RSA Library Update - March 2008

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of March 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Michael Chanan
The Politics of Documentary
BFI, 2008, 070.18 CHA
Michael Chanan traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumière films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence of documentary with high profile films such as those by Michael Moore. Drawing on examples of documentary cinema in Japan, Iran and Latin America as well as Europe and the USA, Chanan argues that documentary provides a crucial public space in which ideas are debated, opinion is formed and those in authority are held to account.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Mark Vernon
What Not to Say: Finding the Right Words at Difficult Moments
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 100 VER
For those who are a little tired of feel-good self-help, or a little wary of too much psycho-babble, it offers an alternative based on the reality of cool analysis and genuine insight. What Not to Say is witty and thought-provoking, and whilst never moralising, does have a serious aim. First, to enable readers to speak more truthfully in difficult situations. Second, to allow readers to talk about personal problems in a wider perspective that can often ease the pain. Third, to gain greater clarity when discussing what to do in the future: to ask the question, How to live? In short, it is an aid in the search for the right and wise thing to say.

Jerome Kagan
What is Emotion? History, Measures and Meanings
Yale University Press, 2007, 152.4 KAG
In this sophisticated overview of human emotions, a widely respected psychologist Jerome Kagan addresses the ambiguities and embraces the controversies that surround this intriguing subject. He examines what exactly we do know about emotions, which popular assumptions about emotions are incorrect, and how scientific study must proceed if we are to uncover the answers to persistent and evasive questions about emotions.

G. E. R. Lloyd
Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
Clarendon, 2007, 153 LLO
Sir Geoffrey Lloyd presents a cross-disciplinary study of the problems posed by the unity and diversity of the human mind. On the one hand, as humans we all share broadly the same anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and certain psychological capabilities - the capacity to learn a language, for instance. On the other, different individuals and groups have very different talents, tastes, and beliefs, for instance about how they see themselves, other humans and the world around them. These issues are highly charged, for any denial of psychic unity savours of racism, while many assertions of psychic diversity raise the spectres of arbitrary relativism, the incommensurability of beliefs systems and their mutual unintelligibility.

Albert Bandura
Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control
W.H. Freeman, 1997, 155.2 BAN
This volume is the result of over 20 years of psychological research by the author. It argues that those with high self-efficacy expectancies (the belief that one can achieve what one sets out to achieve) are healthier, more effective, and generally more successful than those with low self-efficacy expectancies. After a discussion of what self-efficacy is and where it comes from, the text discusses how belief in one's abilities affects developmental, mental functioning, and health; as well as its applications to the areas of psychopathology, athletics, business, and international issues.

Slavoj Žižek
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
Profile, 2008, 179.7 ŽIŽ
The premise of Slavoj Žižek’s new theory is that the subjective violence we see - violence with a clear identifiable agent - is only the tip of an iceberg made up of 'systemic' violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. With the help of Marx, Engels, Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Brecht and many more, Žižek examines the hidden causes of violence, delving into the supposed 'divine violence' which propels suicide bombers and the unseen 'systemic' violence which lies behind outbursts, from Parisian suburbia to New Orleans. For Žižek, the controversial truth is that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing you can do. He calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today's democracies - using an unconventional plethora of references: Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud and more.

200s – Religion

Vali Nasr
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future
W. W. Norton, 2007, 297.8 NAS
In this smart, clear and timely book Vali Nasr, one of America's leading commentators on the Middle East, dissects the political and theological antagonisms within Islam. His concise and coherent analysis provides an objective understanding of the 1,400-year struggle between Shias and Sunnis, and sheds light on its modern-day consequences.

300s – Social Sciences

Dan Gardner
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
Virgin, 2008, 302.12 GAR
Every day, we suffer a barrage of information about the threat of terrorism, war and apocalypse. But while we are preoccupied by our fears, the real risk of these obscure annihilating events taking place is about as likely as winning the lottery. In this ground-breaking new book, Dan Gardner explains our 'risk perception' through our brain’s two simultaneous responses to risk - the ancient 'fight or flight' instinct and the rational considered response. How do we make choices amidst the bombardment of information we experience every day? And to what extent is that information manipulated to provoke a particular reaction from the public? To discover the answers, Dan Gardner speaks to economists, politicians, psychologists and media commentators, with entertaining and often surprising results.

Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisation without Organisations
Allen Lane, 2008, 303.4833 SHI
Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this. In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society. What does it mean that someone with a laptop can spark a movement that changes the fortunes of a billion-dollar-industry or help topple a government? This profound and larger social impact is only now being explored. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, one of the new culture's wisest observers, give us his lucid and penetrating analysis on what the impact of this social revolution will be - for better or worse - on what we do, and who we are.

Gene Smith
Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web
New Riders, 2008, 303.4833 SMI
Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users’ desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence.

Jenna Bailey
Can any Mother Help Me?
Faber & Faber, 2008, 305.409410904 BAI
In 1935, a young woman wrote a letter to Nursery World magazine, expressing her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Women from all over the country experiencing similar frustrations wrote back. To create an outlet for their abundant ideas and opinions they started a private magazine, The Cooperative Correspondence Club. The deep friendships formed through its pages ensured the magazine continued until 1990, fifty-five years after the first issue was put together.

Charles Leadbeater
We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity
Profile, 2008, 306 LEA
Society is based not on mass consumption now but on mass, innovative participation - as is clear in phenomena from Wikipedia, Youtube and Craigslist to new forms of scientific research and political campaigning. This new mode of 'We-think' is reshaping the way we work, play and communicate. We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves - not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations.

Damian Thompson
Counterknowledge
Atlantic, 2008, 306 THO
We are being swamped by dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial, creationism to alternative medicine, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world. For Damian Thompson, these unproven theories and spurious claims are forms of 'counterknowledge', and, helped by the internet, they are creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. 'The sleep of reason brings forth monsters', warns the title of Francisco Goya's famous etching of 1799. As Damian Thompson demonstrates, unless the defenders of enlightenment values fight back soon, the counterknowledge industry has the potential to create new political, social and economic disasters.

James Mason
The London Nobody Knows
Optimum, 2008, 306.09421 MAS
The London Nobody Knows exposes the real London of the Swinging Sixties, turning its back on familiar sights to explore the hidden details of a crumbling metropolis, from abandoned music-halls to egg breaking factories.

Alan Macfarlane
Japan Through the Looking Glass
Profile, 2007, 306.0952 MAC
This entertaining and endlessly surprising book takes us on an exploration into every aspect of Japanese society from the most public to the most intimate. A series of meticulous investigations gradually uncovers the multi-faceted nature of a country and people who are even more extraordinary than they seem. Our journey encompasses religion, ritual, martial arts, manners, eating, drinking, hot baths, geishas, family, home, singing, wrestling, dancing, performing, clans, education, aspiration, sexes, generations, race, crime, gangs, terror, war, kindness, cruelty, money, art, imperialism, emperor, countryside, city, politics, government, law and a language that varies according to whom you are speaking. Clear-sighted, persistent, affectionate, unsentimental and honest - Alan Macfarlane shows us Japan as it has never been seen before.

