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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > From 1900
'Impeccably researched and sumptuous in its detail... It's a
page-turner' The Economist 'Well-paced and cleverly organised' The
Sunday Times 'Gripping' Guardian 'A pacy and deeply-reported tale'
Financial Times Longlisted for the 2021 Financial Times / McKinsey
Business Book of the Year In this compelling story of greed,
chicanery and tarnished idealism, two Wall Street Journal reporters
investigate a man who Bill Gates and Western governments entrusted
with hundreds of millions of dollars to make profits and end
poverty but now stands accused of masterminding one of the biggest,
most brazen frauds ever. Arif Naqvi was charismatic, inspiring and
self-made. The founder of the Dubai-based private-equity firm
Abraaj, he was the Key Man to the global elite searching for impact
investments to make money and do good. He persuaded politicians he
could help stabilize the Middle East after 9/11 by providing jobs
and guided executives to opportunities in cities they struggled to
find on the map. Bill Gates helped him start a billion-dollar fund
to improve health care in poor countries, and the UN and Interpol
appointed him to boards. Naqvi also won the support of President
Obama's administration and the chief of a British government fund
compared him to Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. The only
problem? In 2019 Arif Naqvi was arrested on charges of fraud and
racketeering at Heathrow airport. A British judge has approved his
extradition to the US and he faces up to 291 years in jail if found
guilty. With a cast featuring famous billionaires and statesmen
moving across Asia, Africa, Europe and America, The Key Man is the
story of how the global elite was duped by a capitalist fairy tale.
Clark and Louch's thrilling investigation exposes one of the
world's most audacious scams and shines a light on the hypocrisy,
corruption and greed at the heart of the global financial system.
'An unbelievable true tale of greed, corruption and manipulation
among the world's financial elite' Harry Markopolos, the Bernie
Madoff whistleblower
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK BY THE NEW YORK POST ALSO AVAILABLE
AS AN AUDIOBOOK A from-the-trenches view of New York Daily News and
New York Post runners and photographers as they stop at nothing to
break the story and squash their tabloid arch-rivals. When author
Mike Jaccarino was offered a job at the Daily News in 2006, he was
asked a single question: "Kid, what are you going to do to help us
beat the Post?" That was the year things went sideways at the News,
when the New York Post surpassed its nemesis in circulation for the
first time in the history of both papers. Tasked with one job-crush
the Post-Jaccarino here provides the behind-the-scenes story of how
the runners and shooters on both sides would do anything and
everything to get the scoop before their opponents. The New York
Daily News and the New York Post have long been the Hatfields and
McCoys of American media: two warring tabloids in a town big enough
for only one of them. As digital news rendered print journalism
obsolete, the fight to survive in NYC became an epic, Darwinian
battle. In America's Last Great Newspaper War, Jaccarino exposes
the untold story of this tabloid death match of such ferocity and
obsession its like has not occurred since Pulitzer- Hearst. Told
through the eyes of hungry "runners" (field reporters) and
"shooters" (photographers) who would employ phony police lights to
overcome traffic, Mike Jaccarino's memoir unmasks the
do-whatever-it-takes era of reporting-where the ends justified the
means and nothing was off-limits. His no-holds-barred account
describes sneaking into hospitals, months-long stakeouts,
infiltrating John Gotti's crypt, bidding wars for scoops,
high-speed car chases with Hillary Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and the
baby mama of a philandering congressman-all to get that coveted
front-page story. Today, few runners and shooters remain on the
street. Their age and exploits are as bygone as the News-Post war
and American newspapers, generally. Where armies once battled,
often no one is covering the story at all. Funding for this book
was provided by: Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
"Somewhere in the tangle of the subject's burden and the subject's
desire is your story."-Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic
story. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the
epic stories of marginalized people-from lonely immigrants
struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school
custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon's
friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People
collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts-including
"My Family's Slave," the Atlantic magazine cover story about the
woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that
amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American
background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and
Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and
insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs.
His articles-many originally published in the Seattle Times and the
Los Angeles Times-are brimming with enlightening details about
people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. In
their introductions to Tizon's pieces, New York Times executive
editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey
Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski,
and others salute Tizon's respect for his subjects and the beauty
and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute
to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to
chronicle the lives of others.
