Squarely challenging a culture obsessed with success, an acclaimed philosopher argues that failure is vital to a life well lived, curing us of arrogance and self-deception and engendering humility instead. Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life's challenges. Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning-and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but transformative. In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. It begins by examining the defiant choices of the French mystic Simone Weil, who, in sympathy with exploited workers, took up factory jobs that her frail body could not sustain. From there we turn to Mahatma Gandhi, whose punishing quest for purity drove him to ever more extreme acts of self-abnegation. Next we meet the self-styled loser E. M. Cioran, who deliberately turned his back on social acceptability, and Yukio Mishima, who reveled in a distinctly Japanese preoccupation with the noble failure, before looking to Seneca to tease out the ingredients of a good life. Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Bradatan concludes that while success can make us shallow, our failures can lead us to humbler, more attentive, and better lived lives. We can do without success, but we are much poorer without the gifts of failure.

For more than five decades Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989. While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and enduring love. This love-awaited biography of two of South Africa's most respected and loved figures has been written by their daughter-in-law Elinor. Elinor Sisulu is a journalist who has had unrivalled access to the subjects of her book and to personal and family letters as well as previously classified documents from the security police and prisons. She tells a moving story of a couple who in their different ways have embodied the struggle against injustice and oppression in South Africa.

'A book of women and water , babies and art - the herstory of Ireland - but mostly this is a book about the raw, riotous, brutally beautiful act of being alive.' - Kerri ni Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places A map of motherhood, Milk is at once a gentle and meditative story of one woman's experience of new motherhood as well as a confronting and often painful examination of the experience of having children in contemporary Ireland. Alice Kinsella is a young mother, giving birth to her son in her mid-twenties, adrift in a new town and navigating her newly accompanied life. A powerful and yet delicate mix of the personal and political, Milk is an unflinching and unique memoir that looks at the experience of motherhood against the backdrop of a seemingly changed Ireland.

In this poignant, hilarious and deeply intimate call to arms, Hollywood's most powerful woman, the mega-talented creator of Grey's Anatomy and Scandal and executive producer of How to Get Away with Murder, reveals how saying YES changed her life - and how it can change yours too.

With three hit shows on television and three children at home, Shonda Rhimes had lots of good reasons to say no when invitations arrived. Hollywood party? No. Speaking engagement? No. Media appearances? No. And to an introvert like Shonda, who describes herself as 'hugging the walls' at social events and experiencing panic attacks before press interviews, there was a particular benefit to saying no: nothing new to fear. Then came Thanksgiving 2013, when Shonda's sister Delorse muttered six little words at her: "You never say yes to anything".

Profound, impassioned and laugh-out-loud funny, in Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes reveals how saying YES changed - and saved - her life. And inspires readers everywhere to change their own lives with one little word: Yes.

J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar--including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler--took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.

The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller

This is the age of addiction, a condition so epidemic, so all encompassing and ubiquitous that unless you are fortunate enough to be an extreme case, you probably don't know that you have it.

What unhealthy habits and attachments are holding your life together? Are you unconsciously dependent on food? Bad relationships? A job that doesn't fulfill you? Numb, constant perusal of your phone, looking for what?

My qualification for writing this book is not that I am better than you, it's that I am worse. I am an addict, addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, money, love and fame.

The program in Recovery has given Russell Brand freedom from all addictions and it will do the same for you.

This system offers nothing less than liberation from self-centredness, a new perspective, freedom from the illusion of suffering for anyone who is willing to take the necessary steps.

One might as well start with Séraphin: twenty-four years old, playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek. In a few weeks he will leave the confines of his family life for cosmopolitan Cape Town where his friends, parties, conquests and controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school will deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant parents have for their children when they are forced to leave home and settle in new countries: a degree from one of South Africa’s most prestigious universities.

For Séraphin, the coming year promises to be felicitous. But a year is more than the sum of its parts and en route to the future the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived. The Eternal Audience of One follows the intersecting lives of Séraphin and a host of eclectic characters from pre- and post-1994 Rwanda, colonial and post-independence Windhoek, Paris and Brussels in the ’70s, the crowded public schools of Nairobi, as well as the hormone-saturated clubs and streets of Cape Town. From one of Africa’s emerging literary voices comes a piquant modern epic of family, friendship and migration.

Met hierdie unieke boek vertel Nataniël die verhaal van ’n kindertyd in drie klein dorpies en een groot voorstad, ’n era waartydens reëls blindelings gevolg is en oor ’n jong seun met ’n oorweldigende vrees vir die gewone. Kyk na my is Nataniël se eerste volwaardige memoir. 