Daniel Miller (ed.)
Materiality
Duke University Press, 2005, 306.46 MIL
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief - whether religious or secular - have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to de-center the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as seemingly diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors - most of whom are anthropologists - examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences.

Vic Gatrell
City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London
Atlantic, 2007, 306.70942109033 GAT
Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the centre of hectic social ferment and of spectacular sexual liberation. It prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities and constant debate about the relations between the sexes, and nowhere was London's lewdness and iconoclasm more vividly represented than in its satire. Combining words and images to offer a brilliantly original panorama of that time, City of Laughter is a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of seismic change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes to sex, celebrity and satire today.

Drew Westen
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
PublicAffairs, 2007, 324.9730019 WES
This book presents a groundbreaking and surprising scientific investigation into how the mind works, how the brain works and what this means for why candidates win and lose elections. Since the 18th century, the idea of mind that has captured the imagination of philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists and political scientists is of a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing evidence and reasoning to make the most valid conclusions. It bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. In this landmark book, Professor Drew Westen - a scientist and psychologist who has led a pioneering investigation into how the brain processes political information - shows through a whirlwind tour of American political leaders how electorates vote not with their heads, but with their hearts. The book, which examines data across several Presidential elections from the 1950s to the present day, is a serious and groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in driving voting behaviour.

Edward Lucas
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
Bloomsbury, 2008, 327.4 LUC
In the 1990s, Russia was the sick man of Europe, but the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in 1999 coincided with a huge hike in world oil and gas prices, and after Yeltsin's downfall Putin set about re-establishing Russian autocracy. Using gas and oil reserves, Russia has paid off its debts and amassed huge cash reserves, investing these in easily accessible European businesses and using its valuable natural resources to develop power over Europe. Russia has so far sidelined America, its most formidable opponent in the last cold war: America needs Russia co-operation on North Korea, Iran and the Middle East, leaving the way clear for the Kremlin. The New Cold War explains both the Kremlin's tactics and the West's weaknesses. Why we are perilously close to defeat and - and how we can still win.

Firoze Madatally Manji
African Perspectives on China in Africa
Fahamu, 2007, 327.6051 MAN
Much of the commentary on China in Africa focuses either on assessing how the interests of Western capital might be affected, or on denouncing China for practises that have for centuries been the norm for US and European powers. Lost in that cacophony has been the voice of independent African analysts and activists. They are heard in this unique collection of essays from the prize-winning weekly electronic newsletter Pambazuka News.

Manuel Perez Paredes
Che Guevara As You Have Never Seen Him Before
Network, 2007, 335.4 PAR
This documentary pieces together the story of Che’s life, from early childgood to his revolutionary activities in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia. Using previously unseen archive footage and stills, this remarkable diary of events includes interview footage with his father Ernesto, Fidel Castro and many other people who met and worked with him throughout his lifetime.

Robert Service
Comrades: A World History of Communism
Macmillan, 2007, 335.4 SER
Comrades tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, drawing on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Service demonstrates that, while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. The lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form.

Sherene H. Razack
Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics
University of Toronto Press, 2008, 340.112 RAZ
Three stereotypical figures have come to represent the 'war on terror' - the 'dangerous' Muslim man, the 'imperilled' Muslim woman, and the 'civilized' European who anchors them. Casting Out explores the use of these figures in the formation of a story about a family of civilized white nations obliged to use force and terror to defend itself against a menacing cultural Other. It argues that this myth is promoted to justify the expulsion of Muslims from the political community; a process that takes the form of stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and bombing. This is a study of great immediacy that uses the treatment of security detainees in the West, the flaunting of rights of Muslim populations in the name of protecting Muslim women, and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to show that the framing of Western-Muslim relations is actually part of a racial construct of long standing.

Jasvinder Sanghera
Shame
Hodder Paperbacks, 2007, 362.8292092 SAN
When she was fourteen, Jasvinder Sanghera was shown a photo of the man chosen to be her husband. She was terrified. She'd witnessed the torment her sisters endured in their arranged marriages, so she ran away from home, grief-stricken when her parents disowned her. Shame is the heart-rending true story of a young girl's attempt to escape from a cruel, claustrophobic world where family honour mattered more than anything - sometimes more than life itself. Jasvinder's story is one of terrible oppression, a harrowing struggle against a punitive code of honour - and, finally, triumph over adversity.

Robert Reiner
Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control
Polity Press, 2007, 364.941 REI
This book offers an up-to-date analysis of the twin trends of declining crime rates and rising fear of crime, providing all honest and concerned citizens with a concise yet comprehensive survey of the sources of current problems and anxieties about crime. It shows that the dominant tough law and order approach to crime is based on fallacies about its nature, sources, and what works in terms of crime control. Instead, it argues that the growth of crime has deep-seated causes, so that policing and penal policy at best can only temporarily hold a lid down on offending.

400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

David Attenborough
Life in Cold Blood
BBC DVD, 2008, 590 ATT
The focus of Life in Cold Blood is on reptiles and amphibians, bringing into focus a series of creatures very much of all shapes and sizes. Across the episodes that make up the series - all of which are contained in this DVD set - the programme makers delve into the lives and mannerisms of its subjects. They do so with some quite stunning camera work, bringing to our screens things that have quite simply never been seen before.

Claude Nuridsany and Jean-Marc Perennou
Microcosmos
Second Sight Films, 2008, 590 NUR
A French meadow on a summer’s day is the setting for this incredible, highly-acclaimed film that takes its microscopic cameras into the heart of the insect world. In this miniature environment where a single raindrop can cause havoc, we are treated to an array of jaw-dropping moments: an underwater spider makes a home out of an air bubble, a colony of ants face a massacre when a pheasant attacks, a determined beetle struggles to relocate his ball of dung, two snails get amorous and a mosquito is born. There’s drama, comedy, action and even a little love in this astonishing film that invites us to share the trials and tribulations of its wonderful cast.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

James Hamilton
London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World
John Murray, 2007, 609.22421 HAM
From the time of Nelson's death at Trafalgar to the opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park nearly fifty years later, London spread like a disease across the fields of Middlesex and Surrey. Foul and dangerous though it was to inhabit, in these decades London developed a new confidence in the intellectual purpose and lucrative promise of art, technology and science. This book is about the men and women who, through their genius and courage, luck and misfortune, anger and charm, put London at the cutting edge of cultural change. They worked in basements and drawing rooms, in studios and museums, in learned societies and in the squalor of the debtors' prison. Although it took fifty years to achieve maturity and direction, in the early decades of the nineteenth century London set itself on course to become the financial, entrepreneurial and intellectual capital of the world.

Gerald M. Edelman
Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge
Yale University Press, 2007, 612.82 EDE
Burgeoning advances in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousness - the very centre of human concern - by scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description? Edelman's brain-based approach to knowledge has rich implications for our understanding of creativity, of the normal and abnormal functioning of the brain, and of the connections among the different ways we have of knowing. While the gulf between science and the humanities and their respective views of the world has seemed enormous in the past, the author shows that their differences can be dissolved by considering their origins in brain functions. He foresees a day when brain-based devices will be conscious, and he reflects on this and other fascinating ideas about how we come to know the world and ourselves.

