Archives de catégorie : Nonfiction

DRESSING BARBIE de Carol Spencer

A dazzling celebration of the clothes that made America’s favorite doll and the incredible woman behind them, timed to the movie release of Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling and directed by Greta Gerwig.

DRESSING BARBIE
A Celebration of the Clothes That Made America’s Favorite Doll and the Incredible Woman Behind Them
by Carol Spencer
Harper, March 2019

If you’ve ever had a Barbie doll, or you know someone who did, chances are that Barbie was dressed in one of the thousands of designs created by Carol Spencer during her unparalleled reign as a Barbie fashion designer spanning more than thirty-five years.

Illustrated with more than 100 full-color photographs, including many never-before-seen images of rare and one-of-a-kind pieces from Spencer’s private archive, Dressing Barbie is a treasure trove of some of the best and most iconic Barbie looks from the early 1960s until the late 1990s. Along with behind-the-scenes stories of how these designs came to be, Spencer reminisces about her thrilling time at Mattel working with legendary figures such as Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator, and Charlotte Johnson, the original Barbie designer, for a full, inside look into life with the beloved doll. Over the course of her career, Spencer won many accolades. She was the first designer to have her signature on the doll, the first to go on a signing tour, the first to design a limited-edition Barbie for collectors, and the designer of the biggest-selling Barbie of all time. Now, she is the first member of the inner circle to reveal the fashion world of the quintessential California girl as never before.

Carol Spencer worked for several years as a fashion designer and illustrator in the apparel industry before beginning her illustrious career at Mattel as a fashion designer for Barbie in 1963. For thirty-five years, Carol created thousands of designs for the iconic doll and watched as Mattel grew from a small business into a multi-national conglomerate. From seeing Paris fashion shows to running the Hong Kong design group in the 1980s, Carol has been around the world with Barbie. Since retiring in 1998, she has continued to reside in Los Angeles with her impressive personal collection of Barbie dolls.

MELTDOWN de Duncan Mavin

MELTDOWN charts the incredible inside story of a once venerable Swiss bank that produced a conveyor belt of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.

MELTDOWN
The Collapse of Credit Suisse
by Duncan Mavin
Pan Macmillan, September 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

It’s an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and of course, inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.

Mavin is uniquely sourced to tell the story of Credit Suisse’s scandal-ridden demise, with dozens of inside-the-room contacts that can spill exclusive details about the bank onto the page. The bank’s collapse has been the biggest shock to the financial system since the financial crisis, sparking a media frenzy. But only Duncan has access to key sources within the bank’s executive suite and inner circle that will bring this critical, rollicking story to life.

Duncan Mavin is a seasoned international financial journalist and author of the critically acclaimed The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Multi-Billion Dollar Scandal. Since 2009, he has been a reporter, editor and now columnist for Dow Jones publications including the Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong, London and New York. His writing has also appeared in Barron’s, Financial News and on Bloomberg News. He lives with his wife and three sons in the UK.

GOING NUCLEAR de Tim Gregory

In this provocative, timely and well researched book, nuclear chemist Tim Gregory argues our species’ very survival hinges on whether we choose to unleash the potential of the atom and embrace a nuclear future.

GOING NUCLEAR
How the Atom Will Save the World
by Tim Gregory
The Bodley Head (Penguin), 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

GOING NUCLEAR will be an exploration of the immense power in the centre of the atom, the areas of our world that it touches, and the potential it has to solve the biggest problems our species faces. The book retraces our relationship with nuclear through the Nuclear Revolution of the early 20th century and look towards the Nuclear Renaissance that could — and should — ensue over the coming decades. Gregory argues convincingly that there is no net zero without nuclear power.

By interweaving science, policy and environmentalism, Going Nuclear will explore the potential of the atom not only for nuclear power but also clean energy production, nuclear medicine, nuclear forensics, interplanetary exploration and atomic farming.

Tim Gregory is a a nuclear chemist for the National Nuclear Laboratory in the heart of the British nuclear industry. His academic background is in geology, planetary science, and isotope cosmochemistry, and he holds a PhD in the latter. He is also a speaker, presenter and is the author of Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made our World.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE de Jason Bell

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE
The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code
by Jason Bell
Pegasus Books, May 2024
(via Vertical Ink)

The thrilling true story of Agent A12, the first enemy of the Nazis In public life, Dr. Winthrop Picard Bell was a Harvard philosophy professor and wealthy businessman. As MI6 Secret Agent A12, he evaded gunfire and shook pursuers to break open the emerging Nazi conspiracy in electrifying 1919 Berlin. His reports, the first warning of the Nazi plot for WWII, went directly to the man known as C, the mysterious founder of MI6, and to prime ministers. But a powerful fascist politician quietly worked to suppress his alerts. Nevertheless, his intelligence sabotaged the Nazis in ways only now revealed. Bell became a spy once again in the face of WWII. In 1939, he was the first to crack Hitler’s deadliest secret code: the Holocaust. At that time the Führer was a popular politician who said he wanted peace. Could anyone believe Bell’s shocking warning? Fighting an epic intelligence war from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland to France, Germany, Canada and Washington, D.C., A12 was the real-life 007, waging a single-handed fight against madmen bent on destroying the world. Without Bell’s astounding courage, the Nazis might just have won the war.

CRACKING THE NAZI CODE, informed by recently declassified documents, is the first book to illuminate the astounding exploits of Winthrop Bell, Agent A12.

Jason Bell, Ph.D. is a professor of philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. He has served as Fulbright Professor in Germany (at Göttingen, Winthrop Bell’s alma mater), and has taught at universities in Belgium, the United States, and Canada. He was the first scholar granted exclusive access to Winthrop Pickard Bell’s classified espionage papers.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? d’Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman

Aimed at philosophers and non-philosophers alike, this is a modern argument about the ambivalence towards childbearing and how to overcome it.

WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR?
Affirming Life in an Age of Ambivalence
by Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman
St. Martin’s Press, June 2024

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, the Millennial and Gen Z generations are finding it increasingly hard to judge in its favor. WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? seeks to loosen the grip of the shallow narratives that either lament growing childlessness as a mark of cultural decline, or celebrate it as unambiguous evidence of social progress. Berg and Wiseman explore philosophical and cultural examples of this debate, whether from modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, second-wave feminists in the 1970s, or the current trend of dystopian novels and stories. In the tradition of Jenny Odell and Amia Srinivasan, Berg and Wiseman write with clear logic and passionate prose to offer those struggling the guidance necessary to move beyond their uncertainty. They argue that when we make the individual decision whether or not to have children we confront a profound philosophical question, that of the goodness of life itself. How can we justify perpetuating human life given the catastrophic harm and suffering of which we are always at once both victims and perpetrators? WHAT ARE CHILDREN FOR? concludes that we must embrace the fundamental goodness of human life—not only in theory, but in our everyday lives.

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman first explored these questions in an essay for The Point on choosing to have children, the rare work of philosophical inquiry to have gone viral; Berg recently discussed her own decision to pursue having a family in the context of the novel coronavirus in a widely read op-ed in the New York Times. Frequent collaborators and close friends, Anastasia Berg is currently based in Cambridge and will start as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University. She is expecting her first child. Rachel Wiseman lives in Chicago, where she is the managing editor of The Point, an award-winning nonfiction literary magazine.