This is the beginning of an extraordinary novel. It is told over the space of a few months, and in these few months one man's whole life - his failures, his successes, his longing for peace and fulfillment, his loves and his tragedies - are recounted. These memories include his film Suzi Crispin, Night Nurse, and - the darkest moment - the death of his son, which has haunted him. He inherits a small amount of money and buys a rundown farm, where he dreams of creating an Arcadia. On the farm is a captive baboon, Piet, who becomes startlingly involved in his new life. He also has a love affair with a local woman, and becomes hauntingly involved with an African family of squatters. All the while the narrator contemplates his own life back in England and so the novel is also a sharp commentary on what Englishness means. This is a novel about the human enterprise. It is surprising, tender, funny and utterly original.

    A must-read as we head into the 2019 federal election.Canadians are becoming increasingly skeptical about their chameleon prime minister. When he entered politics, Justin Trudeau came across as a person with no fixed principles. Now, he presents himself as a conviction politician. What motivated his metamorphosis--belief or opportunism?Either way, in 2019's election he will be judged on results--results that have so far been disappointing for many, even those in his own party. From the ballooning deficit to the Trans Mountain purchase to the fallout of his disastrous trip to India to the unpopular implementation of a carbon tax, Justin Trudeau has presided over his share of controversy. Most damaging, his egregious missteps during the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the subsequent resignation of two top ministers, his principal secretary, and the clerk of the Privy Council have raised serious questions about Trudeau's integrity.As a political columnist for the National Post since 2003and Ottawa bureau chief for Postmedia for the past three years, John Ivison has watched Trudeau evolve as a politician and leader, a fascinating transition that has not been fully captured by any writer. Trudeau traces the complexities of the man himself, now barely visible beneath the talking points, virtue signalling, and polished trappings of office. Ivison concludes that while Trudeau led a moribund Liberal Party to victory in the 2015 election, the shine of his leadership has been worn off by a series of self-inflicted wounds, broken promises, and rookie mistakes.One of the central contentions of Trudeau is already apparent: the prime minister's greatest strengths are also his greatest weaknesses; the famous name, high-handedness, and impulsiveness are as liable to hurl him from office as they were to get him there in the first place.With unprecedented access and insight, John Ivison takes us inside one of the most contentious first terms of any prime minister in our history.

    In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.

    Vishvapani Blomfield places Gautama in a credible historical setting without assuming that he was really just an ordinary person, albeit an exceptionally wise and kindly one.

    This comprehensive survey is the first to provide a view of African history in the wider context of World History. The text illustrates how Africans have influenced regions beyond the continent's borders, how they have been influenced from outside, and how internal African developments can be compared and contrasted to those elsewhere in the world. Identifying and presenting key debates within the field of African history, this volume encourages students to address the many oversimplified myths regarding the continent and its people. This remains the most accessible, digestible, and relevant text on the subject. Compact and concise, it generates creative knowledge for students to appreciate the nature and essence of the formation of our global community. -- Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin

    Yet as historian David B. Woolner reveals, the end of FDR’s presidency might very well surpass it in drama and consequence.Drawing on new evidence, Woolner shows how FDR used every ounce of his diminishing energy to pursue the things that mattered most to him: the establishment of the United Nations, the reinvigoration of the New Deal, the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and some quiet moments with his closest companions. We see a president shorn of the usual distractions of office, a man whose sense of duty and personal responsibility for the fate of the American people, and the world, bore heavily upon him. From his final Christmas at Hyde Park to his death on April 12, 1945, FDR strove to finish the work he had started twelve long years before.

     It’s one of the great, unexpected turnaround stories in modern history: Just a decade ago, Colombia was regarded as a “failed state,” besieged by megalomaniacal drug kingpins, ruthless terrorist groups, and abominable poverty. But since 2002, it has been dramatically transformed into a far more peaceful, stable modern democracy with a promising future. Now, the man who led the transformation, former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez, offers the untold story of how, at enormous personal risk, he refused to accept Colombia’s perilous status quo.Extremely captivating, No Lost Causes reveals how President Uribe severely weakened the neo-terrorist group, the FARC, which held Colombia captive and caused the brutal murder of his father. It relates the gripping account of how President Uribe staged the daring (and bloodless) jungle rescue of Ingrid Betancourt in 2008, and eventually restored the rule of law across the country. It also explores practical lessons of hands-on management—relevant to both political and business leaders—and provides a thrilling behind-the-scenes look at newsmaking U.S. foreign affairs and never before discussed details and dealings with various world leaders.Unlike any other presidential memoir, No Lost Causes is not only a compelling story of leadership, but an epic, heart-racing account of how bravery and hope gave a failing nation a brighter future.