Steven Johnson
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and Two Men who Battled to Save Victorian London
Penguin, 2008, 614.514 JOH
In Ghost Map, Steven Johnson tells the story of the terrifying cholera epidemic that engulfed London in 1854, and the two unlikely heroes - anaesthetist Doctor John Snow and affable clergyman Reverend Henry Whitehead - who defeated the disease through a combination of local knowledge, scientific research and map-making. In telling their extraordinary story, Johnson also explores a whole world of ideas and connections, from urban terror to microbes, ecosystems to the Great Stink, cultural phenomena to street life. Re-creating a London full of dirt, dust heaps, slaughterhouses and scavengers, Ghost Map is about how huge populations live together, how cities can kill - and how they can save us.

Adam Zeman
A Portrait of the Brain
Yale University Press, 2008, 616.8 ZEM
In this compelling book, neurologist Adam Zeman tells the stories of patients with a variety of neurological disorders, some familiar (epilepsy, chronic fatigue, stroke, memory loss) and others relatively mysterious (narcolepsy, chronic deja vu, compulsive fidgeting, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). On every page Zeman both entertains and informs, and readers will find themselves pondering the enigmas of brain and mind long after closing the covers of this thought-provoking volume.

Eric R. Kandel
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
W. W. Norton, 2007, 616.80092 KAN
Eric R. Kandel illuminates how behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of mind, providing nuanced insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously opens pathways to more effective healing. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel's outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.

Charlotte Gray
Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention
Arcade, 2006, 621.385092 GRA
A major new biography of one of the giants of the golden age of invention whose innovations revolutionized the modern world.

Mark Lynas
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Harper Perennial, 2008, 363.73874 LYN
The nightmare scenarios in Mark Lynas's incredible new book are not science-fiction; nor are they sensationalist. The titular 6° refers to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. This is the first time we have had a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. Most vitally, Lynas's book serves to highlight the fact that the world of 2100 doesn't have to be one of horror and chaos.

Peter Cook
Sex, Leadership and Rock N’ Roll
Crown House, 2006, 658.4092 COO
At last, a book that cuts through the jargon of leadership and personal development. It offers a real world source of inspiration and provocation in areas such as: creativity, innovation, relationships, motivation, leadership, high performance, learning, and reinvention. Peter Cook has been able to skilfully synthesise leading edge management concepts with wisdom of the street in the form of rock music because of his background, both as a business academic, MBA graduate and tutor, strategy consultant and thought leader and also as a musician, writing and performing music, in rock bands. The book examines the issues using the language of 'Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll' rather than that of prophets, consultants, and gurus. This book has kindly been donated to the Library by its author, a Fellow of the RSA.

Robin Ryde
Thought Leadership: Moving Hearts and Minds
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 658.4092 RYD
All leadership starts with thinking - about problems, about possibilities and about organisational capabilities, but thinking never occurs in a vacuum. Long gone are the days when a chief executive would disappear for weeks with a towel over his head, only to reappear to announce 'the answer' to the organization. Modern leadership is about shaping the social process of engagement, strategizing and decision-making so that workers can create immeasurable value. This book is about what executives can do to transform the thinking of those around them. It is about the circuitry that lies beneath the change process and the habits and norms that govern business conversations. This book will give you exemplary decision-making, quicker organizational change and focussed leadership.

700s – The Arts

Paul Goldberger
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York
Random House Trade, 2005, 725.23097471 GOL
In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history. From the decision to reintegrate the site into the dense fabric of lower Manhattan, to the choice of Daniel Libeskind as master planner, to the appointment of a memorial jury, the process has been marked by moments of bold vision, effective community activism, and personal instinct, punctuating the often contentious politics of public participation. Up from Zero takes in the full sweep of this tremendous effort. Goldberger presents a drama of creative minds at work, solving seemingly insurmountable clashes of taste, interests, and ideas.

Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Picador, 2007, 781.11 SAC
Oliver Sacks has been hailed by the New York Times as 'one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century' and in this book, the subject of his uniquely literate scrutiny is music: our relationship with it, our facility for it, and what this most universal of passions says about us. In chapters examining savants and synaesthetics, depressives and musical dreamers, Sacks succeeds not only in articulating the musical experience but in locating it in the human brain. He shows that music is not simply about sound, but also movement, visualization, and silence.

Jason Wood
Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons
Faber & Faber, 2005, 791.430233092 WOO
Over the past twenty-five years Nick Broomfield has established himself as Britain’s best-known and most unflaggingly controversial director of documentaries. He has pursued the likes of South African supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche, comedian Lily Tomlin and rock star Courntey Love, as well as investigating Army barracks, brothels and S&M parlours. This is Broomfield in his own words, as frank and revealing as his inimitable films.

800s – Literature

James Wood
How Fiction Works
Jonathan Cape, 2008, 809.3 WOD
How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

Anna Beer
Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
Bloomsbury, 2008, 821.4 BEE
Of all the major English poets, John Milton was by far the most deeply involved in the political and religious controversies of his time, writing a series of pamphlets on free speech, divorce and religious, political and social rights that forced a complete rethinking of the nature and practice not only of government, but of human freedom itself. Not only did he write, but he was also actively engaged with the business of government, working as Cromwell's international secretary for all his dealings with Europe and the wider world. For centuries, Milton has emerged from biographies either as a woman-hating domestic tyrant or as a saintly figure removed from the messy business of personal affections. Neither tyrant nor saint, he was a man who had intense and often troubled relationships with both men and women throughout his life. His ideals (such as chaste love between men or intellectual companionship between men and women) invariably proved unlivable, but he emerges from Anna Beer's ground-breaking biography for the first time as a fully rounded human being.

Charles Nicholl
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
Allen Lane, 2007, 822.33 NIC
'One Mr Shakespeare that lay in the house...' In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster - it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine - a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry - but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist's famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating episode in Shakespeare's life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.

Julian Barnes
Nothing to be Frightened of
Jonathan Cape, 2008, 828.914 BAR
'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him'. Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is like a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers. When Angela Carter reviewed Barnes' first novel, Metroland, she praised the mature way he wrote about death. Now, nearly thirty years later, he returns to the subject in a wise, funny and constantly surprising book, which defies category and classification - except as Barnesian.

900s – Geography & History

Stephen Rippon
Historic Landscape Analysis: Deciphering the Countryside
Council for British Archaeology, 2005, 911.41 RIP
This handbook introduces some of the techniques that archaeologists, historians, historical geographers and planners can use to unravel the complex history of the countryside. A series of case studies demonstrate practical applications of historic landscape analysis for a broad range of uses and at a variety of national and regional levels. This well-illustrated and clear guide will be essential reading for anyone trying to understand the origins and development of regional variation in historic landscape character.

