All information sourced from publishers.
*The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, *Nicholas Niarchos
Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition” – the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s…
All information sourced from publishers.
*The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth, *Nicholas Niarchos
Congo is rich. Swaths of the war-torn African country lack basic infrastructure, and, after many decades of colonial occupation, its people are officially among the poorest in the world. But hidden beneath the soil are vast quantities of cobalt, lithium, copper, tin, tantalum, tungsten, and other treasures. Recently, this veritable periodic table of resources has become extremely valuable because these metals are essential for the global “energy transition” – the plan for wealthy nations to wean themselves off fossil fuels by shifting to sustainable forms of energy, such as solar and wind. The race to electrify the world’s economy has begun, and China has a considerable head start. From Indonesia to South America to Central Africa, Beijing has invested in mines and infrastructure for decades. But the US has begun fighting back with massive investments of its own, as well as sanctions and disruptive tariffs.
In this rush for green energy, the world has become utterly reliant on resources unearthed far away and willfully blind to the terrible political, environmental, and social consequences of their extraction. If the Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses such riches, why are its children routinely descending deep into treacherous mines to dig with the most rudimentary of tools, or in some cases, their bare hands? Why are Indonesia’s seas and skies being polluted in a rush for battery metals? Why is the Western Sahara, a source for phosphates, still being treated like a colony? Who must pay the price for progress?
Nicolas Niarchos reveals how the scramble to control these metals and their production is overturning the world order, just as the global race to drill for oil shaped the 20th century. Exploring the advent of the lithium-ion battery and tracing the supply chain for its production, Niarchos tells the story both of the people driving these tectonic changes and those whose lives are being upended. He reveals the true, devastating consequences of our best intentions and helps us prepare for an uncertain future. If you have ever used a smartphone or driven an electric vehicle, you are implicated.
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God, Peter Ormerod
In this wide-ranging biography, Peter Ormerod explores the quest for spirituality that powered David Bowie’s creativity from his earliest recordings to his death-defying final album. Bowie’s genre-expanding, era-crossing genius had an extraordinary impact on popular culture but his lifelong search for spiritual truth and enlightenment has been overlooked.
From Bowie’s first musical encounters as a choirboy, this book traces his spiritual obsessions over the years. As a young musician at the start of his career, he was enraptured by Tibetan Buddhism. It was the first step in a spiritual journey that would generate his most profound lyrics and music. From the Kabbalah-influenced tracks of Station to Station to Ziggy Stardust’s messiah complex and the profound affinity between Heroes and Christian thought, Ormerod sheds new light on the spiritual traditions behind Bowie’s genius.
Taking Bowie’s spiritual explorations and faith seriously, Ormerod shows us how this quest for meaning propelled him through his darkest moments and biggest successes, lending his music a timelessness and depth that has spoken to so many people across the world. Whether experiencing a dark night of the soul in LA during his occult phase or reciting the Lord’s prayer in front of thousands of concertgoers, Bowie was always searching for that universal truth that lies beyond everyday reality.
Be More Bird: Life Lessons from a Hawk, Candida Meyrick
The twelve-week-old Harris Hawk, Sophia Houdini Whitewing – aka Bird – is trained over the following months by the author and her children to be most herself: a skilled hunter and dazzling aerial gymnast, whose flights enrapture the family and set the author on a deepening love affair with life on the wing.
Working with her Harris Hawk over the following years reveals a new world: confronting mortality daily, moving through a liminal landscape, part sky-, part earth-bound. And every day’s hunting brings a new life-lesson. Bird opens up a way of being that is everything the author most longs to be: courageous, compassionate, independent, full of joy – free as a bird.
Be More Bird charts this deepening relationship between bird and woman, set in one of Britain’s wildest landscapes. It reveals the subtle dynamic possible between human and bird, illuminating the ancient, worldwide art of falconry and its urgent relevance for the modern mind: the importance of untethering our souls and belief systems and re-establishing a connection with the wilder world.
Three Wild Dogs (and the truth): A Memoir, Markus Zusak
What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs – Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?
The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed … not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour.
There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family. Three Wild Dogs (and the truth) is a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever.
Another Man in the Street, Caryl Phillips
In the early Sixties, Victor “Lucky” Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill – then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman.
Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in London to the present day, Caryl Phillips paints a striking portrait of a flawed but vividly alive man grappling with the lifelong disillusionments of exile – and the uniquely complicated identity of the Windrush generation.
*Another Man in the Street *is a story of loss, displacement, belonging, and the triumph of Black resilience – epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate; and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London.
The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy, Brooke Newman
*The Crown’s Silence *is the untold story of the British royal family’s relationship to slavery from the reign of Elizabeth I to the present. It will be the first history of the British monarchy told through the lens of its intimate, centuries-long relationship with African slave trading, slavery, and racial injustice.
The book exposes the ways in which the British monarchy invested in, expanded, and defended the transatlantic slave trade for nearly three centuries and how it continues to profit from systems of racial exploitation to this day – while remaining silent in the face of that legacy. It will reveal how the Crown effectively ruptured and reshaped Britain’s national narrative and collective memory of its own colonial past, as well as the consequences of that deafening silence.
As former British colonies in the Caribbean consider severing their ties with the Crown (and the British royal family sends emissaries to try to keep them), *The Crown’s Silence *tells a history that is very much in the headlines – and will no doubt continue to be.
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