From beloved spiritual writer and Catholic leader Gregory Floyd comes a moving meditation on the power of memory and how God is often more clearly seen when we look back. This is a book about memory, about what stays in the mind, and why. It is a book about the presence of God in our lives and the sights, sounds, words, and experiences that become unforgettable. Beginning with a single word he heard in the middle of the night-one that changed his life-this powerful memoir by Gregory Floyd asks the question: without memory, who are we? It is a meditation on beauty, marriage, family, and prayer, asking of the memories that each implants: what do they reveal? Where do they lead? -and witnessing to their potential to draw us to God.

When Letshego Zulu set off with her husband, South African racing champion Gugulethu Zulu, to conquer Mount Kilimanjaro in July 2016, she had no idea that she would return to South Africa days later with her husband’s body in a coffin. Known and loved as SA’s Adventure Couple, the husband and wife team were brimming with excitement at being part of the 42-strong team of the Trek4Mandela initiative, attempting to summit the world’s highest free-standing mountain.

Along the way, Gugulethu complained about a scratchy throat but seemed fit to scale the 5 895 m peak. The doctor on the expedition gave him the all clear. On 17 July, the couple were separated as Gugu, who seemed to be struggling with the altitude, elected to join the slower team heading for the Kibo peak.

By the time the couple rejoined that evening at the base station, Gugu was deeply exhausted. Letshego helplessly watched as an energy drip was attached to her husband, which she later discovered was a medical faux pas at high altitudes. Within hours, his breathing had become gurgling gasps for air. Letshego’s blood turned to ice; it sounded like her husband was drowning. The camp doctor decided that Gugu, now in medical emergency mode, needed to descend. In the middle of the icy night, along with two guides, team leader Richard Mabaso and her husband strapped to a crude metal stretcher, Letshego ran down the treacherous mountain for eight hours in the black night behind her husband to find help.

I Choose to Live is both a tragic and inspiring memoir told in mesmerising detail by Letshego Zulu. As much as it is about the death of a beloved husband and the 17-year-long relationship the two shared, it is also a remarkable story of a wife’s courage and stamina as she tries to make sense of her loss and find life after Gugu’s untimely death. Letshego’s wish is that after reading her story, readers will be inspired to choose to live, to really live.

'Stunning . . . Built like a thriller, moving, wise and illuminated on every page with love' -Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat When Carolyn Hays's child made clear to the family that they were all wrong, he was not a boy, but, in fact, a girl, the Hays shifted pronouns, adopted a nickname and encouraged her to dress as she felt comfortable. One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on their door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this threat that instilled in them a deep-seated fear for their child's safety in the Republican state they called home. And so they uprooted their lives to the more trans-accepting Northeast United States, though they were never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation's core. Intimate, lyrical and thought-provoking, A Girlhood is an ode to Hays's brilliant, brave child, as well as a cathartic revisit of the pain of the past. It tells of the brutal truths of being trans, of the sacrificial nature of motherhood, and of the lengths a family will go to shield their youngest from the cruel realities of the world. Hays asks us all to love better, for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Girlhood is a celebration of difference, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future, but moreover, it is a love letter to a child who has always known herself and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

In The Allies on the Rhine Skrjabina describes the coming of the Allies to the Rhineland, the occupation, and the first clear signs of the recovery of war-shattered Germany. She describes what occurred and how it was interpreted at the time by a keen observer who had lived under Soviet, Nazi, American, and French rule. She describes the first chaotic days of the occupation when instead of the calm and peace expected as a remit of the American advance, there was fearful chaos. She shows clearly that as the main allied forces moved on there was no real law and order and that she and the frightened populace were often terrorized by marauding youthful former work camp inmates over whom there was no effective control.

Kan ʼn rock-ster op ʼn Karooplaas bly en werk? Natuurlik, dis presies wat Mianke van den Hever van Hanover is en doen.

Dié besondere plaasnooi, wat met Down-sindroom gebore is, boer en leef haar uit tussen perde, skape, beeste, wild, klein diertjies in die veld, haar honde en die plaasmense op Beestekuil. Pa GP het vertel dat Mianke van kleins af ʼn boek wou skryf, maar dat die verstaan van letters en woorde haar nie beskore is nie. GP vra of ek kan help om dié droom te verwesenlik?

Sy het haar netjies voorbereide storie uit haar kop aan my vertel en dit is hier op skrif gestel, soos sy dit wou hê.