Rob Gifford
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
Bloomsbury, 2007, 915.1046 GIF
China is a country on the move, and Route 312 - China's Route 66 - is the artery along which 150 million Chinese travel daily in search of work and a better life. Running 3,000 miles from the east-coast boomtown of Shanghai to the border of Kazakhstan in the northwest, crossing many ethnic and provincial boundaries, Rob Gifford travels the intercontinental road to get to the heart of the new China, and his ability to talk to everyone across the social spectrum - from truckers and prostitutes to yuppies and travelling salesmen - makes China Road an outstanding travel narrative.

Norma Clarke
Dr. Johnson’s Women
Pimlico, 2005, 828.609 CLA
Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs. He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters. It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors. Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case. Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.

Matthew Johnson
Ideas of Landscape
Blackwell, 2006, 936.2 JOH
Drawing on his local experience, Matthew Johnson focuses on the so-called English landscape tradition and discusses why it is so distinctive: it stands at some distance from North American and other approaches, in which theory plays a more prominent role. Johnson identifies the origins of this tradition in English Romanticism, through the influence of the father of landscape history W.G. Hoskins among others, and argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of the Romantic movement. He offers an alternative agenda, which maps more closely on to the established empirical strengths of landscape study and is more relevant both to the thrust of interdisciplinary landscape studies and to contemporary social concerns. Passionately and accessibly written, this engaging book takes up a crucial strand in archaeological thinking and examines it critically for the first time.

Richard Trank
I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
Stax Entertainment, 2007, 940.5318 TRA
Simon Weisenthal, a Holocaust survivor, helped track down numerous Nazi war criminals following World War II and then spent the latter decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people. His life’s quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria where Wiesenthal was a prisoner in May 1945. It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 99 lb when he was freed. Wiesenthal said he quickly realised “there is no freedom without justice,” and decided to dedicate “a few years” to seeking justice.

Sandra Koa Wing
Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War
Profile, 2008, 941.084 WIN
A powerful, detailed and warming story of the Second World War - told through the previously unheard voices of those who described the home front for the Mass Observation project. Using diaries that have never been published before, this book tells the story of the war - the military conflict, and, mainly, life on the home front - through the lives of the Home Front’s volunteers.

Ian Mortimer
The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England 1327-1330
Pimlico, 2004, 942.036092 MOR
One night in August 1323 a captive rebel baron, Sir Roger Mortimer, drugged his guards and escaped from the Tower of London. With the king's men-at-arms in pursuit he fled to the south coast, and sailed to France. There he was joined by Isabella, the Queen of England, who threw herself into his arms. A year later, as lovers, they returned with an invading army: King Edward II's forces crumbled before them, and Mortimer took power. He removed Edward II in the first deposition of a monarch in British history. Until now no one has appreciated the full evil genius of the man. This first biography reveals not only the man's career as a feudal lord, a governor of Ireland, a rebel leader and a dictator of England.

Rosemary Ashton
142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London
Vintage, 2008, 942.10810922 ASH
142 Strand was the home of the brilliant, unconventional young publisher John Chapman. The Strand was packed with booksellers, magazine publishers, theatres, clubs, and quack doctors. Just behind lay the brothels of Covent Garden and the disreputable pornographers of Holywell Street, while Westminster and the Houses of Parliament were a short distance away. Chapman's circle touched all these worlds, and the vivid story of these unconventional lives and unorthodox views - marvellously told by Rosemary Ashton - takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, uncovering its surprising energy, its doubts and arguments, and, above all, its passionate reforming spirit.

Julian Barnes
Letters from London
Picador, 2005, 942.10859 BAR
Since 1990 Julian Barnes has written a regular 'Letter from London' for the New Yorker magazine. These already celebrated pieces cover subjects as diverse as the Lloyd's insurance disaster, the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the troubles of the Royal Family and the hapless Nigel Short in his battle with Gary Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Finals. With an incisive assessment of Salman Rushdie's plight and an analysis of the implications of being linked to the Continent via the Channel Tunnel, Letters from London provides a vivid and telling portrait of Britain in the Nineties.

Mark Leonard
What Does China Think?
HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 951.06 LEO
Mark Leonard asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about China and start again. He introduces us to the thinkers that are shaping China's wide open future and opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution and changing the face of the world.

Nick Broomfield
Battle for Haditha
Contender Home Entertainment, 2008, 956.7 BRO
Documentary-maker Nick Broomfield’s first move into dramatisations tells the aftermath of an insurgent’s roadside bomb for the Marines caught by it, and the local families caught by the Marines, using Iraqi refugees in Jordan and ex-Marines in similar situations to those who involved in the incident, and reconstructed using the report the official enquiry.

Mike Tucker
Gunner Palace
Elephant Video, 2007, 956.7 LON
In this striking documentary shot in 2003, early on in the US-led war on Iraq, a group of American soldiers in Baghdad who have taken over a bombed-out palace that belonged to Uday Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein, offer the camera a view on their world. While they party poolside for most of the day and lead raids on homes of suspected bomb-builders most nights, they also have a lot to say about the war and their situation. Their youth and immaturity is striking, as is the war itself and the nebulous reasons that they are stationed there. While the primary purpose of Gunner Palace is to give the perspective of the soldiers, viewers also get a glimpse of Iraqi civilians and how they react to the US military presence--some are terrified, others are sceptical, still others are compliant and grateful if not totally sure why.

Charles Tripp
A History of Iraq: Third Edition
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 956.704 TRI
Charles Tripp's thesis is that the history of Iraq throughout the twentieth-century has made it what it is today, but also provides alternative futures. Unless this is properly understood, many of the themes explored in this book - patron-client relations, organized violence, sectarian, ethnic and tribal difference - will continue to exert a hold over the future of Iraq as they did over its past.

Charles Ferguson
No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos
PublicAffairs, 2008, 956.70443 FER
The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerrilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, No End in Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Presenting the research behind the award-winning documentary, this book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003. It features verbatim interviews with high ranking officials including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts.

Gareth R. V. Stansfield
Iraq: People, History, Politics
Polity, 2007, 956.70443 STA
This book asks why is it that a state which, on paper, would seem to have immense potential, became a pariah, deemed to be a threat to its own people, or to its neighbours? Can the answers be found in the peculiar psychological make-up of particular political leaders, or are there structural weaknesses inherent within the construct of the state itself? What is the social, political and economic impact on the people of this tortured state of years of war, deprivation and hardship in addition to existing under the oppressive totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein?

Jonathan Steele
Defect: Why they Lost Iraq
I. B. Tauris, 2007, 956.70443 STE
As the dreadful reality of the Coalition's defeat in Iraq begins to sink in, one question dominates Washington and London: why? In this controversial new book, award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele provides a stark and arresting answer: Bush and Blair were defeated from the day they decided to occupy the country. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with ordinary Iraqis, Steele shows for the first time how the staging posts of the conflict so familiar to Western newspaper readers were seen by the Iraqis themselves.

