Two Weeks in November is the thrilling, surreal, unbelievable and often very funny true story of four would-be enemies – a high-ranking politician, an exiled human rights lawyer, a dangerous spy and a low-key white businessman turned political fixer – who team up to help unseat one of the world’s longest serving dictators, Robert Mugabe.

What begins as an improbable adventure destined for failure, marked by a mixture of bravery, strategic cunning and bumbling naiveté, soon turns into the most sophisticated political-military operation in African history. By virtue of their being together, the unlikely team of misfit rivals is suddenly in position to spin what might have been seen as an illegal coup into a mass popular uprising that the world – and millions of Zimbabweans – will enthusiastically support.

Impeccably researched, deftly written, and told in the style of a political thriller, Two Weeks in November is Ocean’s 11 meets Game of Thrones: a real-world life or death chess match for the future of a country where the political endgame is never a forgone conclusion.

WINNER OF THE 2020 CONNECTICUT BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOOK CLUBS IN 2021 BY BOOKBROWSE "Perkins' richly detailed narrative is a reminder that gender equity has never come easily, but instead if borne from the exertions of those who precede us."-Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without. In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "one thousand male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education. Or was it? The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today. "Yes, Yale needed women, but it didn't really want them... Anne Gardiner Perkins tells how these young women met the challenge with courage and tenacity and forever changed Yale and its chauvinistic motto of graduating 1,000 male leaders every year."-Lynn Povich, author of The Good Girls Revolt

What happened on January 29, 1979, wasn’t a crime of passion. This was something new: a child shooting children she didn’t know, from her home across the street, for no reason that made sense.

In 1979, Brenda Spencer, a seemingly average teenage girl living in a nice suburban neighbourhood, made and executed plans that would place her in infamy and set a violent and terrifying national precedent.

She receives a rifle for Christmas and a month later set her sights and opens fire on the elementary school across the street.

The event marks the bloody beginning of the American phenomenon of school shootings. Before Columbine and Sandy Hook, there was Brenda Spencer...

I Don’t Like Mondays sifts through the mythology that has sprung up around this fateful day, presenting the raw and riveting facts for the first time. This book lays bare this seemingly average teenage girl’s brutal motives and subsequent arrest.

Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor spent years traversing every corner of London, getting to know the most interesting of its residents--the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub door attendant, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard. Now, in Londoners, this diverse cast of characters--rich and poor, young and old, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)--shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before. With candor and humor, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London, scripting the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

A magisterial history of South Africa, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present.

Leonard Thompson, a leading scholar in southern African history and politics, provides a fresh and penetrating exploration of the country's history, from the earliest known human inhabitation of the region to the present, focusing primarily on experiences of its black inhabitants.

The Fourth Edition of this classic text brings South Africa's history up to date with a new chapter chronicling the first presidential term of Mbeki and ending with the funeral of Nelson Mandela.

In 1884 begin Hendrik Witbooi en sy Namavolk met 'n profetiese trek na die vrugbare noorde om aan die droogte van die Kalahariwoestyn te ontsnap. Terselfdertyd stap die keiserlike afgevaardigde dr. Göring sowat 'n honderd kilometer daarvandaan aan land in die nuwe Duitse kolonie Suidwes-Afrika - die huidige Namibië.

Daarop volg 'n stryd om lewe en dood tussen die Duitse Schutztruppe en die Afrikane wat vir hul onafhanklikheid veg.

Die honderde briewe wat deur Hendrik Witbooi aan Duitse goewerneurs, Engelse magistrate en Afrikaleiers geskryf is, het aan Conny Braam unieke insig gegee in die wêreld van Witbooi: sy liefde vir die ou volk van die Khoisan, die leringe van sendeling Olpp, sy verontrusting oor die Westerse kredietstelsel wat van sy volk slawe sou maak en sy intense verdriet toe hy besef dat keiser Wilhelm II die totale vernietiging van die opstandige inheemse bevolking eis.

In 1904 lei die tagtigjarige Hendrik nog een keer die opstand teen die Duitse koloniale leër. Hy sou die geskiedenis ingaan as een van die grootste vryheidstryders wat Afrika geken het.

“'n Verhaal wat onder geen omstandighede vergeet mag word nie.” - Trouw

India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

This book translates and contextualizes the recollections of men and women who built, lived, and worked in some of the factory compounds relocated from China's most cosmopolitan city-Shanghai. Small Third Line factories became oases of relatively prosperous urban life among more impoverished agricultural communities. These accounts, plus the guiding questions, contextual notes, and further readings accompanying them, show how everyday lives fit into the sweeping geopolitical changes in China and the world during the Cold War era. Furthermore, they reveal how the Chinese Communist Party's military-industrial strategies have shaped China's economy and society in the post-Mao era. The approachable translations and insight into areas of life rarely covered by political or diplomatic histories like sexuality and popular culture make this book highly accessible for classroom use and the general-interest reader.

