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Find out moreLooking to find out something more about the world we live in, instead of gallivanting off into the realm of fiction? Have a look at our hand-picked non-fiction choices.
It does not follow, over time, that as a society gets wealthier and more secure, it’s people become happier. Do you find the goal posts are always moving; that no matter your degree of personal or professional achievement, you never quite reach satisfaction? Contentment, at least full contentment, is a myth? And is the pursuit of personal happiness in fact self indulgent and selfish? If we do an unselfish act for another in order that it provides us with a good feeling, is that not, in fact, a selfish act? The Happiness Problem is a book written to invite us to stand back and ask a question. What is happiness, and what is it we seek to achieve through its pursuit? Wren-Lewis's book is thought provoking, disturbing and at the same time reassuring. A good read for anyone wanting to re-assess their goals in life, to reconnect with it, and to explore the notion that all that glitters is not gold.
For entrepreneurs ready to reach the next level of success, small business owner turned multibillionaire Tilman Fertitta shares the commonsense principles that have rocketed his worldwide hospitality empire to the top. For aspiring entrepreneurs or people in business, this audiobook will help you take your company to the next level. When you finish listening, you’ll know what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong to operate your business, and if you’re just getting started, it will help set you up for success. Tilman Fertitta, also known as the Billion Dollar Buyer, started his hospitality empire thirty years ago with just one restaurant. So he knows the challenges that business owners face, as well as the common pitfalls that cause them to go under. Over the years he’s stayed true to the principles that helped him scale his business to what is believed to be the largest single-shareholder company in America, with over $4 billion in revenue, including hundreds of restaurants (Landry’s Seafood, Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, Morton’s Steakhouse, Mastro’s, The Chart House, Rainforest Café, and over forty more restaurant concepts) and five Golden Nugget Casinos. He’s also sole owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets. In Shut Up and Listen!, he shares the key insights that made it all possible. When entrepreneurs appear on Billion Dollar Buyer, the biggest obstacles they often face are ones they don’t suspect: not knowing your numbers, not knowing your strengths and weaknesses, or not being willing to go that extra mile with your customers. Fertitta has seen it all. He knows that what you aren’t paying attention to can either sink your business or become the very things that launch you to the top. As Fertitta says: “You might think you know what you’re doing, but I’m going to show you what you don’t know.” Fertitta shares straight-talk “Tilmanisms” around six key action items that any entrepreneur can adopt today: Be the Bull No Spare Customers Change, Change, Change Know Your Numbers Follow the 95/5 Rule Take No Out of Your Vocabulary A groundbreaking, no-holds-barred audiobook, Shut Up and Listen! offers practical, hard-earned wisdom from one of the most successful business owners in the world.
This really is the most gorgeously scrumptious book, showcasing some truly beautiful and awe-inspiring skies. 365 photographs and paintings, information, science, poetry and quotations all sit inside this rather lovely cover. The book is a great size, not too unwieldy, and after the introduction, which also gives some handy page numbers of some of the highlights, every single page is adorned with clouds. Did you know there was a Cloud Appreciation Society? I didn’t, but of course it makes complete sense! Gavin Pretor-Pinney started the society and says: “Having your head in the clouds, even for just a few moments each day, is good for your mind, good for you body and good for your soul. This book aims to show you why.” It certainly does show you why, you can open it at random, return again and again, and just soak up the images. The next time you head out, you can look up and know a little bit more about our beautiful skies. A Cloud A Day is a stunner, visually and mentally stimulating, it has been chosen as a LoveReading Star Book.
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Uninhabitable Earth written and read by David Wallace-Wells. It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.
How can wordless collections of sounds send shivers down our spines and tickle ancient parts of our brains we share with reptiles? How did a chemist's quest to create a drug to ease the pain of childbirth result in the creation of LSD? Why do goats partake in oral sex, and how can a horse (or even a table) make us weak in the knees? And how on earth could the revered 'father of anatomy' not know where the clitoris was? From tortoiseshell condoms to superstar athletes on hallucinogens, these burning questions are explored and dissected, mixed with insights from some of the world's bravest, cleverest and downright weirdest scientist experimenting on the edge - and themselves. It's a sharp shocker, an eye opener, asking the big questions about what it means to be human, about consciousness and happiness. It'll pull you in and gross out.
Starting life as part of the BBC World Service transmission, Afghan Woman’s Hour, women were encouraged to tell their stories, it became one of the most widely listened to programmes in the country. Zarghuna Kargar interweaves her own story around these biographical fragments, tragic stories of women broken and downtrodden by such a deeply traditional and conservative culture where women have value only as bearers of sons. The situation has worsened due to the wars adding widowhood and disablement to women’s woes. There are chinks of light among the stories, a loving relationship, a woman finding a way of supporting her family, another able to choose the man she loves but one is left angered and saddened at the treatment meted out to the Afghan women and deeply grateful to Zarghuna Kargar for revealing the plight of these women. Like for Like Reading: Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
Starting life as part of the BBC World Service transmission, Afghan Woman’s Hour, women were encouraged to tell their stories, it became one of the most widely listened to programmes in the country. Zarghuna Kargar interweaves her own story around these biographical fragments, tragic stories of women broken and downtrodden by such a deeply traditional and conservative culture where women have value only as bearers of sons. The situation has worsened due to the wars adding widowhood and disablement to women’s woes. There are chinks of light among the stories, a loving relationship, a woman finding a way of supporting her family, another able to choose the man she loves but one is left angered and saddened at the treatment meted out to the Afghan women and deeply grateful to Zarghuna Kargar for revealing the plight of these women. Like for Like Reading: Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
Yuval. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century - from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. War is obsolete. You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict. Famine is disappearing. You are at more risk of obesity than starvation. Death is just a technical problem. Equality is out - but immortality is in. What does our future hold?