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Blimes
The Three Trillion Dollar War
Allen Lane, 2008, 956.704431 STI
The Three Trillion Dollar War is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and Bilmes will show underestimates the real figure by approximately six times. The authors expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans - for the rest of their lives.Shifting to a global perspective, the authors investigate the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. With chilling precision, they calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building. Stiglitz and Bilmes write in simple language, which makes the details they present, and the sums they add up, all the more disturbing. This book will change forever the way we think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of war generally.

Will Eisner
Last Day in Vietnam
Dark Horse Comics, 2000, 959.7043 EIS
Last Day in Vietnam is Will Eisner’s memoir of stories about soldiers who are engaged not only in the daily hostilities of war but also in larger, more personal combat. During Eisner’s years in the militaryk, and particularly during the many field trips he made for P.S. Magazine, he observed and reported on camp life at close range.

Jacob Weisberg
The Bush Tragedy
Bloomsbury, 2008, 973.931092 WEI
Jacob Weisberg analyses Bush through his response to the failures and accomplishments of his younger self, his idolisation of Ronald Reagan, and his devout Christianity that has led to widely condemned policy decisions that have fundamentally changed the role and position of the United States in the modern world. This original interpretation of Bush also studies seriously the much-mocked language that he uses as a political tool, helping to carve out the vision of himself as a wartime leader. In the run-up to the presidential elections, this is the starting point for a worldwide debate about undoing the damage.

Featured Book - "Here Comes Everybody"

Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisation without Organisations
Allen Lane, 2008, 303.4833 SHI

Like Charles Leadbeater’s recently-published We-Think, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is both a manifesto for a networked culture, highlighting the benefits that come from the instantaneous and highly accessible communication the internet offers and, more importantly, is full of anecdotes demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of these networks in action.

The antithesis of arguments such as Andrew Keen’s in his The Cult of the Amateur, Shirky has already engaged his critics. To join in the conversation. you can try the ideas in his book out for yourself at the RSA’s social organisation platform RSA Networks, discuss the book in the comments of the various celebrity blogger reviews the book has already received, see Shirky make his case at the RSA next Tuesday, or borrow a copy of Here Comes Everybody by emailing the RSA Library.

Featured Book - "The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West"

Edward Lucas
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
Bloomsbury, 2008, 327.4 LUC

The foreign journalists in Moscow may be finding the run-up to Sunday's election boring, and its true that American pre-election elections get a lot more coverage, but the lack of headlines being generated by national politics hasn’t meant a decline in commentary on Russia and its continuing role in the international arena.

Recent RSA Thursday speaker Edward Lucas’ new book, The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West deals with both, discussing the domestic power structures built up by Vladimir Putin that in the process of being handed over to Dmitry Medvedev, and how these men to international business. Almost a year ago Matthew Bryza, deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, attacked Russia’s state-owned natural gas company Gazprom for pursuing control of European energy infrastructure, but as Timothy Garton Ash reported yesterday, Europe is yet to formulate a coherent policy.

As The Telegraph’s review points out, it’s a misleading title; the conflict in question is being waged with energy sources and against their customers, not with nuclear bombs aimed at military complexes. This book is a valuable explanation of the seemingly inert Russia politics, and why watching nothing happening is interesting right now.

To borrow a copy of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, please contact the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - February 2008

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of February 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Nicholas Davies
Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
Chatto & Windus, 2008, 070.4 DAV
'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed: the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; and the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Oliver James
The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza
Vermilion, 2008, 155.9 JAM
In Affluenza, world-renowned psychologist Oliver James introduced us to a modern-day virus sweeping through the English-speaking world. He met those suffering from it and demonstrated how their obsessive, envious tendencies made them twice as prone to depression, anxiety and addictions than people in other developed nations. Now, The Selfish Capitalist provides more detailed substantiation for those claims. It looks deeper into the origins of the virus and outlines the political, economic and social climate in which it has grown. James points out that, since the seventies, the rich have got much, much richer, yet the average person's wage has not increased at all. He provides a wealth of evidence to show that we have become more miserable and distressed since this time, and suggests that this is a direct consequence of Thatcherite/Blairite 'Selfish Capitalism', whose most significant act has been to rob the poor to give to the rich. A rallying cry to the government to reduce our levels of distress by adopting a form of unselfish capitalism, this hard-hitting and thought-provoking work tells us why our personal well-being must take precedence over the wealth of a tiny minority if we are to cure ourselves of this disease.

Richard Wiseman
The Luck Factor
Arrow, 2004, 158.1 WIS
Why do some people lead happy successful lives whilst others face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? What enables some people to have successful careers whilst apparently similar others find themselves trapped with jobs they detest? And can unlucky people do anything to improve their luck - and lives? Ten years ago, Dr. Richard Wiseman decided to search for the elusive luck factor by investigating the actual beliefs and experiences of lucky and unlucky people...Looking at the results, Wiseman was able to identify four main factors which explained living a lucky and unlucky life. He was then able to show a group of people that considered themselves unlucky, how to think and behave like lucky people. The results were astounding with almost all participants reporting significant life changes: including increased levels of luck, self-esteem, physical well-being, confidence, and success.

200s – Religion

300s – Social Sciences

Robert Peston
Who Runs Britain? How the Super-rich are Changing our Lives
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, 303.30941 PES
Who makes the decisions in this country? Who is the power behind the throne? Who's really in charge? Let the BBC's business correspondent Robert Peston take you through the looking glass on a behind-the-scenes tour of Britain's hidden power brokers and the reasons behind their rise. There's a new elite in town - and it's not who you might think… Who Runs Britain? is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what's really happening in this country, and why.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith
Fostering Sustainable Behaviour: An Introduction to Community-Based Marketing
New Society, 2000, 303.484 MCK
Our consumption patterns are threatening to outstrip Earth's ability to support humanity and other species. A sustainable future will require sweeping changes in public behaviour. While conventional marketing can help create public awareness, social marketing identifies and overcomes barriers to long-lasting behaviour change. This ground-breaking book is the primary resource for the emerging new field of community-based social marketing, and an invaluable guide for anyone involved in designing public education programs with the goal of promoting sustainable behaviour, from recycling and energy efficiency, to alternative transportation.

Lois Weis
The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family and the Economy
Routledge, 2008, 305.5 WEI
Since the 1980s, the relationship between social class and education has been overshadowed by scholarship more generally targeting issues of race, gender, and representation. Today, with the global economy deeply immersed in social inequalities, there is pressing need for serious class-based analysis of schooling, family life and social structure. The Way Class Works is a collection of twenty-four groundbreaking essays on the material conditions of social class and the ways in which class is produced on the ground in educational institutions and families, written by the most visible and important scholars in education and the social sciences, these timely essays explore the production of class in and through the economy, family, and school, while simultaneously interrogating and challenging our understandings of social class as linked to race, gender, and nation.