The devoted journalists at the Chicago Tribune have been reporting
the city's news for 170 years. As a result, the paper has amassed
an inimitable, as-it-happened history of its hometown, a city first
incorporated in 1837 that rapidly grew to become the third-largest
city in the United States. Since 2011, the Chicago Tribune has been
mining its vast archive of photos and stories for its weekly
feature Chicago Flashback, which deals with the significant people
and events that have shaped the city's history and culture from the
paper's founding in 1847 to the present day. Now the editors of the
Tribune have carefully collected the best, most interesting Chicago
Flashback features into a single coffee-table volume. Each story is
accompanied by at least one black-and-white image from the paper's
fabled photo vault located deep below Michigan Avenue's famed
Tribune Tower. Chicago Flashback offers readers a unique
perspective on the city's long and colorful history.
'Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful' - Philip Hensher, The
Spectator A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019 The
last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think,
Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously
uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career.
Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious
essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in
the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final,
fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977.
Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an
essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's
literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious,
playful, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic
credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and
dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all
brilliantly delineated.
What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true
spirit of a nation? In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to
the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their
goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle,
and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert
Mugabe's rule. In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and
critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe
Chigumadzi reflects on the 'coup that was not a coup', the telling
of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two
women - her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of
the nation.
In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them
fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of
Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since
WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an
ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who
reached land needed food, clothing, medicine and shelter, but the
international aid system broke down completely. In a way that no
one could have anticipated, volunteers arrived to help. Dana
Sachs's compelling eyewitness account weaves together the lives of
seven individuals and their families - including a British coal
miner's daughter, a Syrian mother of six, and a jill-of-all-trades
from New Zealand - who became part of this extraordinary effort.
The story of their successes, and failures, is unforgettable and
inspiring, and a clarion call for resilience and hope in the face
of despair. War had shattered people's lives. This is what happened
next.
China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated
system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet
grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent
quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist
Party are quickly stamped out. Updated throughout and available in
paperback for the first time, The Great Firewall of China draws on
James Griffiths' unprecedented access to the Great Firewall and the
politicians, tech leaders, dissidents and hackers whose lives
revolve around it. New chapters cover the suppression of
information about the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan,
disinformation campaigns in response to the exposure of the
persecution of Uyghur communities in Xinjiang and the crackdown
against the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong.
The things I've learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a
book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot
about Antonioni that they don't know. Or maybe they do even when
they don't. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I
know: it happens to me too. The cronica, a literary genre peculiar
to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to
address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical,
intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector's pieces
for the Saturday edition of Rio's leading paper, the Jornal do
Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays,
aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her
insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or
social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or
love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much
of Life: The Complete Cronicas presents a new aspect of the great
writer-at once off the cuff and spot on.
'Devastating and urgent, this book could not be more timely'
Caroline Criado Perez, award-winning and bestselling author of
Invisible Women Danielle Citron takes the conversation about
technology and privacy out of the boardrooms and op-eds to reach
readers where we are - in our bathrooms and bedrooms; with our
families and our lovers; in all the parts of our lives we assume
are untouchable - and shows us that privacy, as we think we know
it, is largely already gone. The boundary that once protected our
intimate lives from outside interests is an artefact of the
twentieth century. In the twenty-first, we have embraced a vast
array of technology that enables constant access and surveillance
of the most private aspects of our lives. From non-consensual
pornography, to online extortion, to the sale of our data for
profit, we are vulnerable to abuse -- and our laws have failed
miserably to keep up. With vivid examples drawn from interviews
with victims, activists and lawmakers from around the world, The
Fight for Privacy reveals the threat we face and argues urgently
and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right. As a
legal scholar and expert, Danielle Citron is the perfect person to
show us the way to a happier, better protected future.