As a subculture, cloistered monastic nuns live hidden from public view by choice. Once a woman joins the cloister and makes final vows, she is almost never seen and her voice is not heard; her story is essentially nonexistent in the historical record and collective, public history.
From interviews conducted over six years, Abbie Reese tells the stories of the Poor Clare Colettine Order, a cloistered contemplative order at the Corpus Christi Monastery in Rockford, Illinois. Seldom leaving their 25,000-square-foot gated enclosure, members of this community embrace an extreme version of poverty and anonymity - a separation that enables them to withdraw from the world to devote their lives to prayer. This removal, they contend, allows them to have a greater impact on humanity than if they maintained direct contact with loved ones and strangers.
Dedicated to God explores individual and cultural identity through oral history interviews with several generations of nuns, focusing on the origins and life stories of the women who have chosen to become members of one of the strictest religious orders. But the narrative is also one of a collective memory and struggle against extinction and modernity, a determination to create community within the framework of ancient rules.
The author's stunning photographs of their dual worlds, religious and quotidian, add texture to the narrative.
This artistic and ethnographic work highlights the countercultural values and dedication of individuals who, at incredible personal cost, live for love of God and humanity, out of faith in what cannot be seen, and with the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

The volume demonstrates the cultural centrality of the oral tradition for Iranian studies. It contains contributions from scholars from various areas of Iranian and comparative studies, among which are the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian tradition with its wide network of influences in late antique Mesopotamia, notably among the Jewish milieu; classical Persian literature in its manifold genres; medieval Persian history; oral history; folklore and more. The essays in this collection embrace both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, both verbal and visual media, as well as various language communities (Middle Persian, Persian, Tajik, Dari) and geographical spaces (Greater Iran in pre-Islamic and Islamic medieval periods; Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan of modern times). Taken as a whole, the essays reveal the unique blending of oral and literate poetics in the texts or visual artefacts each author focuses upon, conceptualizing their interrelationship and function.

Outside the imagination, witches don't exist. But in Poland and in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. For the first time in English, Michael Ostling tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant-women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous of crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, Ostling also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host-desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of demonic sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self-imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft Ostling explores the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist, and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

Once the Maroons escaped from slavery and established their communities in the remote interior of Suriname, attention shifted from military threat to internal danger. As they faced these dangers in an unknown rainforest, they sought refuge in prophetic movements directed by charismatic religious leaders. This book charts the history of Okanisi religious movements from their escape to the present day. It is based on sixty years of fieldwork by the late Bonno Thoden van Velzen and Ineke van Wetering, archival research and oral histories. Prophets of Doom is a tribute to Okanisi society and reflects decades of research and dedication.

When the slogans are louder than the facts, evidence becomes a moral imperative.

In Israel On Trial, United States District Judge Roy K. Altman brings legal rigor to the world’s most contentious debate. Applying courtroom-tested standards—burden of proof, corroboration, chain of custody—he examines claims of colonialism, apartheid, and genocide with dispassionate precision.

In an era shaped by viral slogans and curated outrage, Judge Altman offers a disciplined method for discerning truth from propaganda. Through historical records, archaeological evidence, genetic data, and international law, Israel On Trial shows what it means to demand proof—and what’s at stake when we stop asking for it.

Key takeaways include:

• How to evaluate modern political claims using legal reasoning
• Why historical evidence still matters in present-day discourse
• What international law actually says about occupation, apartheid, and genocide
• How antisemitic tropes have evolved into mainstream talking points
• A framework for intellectual integrity in an age of ideological warfare

This is not just a book about Israel. It’s a guide for anyone who believes facts still matter.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Ghost Wars, this is the inside story of America's long and ruinous relationship with Saddam Hussein.

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its ruinous, decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein.

Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons programme, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives through understanding his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader - a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of many more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances in his paranoia, resentments and inconsistencies - even when the stakes were incredibly high.

Using unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, The Achilles Trap is a remarkable picture of a dictator who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, it is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy and vanity - on both sides - led to avoidable errors of statecraft: ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change our political landscape.

A new history of the idea of Europe from Ancient Greece to the present.

What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe, award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before - as the history of an idea, and a collective identity.

Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves.

Grappling with the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2,500 years.

Incorporating many rare photographs--most never made public before--from the family albums of survivors who tell their stories in this volume, Harvard professor Julie Silver, M.D., and historian Daniel Wilson help readers understand the sheer terror that gripped parents of young children every spring and summer during the first half of the 20th century as polio epidemics ran rampant. Interviewed as part of the Polio Oral History Project directed by Silver and funded by Harvard, foundations, and private donors, the people featured in this book describe what is arguably the most feared scourge of modern times. Polio killed and maimed millions of Americans. Silver, Wilson, and their interviewees take us into homes and across time to understand the disease's effect on the family and the community. Testimonies are included from people who worked in polio wards, as well as from those involved in worldwide eradication efforts. The book also addresses the emergence of the polio and disability rights movement, the challenges of post-polio syndrome, and the state of polio research and developments today. And it explores the concern that polio could return in an even more vicious form as a result of bioterrorism. This work will be of interest to anyone intrigued by health and medical history; infectious disease and other epidemics; the psychological effects of disease on children, adults, and communities; politics in the Roosevelt era; and bioterrorism.

In this compelling collection of oral histories, more than seventy-five peacemakers describe how they say no to war-making in the strongest way possible--by engaging in civil disobedience and paying the consequences in jail or prison. These courageous resisters leave family and community and life on the outside in their efforts to direct U.S. policy away from its militarism. Many are Catholic Workers, devoting their lives to the works of mercy instead of the works of war. They are homemakers and carpenters and social workers and teachers who are often called "faith-based activists." They speak from the left of the political perspective, providing a counterpoint to the faith-based activism of the fundamentalist Right.

In their own words, the narrators describe their motivations and their preparations for acts of resistance, the actions themselves, and their trials and subsequent jail time. We hear from those who do their time by caring for their families and managing communities while their partners are imprisoned. Spouses and children talk frankly of the strains on family ties that a life of working for peace in the world can cause.

The voices range from a World War II conscientious objector to those protesting the recent war in Iraq. The book includes sections on resister families, the Berrigans and Jonah House, the Plowshares Communities, the Syracuse Peace Council, and Catholic Worker houses and communities.

The introduction by Dan McKanan situates these activists in the long tradition of resistance to war and witness to peace.