Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Nonfiction

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE de Jennifer Ashley Wright

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is a little bit You Never Forget Your First, a little bit The Knick, a dash of The Age of Innocence, and a sprinkle of The Shawshank Redemption.

BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE
by Jennifer Ashley Wright
Hachette Books, Spring 2023

This sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history stars Madame Restell, a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, who was a celebrity in her era and a Moira Rose-esque figure with a flair for high fashion and petty public beefs. The story of Restell’s struggle to care for New York’s unmarried women—providing abortions, birth control, and other assistance—in defiance of increasing persecution from powerful men, it ends not in outright tragedy, but with a glorious, life-affirming, bittersweet twist. That this book doubles as a history of women’s health—and the propaganda on which the “pro-life” movement was founded—makes it not just entertaining, but profoundly comforting for feminist readers. Few and far between are the books expanding our sense of hope, humor, and what’s possible for women’s rights in this politicized arena, one which augurs some real downer developments in the coming years. BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE does just that, and it does so in a sumptuous, character-driven, frequently funny package.

Jennifer Ashley Wright has written beloved pop history collections from It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon (Holt) to the forthcoming She Kills Me, an illustrated field guide to righteous women who have committed murder (Abrams Image). BEHOLD THE TRIUMPH OF VIRTUE is Wright’s first work of single narrative history.

PARADISE OF THORNS de Aidan Hartley

The irresistible account of building a life on the frontier of climate change in Africa’s last wilderness, by the bestselling author of The Zanzibar Chest.

PARADISE OF THORNS: Adventures in an African Wilderness
by Aidan Hartley
Atlantic Monthly Press, Spring 2022

Aidan Hartley is the bestselling author of The Zanzibar Chest, which was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson and Duff Cooper Prizes and appeared on best of the year lists from the Economist and Publishers Weekly. In his new book, Hartley chronicles an adventure in one of Africa’s last patches of wilderness. Concerned by the increasing violence of city life, Hartley moves north with his young family. His aim is to acquire a herd of cattle and live alongside the Samburu, a tribe of nomads who for centuries have lived in harmony with immense herds of wildlife in an unspoiled natural paradise north of Mount Kenya. The family buys a tract of remote desert where they carve out a life from scratch, establishing a ranch in a rugged terrain still teeming with elephants, lions, and other wildlife. Over the next seventeen years in this harsh Eden, the family builds a home and learns to live off the land. There are scorpions and snakes under every stone, charging buffalos, and leopards stealing through camp—but there are no fences in the endless landscape and in the night sky far from towns, the stars twinkle brighter than anywhere. As they build their farm alongside their Samburu neighbors, Hartley finds that the nomads’ way of life has been thrown off balance by environmental collapse and corrupt politics. Worsening droughts instill tribal tensions as these once-proud people compete over dwindling resources. And when a demagogue gains power in Hartley’s district, he uses the unpredictable rains to incite division and bloodshed—leading armed militias into wildlife conservation areas and farming hamlets where villagers are murdered, elephants are poached, and the pastures are worn down to dust. In the end, the demagogue is beaten at the polls by an enlightened Samburu woman famous for breastfeeding her baby in parliament, the scented African rains finally arrive to wash away the bad memories, and harmony returns. The nomads find redemption in a great coming of age ceremony for their young generation. A mother cheetah births a litter of cubs on the plains above the Hartleys’ home and the family resolves to preserve nature in what’s left of paradise. In this age of environmental collapse, PARADISE OF THORNS gives us a unique view from the frontline of climate change in Africa’s last wild spaces. It is infused with the romantic spirit of all writers seeking their own redemption in the natural world—or at least what’s left of it.

Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and grew up in East Africa. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest, an international bestseller that was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson and Duff Cooper Prizes. He has covered the Balkans, the Middle East, and Russia for Reuters and currently writes a column about Africa for the Spectator in London. He lives in Laikipia, in northern Kenya with his wife and two children.

ROCK CONCERT de Marc Myers

From renowned music journalist Marc Myers comes a lively, entertaining, wide-ranging oral history of the golden age of the rock concert based on over ninety interviews with musicians, promoters, stagehands, and others who contributed to the huge cultural phenomenon that is live rock.

ROCK CONCERT: The Oral History of a Rite of Passage
by Marc Myers
Grove Press, November 2021

Wall Street Journal contributing writer and acclaimed music journalist Marc Myers dives into the fascinating history of rock ‘n’ roll in ROCK CONCERT. Myers’s Anatomy of a Song received high praise: the New York Times Book Review raved that “each story is a pleasure to read and will deepen your listening experience.” Myers raises the bar in his enthralling new book, informed by riveting interviews with influential people from the raucous rock ‘n’ roll scene through the ages.
Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience—and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In ROCK CONCERT, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.
Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters, and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio, like Alan Freed in Cleveland and New York; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone’s Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock’s stratospheric rise.
ROCK CONCERT provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll through the lens of live performances — spanning from the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the ’60s, to the growing arena tours of the ’70s and ’80s. Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the ’60s, the Grateful Dead’s free flowing jams, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colorful anecdotes, ROCK CONCERT will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Marc Myers is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, where he writes about rock, soul, and jazz, as well as the arts. He is the author of the critically acclaimed books Anatomy of a Song and Why Jazz Happened, and posts daily at JazzWax.com, winner of the 2015 Jazz Journalists Association’s award for Jazz Blog of the Year.