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Boys in Zinc
(Paperback)
Svetlana Alexievich; Translated by Andrew Bromfield
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Haunting stories from the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the
Nobel Prize in Literature - A new translation of Zinky Boys based
on the revised text - From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a
devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties
on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a
'peace-keeping' mission, the dead were shipped back in sealed zinc
coffins. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers,
doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the
lasting effects of war. Weaving together their stories, Svetlana
Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict: the
killing and the beauty of small everyday moments, the shame of
returned veterans, the worries of all those left behind. When it
was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge
controversy for its unflinching, harrowing insight into the
realities of war.
Ce livre est la premiere monographie qui tente de presenter
l'oeuvre de Ryszard Kapuscinski dans toute sa diversite intrinseque
(journalisme d'opinion, correspondances de presse, reportages,
recits, notes essayistiques, poesie, photographie) et dans toute sa
duree, soit plus de cinquante ans: des premiers poemes au volume
posthume Lapidarium VI. Les auteurs considerent Kapuscinski avant
tout comme un ecrivain qui s'est incarne dans la figure d'un
journaliste-voyageur et qui, grace a son talent, a transforme le
reportage en outil permettant de formuler des significations
universelles tout en preservant sa sensibilite de journaliste aux
changements et aux besoins du monde. Le livre propose des
interpretations theoriques litteraires des principaux ouvrages de
Kapuscinski, mais les auteurs etudient egalement avec attention le
destin personnel de l'ecrivain qui etait souvent le heros de ses
propres textes. La biographie a ete traduite en espagnol et en
italien.
'Deeply moving, darkly funny and hugely powerful' Robert Macfarlane
'A brave, lit-up account of going mad and getting better' Jeanette
Winterson After a lifetime of ups and downs, Horatio Clare was
committed to hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act.
From hypomania in the Alps, to a complete breakdown and a locked
ward in Wakefield, this is a gripping account of how the mind loses
touch with reality, how we fall apart and how we may heal. 'One of
the most brilliant travel writers of our day takes us now to that
most challenging country, severe mental illness; and does so with
such wit, warmth and humanity' Reverend Richard Coles
What takes place when we examine texts close-up? The art of close
reading, once the closely guarded province of professional literary
critics, now underpins the everyday processes of forensic scrutiny
conducted by those brigades of citizen commentators who patrol the
realms of social media. This study examines at close quarters a
series of key English texts from the last hundred years: the novels
of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the
poetry of Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, the films of Alfred
Hitchcock and the tweets of Donald Trump. It digs beneath their
surface meanings to discover microcosmic ambiguities, allusions,
ironies and contradictions which reveal tensions and conflicts at
the heart of the paradox of patriarchal history. It suggests that
acts of close reading may offer radical perspectives upon the
bigger picture, as well as the means by which to deconstruct it. In
doing so, it suggests an alternative to a classical vision of
cultural progress characterised by irreconcilable conflicts between
genders, genres and generations.
Travelling from Madrid to The Valley of the Fallen, through Castile
and Leon and across the fiercely contested region of Catalonia,
Christopher Finnigan meets a remarkable cast of characters behind
some of the biggest political events Spain has witnessed in
decades. Whether it is the Indignados left-wing activists
rethinking society, the everyday citizens sitting in parliament, or
the Catalan separatists fighting for a new nation, The New Spanish
Revolutions meets those struggling at the heart of historic change.
Spain today finds itself in the grip of immense social upheaval,
still shaken by the financial crash of 2008 and still struggling
with its fascist past. Against a fragmented and polarised backdrop,
Christopher Finnigan discovers how individuals and ideas that were
once outside the mainstream are now shaping the nation's future.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain
Literature. 'How much risk is worth taking for so beautiful a
prize?' The Magician's Glass by award-winning writer Ed Douglas is
a collection of eight recent essays on some of the biggest stories
and best-known personalities in the world of climbing. In the title
essay, he writes about failure on Annapurna III in 1981, one of the
boldest attempts in Himalayan mountaineering on one of the most
beautiful lines - a line that remains unclimbed to this day.