    These short books are perfect for adults who are discovering reading for pleasure for the first time. Welcome to the life of a junior doctor. You work 97 hours a week. You make life and death decisions. You are often covered in blood (or worse) from head to toe. And the hospital parking meter earns more money than you do.Adam Kay's diary was written in secret after long days, sleepless nights and missed weekends. It is funny, moving and sometimes shocking. This is everything you wanted to know – and more than a few things you didn't – about life on and off the hospital ward. Specially rewritten for ease of reading by Francesca Main.

    Traveling to Baghdad and then to Mosul with the 1st Cavalry Division, McDonell offers an unforgettable look at the way things stand now—at the translators stranded in a country that doesn’t look kindly on their cooperation, at the infantrymen struggling to make something out of the soft counterinsurgency missions they call chai-ops, at the commanders inured to American journalists and Iraqi officials both—and what the so-called “end of major combat operations” means for where they’re going.

    He was also an extremely able politician who won the esteem of many statesmen-including Winston Churchill and influential persons in the United States. This biography describes Mussolini's childhood; his education (including his suspension from school for attacking other boys with knives); his World War I experiences and severe wounding; his involvement in, and eventual expulsion from the revolutionary Italian Socialist Party; his numerous love affairs, his early career as a journalist and his rise to power and brutal rule.

    This is the account of 23 men torturing and killing by experiment in the name of scientific research and patriotism. The book includes trial transcripts that have not been easily available to the general public and previously unpublished photographs used as evidence in the trial. The author describes the experience of being in bombed-out, dangerous, post-war Nuremberg, where she lived for two years while working on the trial. Once a Nazi sympathiser tossed bombs into the dining room of the hotel where she lived moments before she arrived for dinner. She takes us into the courtroom to hear the dramatic testimony and see the reactions of the defendants to the proceedings. The doctors tell of experiments involving depriving concentration camp inmates of oxygen; freezing them; injecting them with malaria, typhus, and jaundice; amputating healthy limbs; forcing them to drink seawater for weeks at a time; and other horrors.

    This book tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved many.

    These two factors combine to make The Gathering Storm a unique work. The first volume of Churchill's memoirs, this selection is broken into two parts. The first, From War to War, consists of Churchill's critical observations on the settlement of World War I and its place in the causes of the Second World War. The second volume contains letters and memoranda from the British government--of which Churchill was part--as the country plunged unprepared into war. This stands as the best of history: written as it was made, by the man who made it.

    In a matter of months, a city designed to produce this dangerous material arose from the desert of eastern Washington State. Plutonium powered the bomb that dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 (a target selected in almost arbitrary fashion). And the work of Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, and hundreds of thousands of others—the physicists, engineers, laborers, and support staff of the Hanford Nuclear Facility—would remain the basis of the entire US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War and into the present.With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and human stories, Steve Olson offers this dramatic story of human achievement—and hubris—to a new generation.

    On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government and also of Britain--indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson's fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government's defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe's tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister's resignation.Some historians dismiss the "phony war" that preceded this turning point--from September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, to May 1940, when Winston Churchill became prime minister--as a time of waiting and inaction, but Olson makes no such mistake, and describes in dramatic detail the public unrest that spread through Britain then, as people realized how poorly prepared the nation was to confront Hitler, how their basic civil liberties were being jeopardized, and also that there were intrepid politicians willing to risk political suicide to spearhead the opposition to Chamberlain--Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Leo Amery, Ronald Cartland, and Lord Robert Cranborne among them. The political and personal dramas that played out in Parliament and in the nation as Britain faced the threat of fascism virtually on its own are extraordinary--and, in Olson's hands, downright inspiring.