Dave Gorman
America Unchained
Channel 4 DVD, 2008, 306.0973 GOR
In Dave Gorman In America Unchained, recently screened here at the RSA, the multi award-winning performer sets off on a journey to see if it's still possible to live in America without giving any money to 'The Man'. Travelling coast-to-coast, he's not staying in any chain hotels, eating in any chain restaurants, or filling up at any chain gas stations. On this journey, only independent "Mom & Pop" businesses will do. Of course, travelling unchained in a chained world is tricky--when you’re tired you can't just stop at a Starbucks, and when the tank is running empty you can't just pull up at the next gas station. Staying true to the task was always going to be a struggle, but the people facing the real struggle are those working to keep the unchained businesses of America alive.

Michael F. D. Young
Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education
Routledge, 2008, 306.43 YOU
What is it in the twenty-first century that we want young people, and adults returning to study, to know? What is it about the kind of knowledge that people can acquire at school, college or university that distinguishes it from the knowledge that people acquire in their everyday lives everyday lives, at work, and in their families? Bringing Knowledge Back In draws on recent developments in the sociology of knowledge to propose answers to these key, but often overlooked, educational questions. Michael Young argues for the continuing relevance of the writings of Durkheim and Vygotsky and the unique importance of Basil Bernstein's often under-appreciated work. He illustrates the importance of questions about knowledge by investigating the dilemmas faced by researchers and policy makers in a range of fields, and considers the broader issue of the role of sociologists in relation to educational policy in the context of increasingly interventionist governments. In so doing, the book provides conceptual tools for people to think and debate about knowledge and education in new ways provides clear expositions of difficult ideas at the interface of epistemology and the sociology of knowledge makes explicit links between theoretical issues and practical/policy questions offers a clear focus for the future development of the sociology of education as a key field within educational studies.

Dick Pountain
Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude
Reaktion, 2000, 306.40941 POU
This text introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a penetrating analysis of Cool's history, psychology and significance. The contemporary cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. This book traces Cool's origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. The authors examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flaneurs of the 18th and 19th centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s.

Christopher B. Leinberger
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
Island Press, 2007, 307.760973 LEI
Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism, visionary developer and strategist Christopher Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy - car manufacturing and the oil industry - this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.

Paul Collins
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
Bloomsbury, 2006, 320.092 COL
The author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, a radical on the run from the law in London, a founding father of the United States of America, a senator of revolutionary France, Thomas Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. He was a walking revolution in human form - the most dangerous man alive. But in death, Paine's story turns truly bizarre - his bones were taken from New York to London and eventually disappeared. In Paris, London and New York, in bars, grocers, shops and national libraries, crossing paths along the way with, among others, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Cobbett, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin and even Lord Bryon, Paul Collins sets himself the challenge of finding out what happened to Paine's bones, and ends up telling one of the most extraordinary stories of modern history.

John Pilger
Freedom Next Time
Black Swan, 2007, 323.49 PIL
John Pilger is one of the world's pre-eminent investigative journalists and documentary film-makers. In Freedom Next Time, he looks at five countries, in each of which a long struggle for freedom has taken place; in each the people, having shed blood and dreams, are still waiting. In Afghanistan, Iraq and South Africa, there has been the promise of hope, and even an 'official' freedom, but the reality of these divided societies is that they are still waiting for real freedom. In Palestine, the cycle of violence continues with no resolution in sight. And the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is a microcosm of the ruthlessness of great powers. The island was sold by the British to the American military in the 1960s. The indigenous population, descended from slaves, were forcibly removed to the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. They have continued to fight for the return of their homeland ever since - three years ago the High Court granted them the right of return, but this has subsequently been blocked. The island remains the US's third biggest military base; a base from which they are able to launch attacks against the Middle East. Once again, John Pilger gives a voice to the people living through these momentous times and, in gripping detail, shows us the lives behind the headlines.

John Pilger
The War on Democracy
Lionsgate, 2008, 328.346 PIL
In his latest documentary, John Pilger travels to latin America to uncover the consequences of the United States’ greed. Pilger explores how the US has for decades installed presidents in South and Central America who have kept the rich in palaces and the poor in the desperate poverty of the barrios. Through interviews with ex-CIA chiefs, the people of Latin America themselves and a rare interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, John Pilger seeks to prove that you should never believe anything until it’s officially denied.

Gregory Clark
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
Princeton University Press, 2007, 330.9 CLA
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution - and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it - occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich - and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture - not exploitation, geography, or resources - explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

Muhammad Yunus
Creating a World without Poverty: How Social Business can transform our Lives
Public Affairs, 2008, 338.7 YUN
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize outlines his vision for a new business model that combines the power of free markets with the quest for a more humane world - and tells the inspiring stories of companies that are doing this work today. Over the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick and protecting the planet. Creating a World without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social business, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way - and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Tim Harford
The Logic of Life: The Hidden Economics of Everything
Little, Brown, 2008, 339 HAR
To Tim Harford, Economics Editor of the Financial Times, drug addicts and teenage muggers can be rational. Suburban sprawl and inner city decay are rational. Endless meetings at the office and the injustices of working life? Rational. Economics explains why your boss is overpaid, whether we should build more prisons, and whether a city like New Orleans can recover from disaster. The book starts with the most intimate decisions - to have sex, to take drugs, to lead an honest life - then zooms out to discuss the logic of the family, of neighbourhoods, large corporations, cities themselves. This is the new economics of everything you never thought was economics, and it will help you see the world in a new way.

Rosemary Jay
Data Protection: Law and Practice
Sweet & Maxwell, 2007, 342.410858 JAY
Data protection, and the related areas of privacy, confidentiality, rights of access and powers of surveillance, are now mainstream issues. This fully revised and extended third edition is the essential work for anyone concerned with how this important area of law impaces on their practice. It explains the background to the legislation and gives guidance on how to apporoach interpretation, and provides detailed coverage of the relationship between data protection, the right to private life under the Human Rights Convention and the development of UK case law on privacy rights since October 2000.

Daniel J. Solove
The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age
New York University Press, 2004, 342.730858 SOL
Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day - even as you read this - electronic databases are compiling information about you. Ever since the Internet transformed the way we shop, learn, and communicate, computer databases have collected unprecedented amounts of information about almost every individual in the world. Often these dossiers are used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. This practice has, thus far, gone largely unchecked, and poses a grave threat to our privacy. In this startling revelation of how digital dossiers are created (usually without our knowledge), Daniel J. Solove argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is and what it means in the digital age, and then reform the laws that define and regulate it.

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
Allen Lane, 2008, 306.361 SEN
This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring - and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated. The Craftsman shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals' pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents.

Tom Traynor and Alan French
A Guide to Major Trusts, 2007-08
Directory of Social Change, 2007, REF 361.763202541 TRA
Grant-making trusts are a key source of funding for charitable activity, and this two-volume guide has built a reputation as the definitive source of information in this area. Volume one concentrates on the 400 largest trusts that give over £300,000 a year, and the second volume examines a further 1,200 mainly smaller trusts, which between them give tens of thousands each year. The content is compiled both through contact with the trusts themselves and through independent research. Each entry includes: clear description of the trust's grant-making policies and practices; a yearly grant total; contact details; and, areas or subjects the trusts will not consider.