Douglas writes about bitter controversies, like that surrounding
Ueli Steck's disputed solo ascent of the south face of Annapurna,
the fate of Toni Egger on Cerro Torre in 1959 - when Cesare Maestri
claimed the pair had made the first ascent, and the rise and fall
of Slovenian ace Tomaz Humar. There are profiles of two stars of
the 1980s: the much-loved German Kurt Albert, the father of the
'redpoint', and the enigmatic rock star Patrick Edlinger, a
national hero in his native France who lost his way. In Crazy
Wisdom, Douglas offers fresh perspectives on the impact
mountaineering has on local communities and the role climbers play
in the developing world. The final essay explores the relationship
between art and alpinism as a way of understanding why it is that
people climb mountains.
'A vaulting triumph of a book' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'A
master storyteller, Weidensaul communicates so much joy in the
sheer act of witnessing and such exhilaration in the advances of
the science behind what he sees that we are slow to grasp the
extent of the ecological crisis that he outlines.' Observer Bird
migration remains perhaps the most singularly compelling natural
phenomenon in the world. Nothing else combines its global sweep
with its inherent ability to engender wonder and excitement. The
past two decades have seen an explosion in our understanding of the
almost unfathomable feats of endurance and complexity involved in
bird migration - yet the science that informs these majestic
journeys is still in its infancy. Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted
writer-ornithologist Scott Weidensaul is at the forefront of this
research, and A World on the Wing sees him track some of the most
remarkable flights undertaken by birds. His own voyage of discovery
sees him sail through the storm-wracked waters of the Bering Sea;
encounter gunners and trappers in the Mediterranean; and visit a
forgotten corner of north-east India, where former headhunters have
turned one of the grimmest stories of migratory crisis into an
unprecedented conservation success. As our world comes increasingly
under threat from the effects of climate change, these ecological
miracles may provide an invaluable guide to a more sustainable
future for all species, including us. This is the rousing and
reverent story of the billions of birds that, despite the numerous
obstacles we have placed in their path, continue to head with hope
to the far horizon.
On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural
Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. On
route to a protest, local police intercepted the students and a
confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without
a trace. Hernandez reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events
of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely
the most complete picture available: her sources are unparalleled,
since she has secured access to internal government documents that
have not been made public, and to video surveillance footage the
government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernandez demolishes the
Mexican state's official version, which the Pena Nieto government
cynically dubbed the "historic truth". As her research shows, state
officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper
echelons of the PRI administration, conspired to put together a
fake case, concealing or manipulating evidence, and arresting and
torturing dozens of "suspects" who then obliged with full
"confessions" that matched the official lie. By following the role
of the various Mexican state agencies through the events in such
remarkable detail, Massacre in Mexico shows with exacting precision
who is responsible for which component of this monumental crime.
"This book is fearless and luminous and full of grace; it travels
to the edge of death and finds life there. Its attention to the
particulars of love - between the ones who will go and the ones
they will leave - is something close to sublime."--Leslie Jamison,
author of "The Empathy Exams"A nurse sleeps at the bedside of his
dying patients; a wife deceives her husband by never telling him he
has cancer; a bedridden man has to be hidden from his demented and
amorous eighty-year-old wife. In her poignant and genre-busting
debut, Susana Moreira Marques confronts us with our own mortality
and inspires us to think about what is important.Accompanying a
palliative care team, Moreira Marques travels to Tras-os-Montes, a
forgotten corner of northern Portugal, a rural area abandoned by
the young. Crossing great distances where eagles circle over the
roads, she visits villages where rural ways of life are
disappearing. She listens to families facing death and gives us
their stories in their words as well as through her own
meditations.Brilliantly blending the immediacy of oral history with
the sensibility of philosophical reportage, Moreira Marques's book
speaks about death in a fresh way.Susana Moreira Marques is a
writer and journalist. She was born in Oporto in 1976 and now lives
in Lisbon, where she writes for "Publico" and "Jornal de Negocios."
Between 2005 and 2010 Moreira Marques lived in London, working at
the BBC World Service while also serving as a correspondent for
Portuguese newspaper "Publico." Her journalism has won several
prizes, including the Premio AMI--Jornalismo Contra a Indiferenca
and the 2012 UNESCO "Human Rights and Integration" Journalism Award
(Portugal).Julia Sanches's translations have appeared in "Suelta,"
"The Washington Review," "Asymptote," "Two Lines," and "Revista
Machado," amongst others. She currently lives in New York City.
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