I picked up this deceptively slim book by
chance and read it in a long afternoon.
It charts the collapse of Haile
Selassie’s reign in Ethiopia in 1972 but resonates far beyond that moment. Told in the voices of the people who served him, it’s a compelling and darkly
comic portrait of a regime whose dreams unmoored it from reality.
It would give
Vladimir Putin a sleepless night, if he had a conscience.
A "sensitive, powerful ... history" (The New York Review of Books) of a man living amidst nearly unimaginable pomp and luxury while his people teetered netween hunger and starvation.
Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, His Most Puissant Majesty and Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, reigned from 1930 until he was overthrown by the army in 1974. While the fighting still raged, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Poland's leading foreign correspondent, traveled to Ethiopia to seek out and interview Selassie's servants and closest associates on how the Emperor had ruled and why he fell. This is Kapuscinski's…
There’s
never been more pressure to turn yourself into a product, and if that’s ever
bothered you, this incisive and impassioned book shows why
that’s a symptom of larger problems.
Probing the systems that fuel our modern conflagration of politics, social
media, and predatory capitalism, Klein arrives at conclusions both chilling and
comforting. Chilling because the enemies of democracy and our planet thrive in
confusion, panic, and toxic individualism; comforting because we’ll never
find a way out until we know where we are.
What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all?
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn't. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path?…
I’d always thought of Steinbeck as
an elegant moralist, but this book reveals him as a
poet of pure joy, offering the fun of escapist fantasy without the guilty
aftertaste.
A journal of an expedition through the Gulf of California with the
biologist Ed Ricketts, the model for Cannery Row’s “Doc,” the book is a
love letter to a vanished world and time that captures the manic pleasures of
traveling with people who love nothing more than the sweaty, sunburned work of studying
the astonishing life of the sea (and, once in a while, of the shore).
In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was described by the two men in SEA OF CORTEZ, published in 1941. The day-to-day story of the trip is told here in the Log, which combines science, philosophy and high-spirited adventure.
A wild and entertaining mix of
natural history, adventure travel, and literary biography, my book sees the world through the curious eyes of the charismatic and intelligent falcons called caracaras, the people who live with them, and
the 19th-century naturalist William Henry Hudson.
Caracaras also amused and fascinated a young Charles Darwin, who met them in his journey aboard the Beagle and called them “tame and inquisitive...quarrelsome and passionate”. I traveled throughout South America, from the jungles of Guyana to the edge of Tierra del Fuego, to tell their story, and the journey left me amazed at how much remains to be learned about life on our planet.