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future. 'Here is a simple reason why Sapiens has risen explosively to the ranks of an international bestseller. It tackles the biggest questions of history and of the modern world, and it is written in unforgettably vivid language. You will love it!' - Jared Diamond
Winner of the Galaxy Food & Drink Book of the Year 2010. With his fabulous restaurants and bestselling Ottolenghi Cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi has established himself as one of the most exciting new talents in the world of cookery and food writing. Yotam's food inspiration comes from his strong Mediterranean background and his unapologetic love of ingredients. Not a vegetarian himself, his approach to vegetable dishes is wholly original and innovative, based on strong flavours and stunning, fresh combinations. With sections devoted to cooking greens, aubergines, brassicas, rice and cereals, pasta and couscous, pulses, roots, squashes, onions, fruit, mushrooms and tomatoes, the breadth of colours, tastes and textures is extraordinary.
Europe is currently dealing with an unprecedented flow of human beings escaping conflict, hunger and political injustice. In Asia there is another flow of refugees undertaking an even deadlier journey from North Korea via China and Mongolia to reach the South - and freedom. It's an unsparing account of her North Korean life, escape with her mother across the river to China only to be faced with assault and rape with a price on their head as valuable merchandise in a country with a shortage of marriagable women. This book is Yeonmi Parks's own story but it also shows us the personal suffering that refugees face and, especially for North Koreans, the education needed to cope with life on the other side of the divide. One of the many dreadful images the book left me is beleagured North Korean medics and teachers bribing their patients in order that they might eat, images far indeed from the golden dawn of the North Korean wonderland. Like for Like ReadingNothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, Barbara DemickHuman Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, Caroline Moorehead
Europe is currently dealing with an unprecedented flow of human beings escaping conflict, hunger and political injustice. In Asia there is another flow of refugees undertaking an even deadlier journey from North Korea via China and Mongolia to reach the South - and freedom. It's an unsparing account of her North Korean life, escape with her mother across the river to China only to be faced with assault and rape with a price on their head as valuable merchandise in a country with a shortage of marriagable women. This book is Yeonmi Parks's own story but it also shows us the personal suffering that refugees face and, especially for North Koreans, the education needed to cope with life on the other side of the divide. One of the many dreadful images the book left me is beleagured North Korean medics and teachers bribing their patients in order that they might eat, images far indeed from the golden dawn of the North Korean wonderland. ~ Sue Baker Like for Like ReadingNothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, Barbara DemickHuman Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, Caroline Moorehead
England may be a small country on a small island, but its inhabitants have always had a boundless curiosity about the world beyond their shoreline. From the nation's modern origins in the Renaissance, travellers have eagerly roamed the globe and been enticed by the diversity and richness of other civilizations. And while this appetite for adventure has often been tainted by aggression or exploitation, the English have also carried within them a capacity to soak up new experiences and ideas and to weave them into every aspect of life back home, from language and literature to customs and culture. Here we trace this golden thread of otherness through five centuries of English history to reveal how it has shaped the buildings, flavoured the food, powered the economy, and created a truly diverse society. Today, when England is no longer synonymous with Britain and the English ask themselves who they are, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown paints a sumptuous and illuminating portrait of who they have been and brings a fresh, invigorating perspective on what 'Englishness' really means.
If you are looking for a way to eat organically the this is a good little guide for getting you out in the country and foraging for your own food. There is guide to help you identify various foods so you don’t poison yourself and handy tips on how to cook certain things. This book provides a fun way for all the family to learn about and enjoy the wild food that is out there for everyone to enjoy.
This is a powerful and darkly humorous graphic polemic by a leading British comics artist that investigates our increasingly dangerous relationship with cars. If you want to get away with murder, buy a car. Combining autobiography, statistics, case histories, advertising and reportage, Woodrow Phoenix draws a compelling picture of the warped psychology behind our need for speed.
Multi-millionaire Anthony Spencer is trapped in a coma and finds himself in a surreal world that reflects the skewed priorities of the life he's lived on earth where he meets a stranger who turns out to be Jesus and a grandmother who is the Holy Spirit. Pleading for a second chance, he is sent back to earth to redeem himself. There he must fight to put right the mess he's created, experiencing events through others' eyes before deciding how to use the miraculous gift he's been given. Before his illness he had set events in motion that he now needs to undo - but will he have the courage to make the right choice? THE SHACK is an international phenomenon, surpassing 1 million copies sold before being picked up by a mainstream publisher: its combination of radical spirituality with a heart-wrenching story made it a word-of-mouth hit, and CROSS ROADS has all the ingredients to repeat its impact.
Cartoonist, Robert Crumb said; “When I come up against the Real World, I just vacillate”. Well, he can happily vacillate here for a while. This section features a whole host of books covering subjects as diverse as Mankind’s place in the Universe (Human Universe by Brian Cox), the history of the human journey to work (Rush Hour by Iain Gateley) and the real business of reading books (Bookworms, Dogears and Squashy Big Armchairs by Heather Reyes). This is the ‘Human’ section in our book lovers’ journey.
If you love reading, then you’ll find something here to fascinate you. There are new and interest-piquing passages here from science, philosophy, politics, history, religion, and all of the things that occupy the lives of humans. And we mean ALL of them. The fight against Cancer, the fight for freedom, feminism, fatality, frailty and fame. It’s too big to list. Have a browse through the titles by using our monthly recommendations past and present. We guarantee you’ll be hooked in minutes!