David Lyon
Surveillance Studies: An Overview
Polity Press, 2007, 363.232 LYO
The study of surveillance is more relevant than ever before. The fast growth of the field of surveillance studies reflects both the urgency of civil liberties and privacy questions in the war on terror era and the classical social science debates over the power of watching and classification, from Bentham to Foucault and beyond. In this overview, David Lyon, one of the pioneers of surveillance studies, fuses with aplomb classical debates and contemporary examples to provide the most accessible and up-to-date introduction to surveillance available, taking in surveillance studies in all its breadth, from local face-to-face oversight through technical developments in closed-circuit TV, radio frequency identification and biometrics to global trends that integrate surveillance systems internationally. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to understand surveillance as a phenomenon and the tools for analysing it further, and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.

Anna Funder
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
Granta Books, 2004, 363.2830943155 FUN
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary Mik Jegger of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to no longer to exist.

Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn and Katherine Hamilton (eds.)
Voluntary Carbon Markets: An International Business Guide to what they are and how they Work
Earthscan, 2007, 363.738746 BAY
This groundbreaking business book, written in a fast-paced journalistic style, draws together all of the key information on international voluntary carbon markets with commentary from leading practitioners and business people. The book covers all aspects of voluntary carbon markets in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and Asia: what they are, how they work and, most critically, their business potential to help slow climate change. It is the indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand voluntary carbon markets and capitalize on the opportunities they present for economic and environmental benefit. If you want to be ahead of the curve for the next big thing, you need this book.

David King and Gabrielle Walker
The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On
Bloomsbury, 2008, 363.738746 KIN
The Hot Topic is a collaborative work by one of the most respected scientists and one of the most dynamic writers in the field of climate change. Sir David King, world-renowned scientist and the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, is widely credited with persuading Tony Blair to act on climate change and with getting key international figures around the negotiating table, and Gabrielle Walker is a respected author, journalist and radio presenter, and a regular contributor to New Scientist, whose 8-part series Planet Earth Under Threat was a major success last year for BBC Radio 4. The Hot Topic goes beyond a statement of the problem to address in detail what can be done to answer the challenge on a personal, social, national and international level. A clear, short and engaging book that approaches the whole issue - the present problem and the future solutions - in a straightforward way, it is bound to receive massive attention from industry, the media and government alike.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Gang Leader for a Day: A Young Sociologist Crosses the Line
Allen Lane, 2008, 364.1066092 VEN
Sudhir Venkatesh is the young sociologist who became famous in Freakonomics, Gang Leader for a Day is a gripping journey of discovery about life on the wrong side of the tracks. When naive sociology student Sudhir Venakatesh went to find out more about urban poverty in Chicago, the last thing he expected was to be held hostage by a gang. And he never guessed that, after being released, he'd want to return to find out more about them, befriend them, and ultimately live amongst them for ten years.

Darius M. Rejali
Torture and Democracy
Princeton University Press, 2007, 364.67 REJ
This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research - conducted in multiple languages and on several continents - begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib.

Robert Hill
Achieving More Together: Adding Value through Partnership
Association of School and College Leaders, 2008, 379.152 HIL
This book is the result of a year-long ASCL research project to find evidence of the concrete benefits – both in terms of innovation and improvement – to be gained from school and college collaboration and to understand the implications for education policy. It makes the educational and practical case for partnership working, and analyse the research evidence on the extent to which partnership working adds value, examines the current scope and form of such collaborative activity among schools and colleges and discusses the barriers to partnership and what can be done to lessen or remove them.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Iain Stewart
Earth: The Power of the Planet
BBC DVD, 2008, 508 STE
In this landmark BBC series, Dr Iain Stewart tells the story of how our planet works and how, over the course of 4.6 billion years, it came to be the remarkable planet it is today. Examining the great forces that shape the earth - volcanoes, the ocean, the atmosphere and ice - the programme explores their central roles in our planet's story. How do these forces affect the earth's landscape, its climate, and its history? This is a series that shows the earth in new and surprising ways. Extensive use of satellite imagery reveals new views of our planet, while time-lapse filmed over many months brings the planet to life.

Peter A. Corning
Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 576.8 COR
Nature's Magic presents a bold new vision of the evolutionary process from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Synergy of various kinds is not only a ubiquitous aspect of the natural world but it has also been a wellspring of creativity and the 'driver' of the broad evolutionary trend toward increased complexity, in nature and human societies alike. But in contrast with the many theories of emergence or complexity that rely on some underlying force or 'law', the 'Synergism Hypothesis', as Peter Corning calls it, is in essence an economic theory of biological complexity; it is fully consistent with mainstream evolutionary biology. Among the many important insights that are provided by this new paradigm, Corning presents a scenario in which the human species invented itself; synergistic, behavioural and technological innovations were the 'pacemakers' of our biological evolution.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Ronald Cohen
The Second Bounce of the Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 658.155 COH
In business, everyone can see the first bounce of the ball. It is the second bounce that is uncertain. Ronald Cohen, one of the world's leading private-equity investors, argues that the entrepreneur's aim is to take advantage of that uncertainty: it is only in situations of uncertainty that significant gains can be made. The Second Bounce of the Ball is the distillation of Cohen's 33-year career building Apax Partners into a firm employing more than 300 people, with offices in eight countries and billions under management, and is essential reading for entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs and all those who want to apply entrepreneurial approaches in all walks of life.It provides relevant background on the development of entrepreneurship and of the venture-capital and private-equity industry through the prism of Cohen's experience at Apax.

Sarah Lewis
Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management: Using AI to Facilitate Organizational Development
Kogan Page, 2007, 658.406 LEW
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is one of the most exciting and increasingly recognized concepts in facilitating organizational change. This book studies AI in depth, illustrating the method of asking particular questions and envisioning the future, encouraging staff to consider both the positive and negative systems in place and to recognize the need to implement change. Case studies from organizations that have already integrated conversational methods into their change management practice show you why the processes are valuable, why they are effective and how to promote, create and generate such conversations yourself. Written in jargon-free language, this is an excellent resource for you to discover the benefits that conversational techniques can have on your organization and its performance.

Gerard Hastings
Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil Have all the Best Tunes?
Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007, 658.8 HAS
This book explains the principles of social marketing and examines the implications of using techniques devised on Wall Street to further social and health goals. Naomi Kein, Joel Bakan and George Monbiot have each done a great job of telling us what is wrong with corporate capitalism, and this book begins to provide some solutions. It shows how we can borrow the techniques they use to promote consumption, to encourage more socially desirable behaviours, and use rigorous research to enable regulators to constrain the worst excesses of Wall Street. Modern marketing techniques now pervade every aspect of our lives: the government, charities, advocacy groups use it to encourage us to live more healthily, support good causes or be more ecologically sensitive. This book asks whether this works and what does it tell us about the relationship between business and civil society? Highly accessible with clear learning objectives, exercises and worked examples, this is also a text that stretches our understanding of the discipline and raises questions about future directions.