TOMORROWMIND de Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin Seligman

How to adapt and thrive in the workplace in an uncertain future filled with change and automation? TOMORROWMIND offers readers—workers, managers, and executives alike—explicit, evidence-based guidance on positive psychology practices to offer a hopeful road map of how to tackle these challenges head on.

TOMORROWMIND:
Flourishing in the Future of Work
by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin Seligman
Atria, Fall 2022/Spring 2023

In recent years a vast literature, from reports from all the major global political and economic bodies to popular books like Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots and Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, has emerged to document and foretell the unprecedented scale of change facing the global workforce as the Age of Automation dawns. The evidence is overwhelming—and, at first glance, frightening. Forty-two percent of the job skills we use today will be obsolete by 2022. Eighty percent of US workers will have their jobs replaced, or their wages reduced, by automation in the new decade. We can expect, within the next ten years, that we won’t be choosing our careers once in a lifetime, but continually, across a wide range of industries. Our average job tenure will be under two years. Our job skills will expire every 18 months. More and more of our work will be done remotely, alone, or with rotating teams. The scale of the shift dwarfs that of all other eras, including the Industrial Revolution, and it poses a unique set of challenges to human wellbeing. In TOMORROWMIND, Gabriella Kellerman and Martin Seligman ask the question other thinkers on the subject have so far avoided: if, today, we sit on the cusp of the most turbulent changes to work society has ever faced, how will that change us? How will we survive? And more importantly, how can most of us thrive?
Surviving in this new world of work means, first, understanding these challenges, and second, intentionally developing skills to overcome them. TOMORROWMIND will offer readers—workers, managers, and executives alike—explicit, evidence-based guidance on navigating through the worst of what the future holds. Calling on the tenets of positive psychology and prospective psychology, disciplines pioneered by Seligman, and supported by the vast data emerging from BetterUp Labs—the basic science arm of the global virtual coaching company BetterUp, where their collaborators include Adam Grant, Roy Baumeister, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Rebecca Goldstein—they argue that automation and constant change don’t have to be cause for alarm or despair. On the contrary: the coming disruption presents remarkable opportunities for each of us to push the boundaries of our cognitive and emotional skills. TOMORROWMIND will paint a picture of human thriving, not despite these challenges, but because of them.

Prince Harry has agreed to be the « Chief Impact Officer » for BetterUp, which is intricately connected to TOMORROWMIND. It’s too early to say whether/how Prince Harry will be involved in the promotion but the news of his hiring has greatly increased the profile of BetterUp. Read more about this here.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD is the Chief Innovation Officer for the $700M behavior change company BetterUp, and the head of BetterUp Labs, where she leads strategic efforts to develop the next generation of offerings in behavior change technology.
Martin Seligman, PhD is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Positive Psychology Center, former president of the American Psychological Association, and a scientific advisory board member of BetterUp Labs. Called the “founder of Positive Psychology,” he is the author of over 30 books for both scholarly and trade audiences, including FLOURISH, AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS, and LEARNED OPTIMISM. His books have been translated into fifty languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide.

THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE de Mari K. Eder

For fans of Radium Girls and history and WWII buffs, THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE takes you inside the lives and experiences of 15 unknown women heroes from the Greatest Generation, the women who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen during WWII―in and out of uniform, for theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

THE GIRLS WHO STEPPED OUT OF LINE:
Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II
by Mari K. Eder
Sourcebooks, August 2021

The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line are the heroes of the Greatest Generation that you hardly ever hear about. These women who did extraordinary things didn’t expect thanks and shied away from medals and recognition. Despite their amazing accomplishments, they’ve gone mostly unheralded and unrewarded. No longer. These are the women of World War II who served, fought, struggled, and made things happen―in and out of uniform. Liane B. Russell fled Austria with nothing and later became a renowned U.S. scientist whose research on the effects of radiation on embryos made a difference to thousands of lives. Gena Turgel was a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Bergen-Belsen and cared for the young Anne Frank, who was dying of typhus. Gena survived and went on to write a memoir and spent her life educating children about the Holocaust. Ida and Louise Cook were British sisters who repeatedly smuggled out jewelry and furs and served as sponsors for refugees, and they also established temporary housing for immigrant families in London. Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder wrote this book because she knew their stories needed to be told―and the sooner the better. For theirs is a legacy destined to embolden generations of women to come.

Mari K. Eder is a retired U.S. Army Major General, a renowned speaker and author, and a thought leader on strategic communication and leadership. General Eder is the former Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve Joint and Special Troops Support Command, former Deputy Chief of the Army Reserve and former Deputy Chief of Public Affairs for the U.S. Army. General Eder is the author of Leading the Narrative: The Case for Strategic Communication, published by the Naval Institute Press.