freedom, yet illness and fear make its citizens less free. After all, freedom is meaningless if we are too ill to think about our right to happiness or too weak to pursue it. So, if a government is making its people unhealthy it is also making them unfree.
On December 29, 2019, Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. As he clung to life he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right, but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning. And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched understaffed and undersupplied hospitals buckling under waves of coronavirus patients. The federal American government made matters worse through wilful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering.
This passionate intervention outlines the lessons we must all learn, wherever we are, and finds glimmers of hope in dark times. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and truth, and planning for our children's future, can everyone be properly free.
Freedom belongs to individuals. But to be free we need our health, and for our health we need one another.
Imagine a world with no banks. No stock market. No tech giants. No billionaires.
Imagine if Occupy and Extinction Rebellion actually won.
In Another Now world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis shows us what such a world would look like. Far from being a fantasy, he describes how it could have come about - and might yet. But would we really want it?
Varoufakis's boundary-breaking new book confounds expectations of what the good society would look like and reveals the uncomfortable truth about our desire for a better world...
'One of my few heroes' - Slavoj Zizek
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