A.S.K. Hollis 2008: The Directory of UK Associations - the Definitive Directory of Associations and Organisations Representing a Membership, a Message and a Mission
Hollis Publishing, 2008, REF 659.202
Over 6,000 associations, pressure groups, unions, institutes, societies and more are profiled, representing every interest area from abrasives through to zoos, from industrial, professional and business sectors to government, charities and the consumer.

700s – The Arts

Alison Chernik
Matthew Barney - No Restraint
Soda Pictures, 2007, 700.92 BAR/CHE
A documentary portrait of artist Matthew Barney, following him through the process of making Drawing Restraint No. 9, his 2005 film, using clips from the film, behind-the-scenes interviews, and home-movie footage of Barney playing high-school football, as well as interviews with gallery owner Barbara Gladstone, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, and Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, which presented a major exhibition on the Drawing Restraint series, including a screening of the film, in the summer of 2005.

Stefan Lubomirski de Vaux
Urban Nature and the Urban Beach
Lubomirski, 2006, 770 LUB
An eclectic collection of 50 original photographs in colour and black & white, on a theme of nature in an urban setting including the use of parks and river banks as urban beaches. Nature tamed and left free, outdoors and indoors and as an inspiration for art.

Alex James
Bit of a Blur
Little, Brown, 2007, 782.42166092 JAM
For Alex James, music had always been a door to a more exciting life: a way to travel, meet new people and, hopefully, pick up girls. But as bass player of Blur - one of the most successful British bands of all time - his journey was more exciting and extreme than he could ever have predicted. Success catapulted him from a slug-infested squat in Camberwell to a world of private jets and world-class restaurants. Pleasingly unrepentant but nonetheless a reformed man, Alex James is the perfect chronicler of his generation - witty, observant, frank and brimming with joie de vivre.

800s – Literature

900s – Geography & History

Daniel Lord Smail
On Deep History and the Brain
University of California Press, 2007, 901 SMA
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

Michelle P. Brown
Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age
University of Toronto Press, 2007, 941 BRO
The Anglo-Saxons first appeared on the historical scene as Germanic pagan pirates and mercenaries, moving into the declining Roman Empire in the 5th Century AD and forging a series of kingdoms which became ‘England.’ By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anglo-Saxon England was one of the most sophisticated states in the medieval West, renowned for its ecclesiastical and cultural achievements. The written word was of tremendous importance in this transformation. Within a century of the introduction of Christianity and literacy, the book had become a central element of Anglo-Saxon society, and a rich vehicle for cultural and artistic expression. This new book by a leading export on this period, Michelle P. Brown, provides an authoritative introduction to the art of book production in the Anglo-Saxon period and an historical overview of the period by means of its book culture. It illustrates in colour over 140 examples of the finest Anglo-Saxon books, from the British Library and other major collections.

Edward James
Britain in the First Millennium
Arnold, 2000, 941.01 JAM
The first millennium in British history, a period framed by two invasions and conquests from across the Channel, is given a fresh portrayal in this innovative new account. It is the first time that Britain has been studied over the entire first millennium - or what might be called the 'long' first millennium, from the middle of the first century BC until the end of the eleventh century AD. It was a fundamental period for the historical and cultural development of Britain. The incomplete nature of the Roman Conquest lies behind the separate development of Ireland and northern Scotland, and perhaps Wales. The events of the fifth and sixth centuries, the so-called Migration Period, led to the re-making of the linguistic map. The arrival of Christianity was a major unifying event of the period in cultural terms. The arrival of the Vikings ultimately brought about the unification of the English kingdom, and aided in the unification of the kingdom of Scotland, the two most significant political developments of the latter part of the period, while the Norman Conquest inextricably tied subsequent medieval English monarchs into the politics of France.

Ian Mortimer
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
Pimlico, 2007, 942.037092 MOR
He ordered his uncle to be beheaded; he usurped his father's throne; he taxed his people more than any other previous king, and he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years. Yet for centuries Edward III (1327-77) was celebrated as the most brilliant of all English monarchs. In this first full study of his character and life, Ian Mortimer shows how under Edward the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, culminating in the crushing victory over the French at Crecy. Yet under his rule England also experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is to Edward that England owes its system of parliamentary representation, its local justice system, its national flag and the recognition of English as the language of the nation. Nineteenth century historians saw in Edward the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted him as a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conqueror. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man - resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. He emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate - the father of both the English people and the English nation.

Timothy Carton Ash
The File: A Personal History
Vintage Books, 1998, 943.1 ASH
In an account of Cold War espionage and treachery, the author describes his discovery that the East German secret police had compiled a secret file on his activities and of his efforts to track down the truth about that file.

Joe Sacco
The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo
Jonathan Cape, 2004, 949.74203 SAC
In his remarkable new book Joe Sacco returns to Bosnia, the setting for his first masterpiece, Safe Area Goražde. In 2001 he went back to Sarajevo to meet up with his old 'fixer', an army veteran called Neven who, for the right price, could arrange anything for the visiting journalist. Sacco gradually realized that Neven's own story - a microcosm of the Balkan conflict itself - might be the most compelling of all. Through Neven, Sacco tells the story of the warlords and gangsters who ran the country during the war, but all the time he - and the reader - never know whether Neven is telling the truth.

Benny Morris (ed.)
Making Israel
University of Michigan Press, 2008, 956.04 MOR
Benny Morris is the founding father of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged received wisdom about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their research rigorously documented crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces, including rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. In Making Israel, Morris now offers the first collection of translated articles on the New History by leading Zionist and revisionist Israeli historians, providing Americans with a firsthand view of this important debate, and enabling a better understanding of how the New Historians have influenced Israelis' awareness of their own past. The book includes contributions from eminent partisans and moderates on both sides (including Mordecai Bar-On, Uri Ram, Avi Shlaim, Anita Shapira, and Morris himself), and is well-adapted for use in courses on politics, history, and Middle Eastern and Jewish studies.

James Miller and Sarah Shah
Death in Gaza
Warner Home Video, 2006, 956.94 MIL
Directed and filmed by James Miller and written and reported by Sarah Shah, in spring 2003, they set out to Gaza to "understand how people learn to hate so deeply they’re prepared to die in order to kill". Their focus is the next generation, "the children who will make either peace or war" told through the tainted eyes of three Palestinian children indoctrinated into Jihad. Death in Gaza culminates with Miller’s own; filming the sustained attack of Israeli tanks on suspected militant residences Miller and Shah are trapped inside a house, and wait until the fighting ceases to make their move. Attempting to leave the area by waving a white flag through the darkness, Miller assumes that the Israeli soldiers will recognise him as a journalist and let his team pass. Instead, shots ring out, killing Miller instantly, the tragedy being captured by a local film crew.

Phil Grabsky
Escape from Luanda
Seventh Art Productions, 2008, 967.3 GRA
This film spans a year in the life of the only music school in Luanda, the capital of Angola, and follows these three students, each striving to make it through their course. Following a 27-year civil war, Angola is still one of the world s poorest and most dangerous places and the students often have to go hungry and face difficult opposition so that they can follow their musical ambition. Escape from Luanda is a moving, funny and enlightening story, showing above all that where there is music, there is life...