What would you do if you discovered that the food you have been told is good for you is actually the cause of your ill health …?

In December 2010, Professor Tim Noakes was introduced to a way of eating that was contrary to everything he had been taught and was accepted as conventional nutrition ‘wisdom’. Having observed the benefits of the low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) lifestyle first-hand, and after thorough and intensive research, Noakes enthusiastically revealed his findings to the South African public in 2012. The backlash from his colleagues in the medical establishment was as swift as it was brutal, and culminated in a misconduct inquiry launched by the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA). The subsequent hearing lasted well over a year, but Noakes ultimately triumphed, being found not guilty of unprofessional conduct in April 2017.

In Lore of Nutrition, he explains the science behind the LCHF/Banting diet, and why he champions this lifestyle despite the constant persecution and efforts to silence him. He also discusses at length what he has come to see as a medical and scientific code of silence that discourages anyone in the profession from speaking out against the current dietary guidelines. Experienced journalist Marika Sboros provides the full backstory to the HPCSA hearing, which reads like something out of a spy novel.

Written in an accessible style, Lore of Nutrition is informative, highly controversial and an eye-opener for anyone who cares about their health.

The riveting account of Nvidia, the tech company that has exploded in value for its artificial intelligence computing hardware, and Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s charismatic, uncompromising CEO.
 
In June of 2024, spurred by the frenzy of investment following the launch of ChatGPT, and thirty-one years after its founding in a Denny’s restaurant, Nvidia became the most-valuable corporation on Earth. In  The Thinking Machine,  acclaimed journalist Stephen Witt recounts the unlikely story of how a manufacturer of video game components shocked Silicon Valley by conquering the market for AI hardware, and in the process re-invented the computer.
 
Essential to Nvidia’s meteoric success is its visionary CEO Jensen Huang, who more than a decade ago, on the basis of a few promising scientific results, bet his entire company on AI. Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its iconoclastic CEO, who emerges as a compelling, single-minded, and ferocious leader, and now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
 
The Thinking Machine  is the story of how Nvidia evolved from providing components for circuit boards to supplying hundred-million dollar supercomputers. It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in computer architecture, and the small group of renegade engineers who made it happen. And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, which Huang has billed as the 'next industrial revolution', as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and new movies, art, and books, generated on command.

When Robert and Michael, a pair of starry-eyed twins see a Boeing 707 at an airport in the mid-1960s, it’s love at first sight.

But who's going to one day pay for their dream to work in aviation? This is apartheid South Africa. Coloured boys can't eat alongside white people, let alone jet off to Paris and study aeronautical engineering!

But in high school they discover an unlikely aptitude for French. Armed with scholarships, they head off to Paris and their once ordinary lives are changed forever.

Source Code describes with unprecedented candour Bill Gates’ life from his childhood in Seattle to dropping out of Harvard aged 20 in 1975. Shortly afterwards he wrote, with Paul Allen, the programme which became the foundation of Microsoft and eventually for the entire software industry, changing the way the world works and lives.

Gates writes about the centrality of family to his life – his encouraging grandmother and ambitious parents, about struggles to fit in, his rebelliousness, and the impact on him of the death of his closest friend. We see his extraordinary mind developing as a teenager, his excitement about the rapidly emerging technology of computing, and the earliest signs of his phenomenal business acumen.

Source Code is a warm, wise and revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential people of our age.

In 2022 Elon Musk - one of the richest and best-known people on earth - made headlines worldwide with his bid to buy Twitter, and he is often in the news for his entrepreneurial exploits and his controversial tweets. Who is this boundary-pushing billionaire with grand plans of inhabiting Mars, and what lies at the heart of his vision? Why is he so utterly unafraid of risk?

As an awkward Pretoria schoolboy who loved comics and science fiction, Musk's early years and singular family background were crucial in forming his stellar ambitions. Journalist and author Michael Vlismas, who attended the same high school as Musk, knows well the environment that shaped him and offers new insights into Musk's development, including his troubled relationship with his father.

Tracing his remarkable life, from his South African childhood to his move to Canada at 17 and then to the US - where Musk made millions out of PayPal and built Tesla and SpaceX into two of the world's most famous companies - this is the revealing new story of a man driven to preserve the optimism he sees in humanity and find a future for humans 'out there among the stars'.

With M-Net, Koos Bekker convinced the business world he had the magic touch. But it was only the start of an entrepreneurial journey that would bring him immense wealth.

Bekker swept in at Naspers, transforming an Afrikaans printer into a global technology giant, earning investors trillions and himself a good few billion. But how? What were the methods employed by this boerseun from Heidelberg?

Financial journalist TJ Strydom distils it down to 15 steps, each calculated and effective, sketching out the winning ways of the elusive media mogul. Bekker often gets the credit for the investment in China’s Tencent, a single punt that rivals South Africa’s entire mining sector in the wealth it created this century. But should he be the one lauded for this achievement?

A hair-raising account about the ins and outs of practising forensic pathology in Africa As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal's chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he's encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife. Blumenthal takes the reader behind the scenes at the mortuary, describing a typical autopsy and the instruments of the trade. He also shares a few trade secrets, like how to establish when a suicide is more likely to be a homicide. Even though they cannot speak, the dead have a lot to say - and Blumenthal is there to listen.

Made into a major motion picture, this moving memoir written by Stephen Hawking’s first wife covers the turbulent years of her marriage to the astrophysics genius, her traumatic divorce, and their recent reconciliation

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous and remarkable scientists of our age and the author of the scientific bestseller A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 25 million copies. In this compelling memoir, his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen's academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of a motor neuron disease. Jane's candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family reveals the inner strength of the author, while the self-evident character and achievements of her husband make for an incredible tale presented with unflinching honesty.

Jane's candor is no less apparent when the marriage finally ends in a high-profile meltdown, with Stephen leaving Jane for one of his nurses and Jane marrying an old family friend. In this exceptionally open, moving, and often funny memoir, Jane Hawking confronts not only the acutely complicated and painful dilemmas of her first marriage, but also the relationship's fault lines exposed by the pervasive effects of fame and wealth.

The result is a book about optimism, love, and change that will resonate with readers everywhere. readers everywhere.

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

“the bird is freed”
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, commentators were rooting for the visionary behind Tesla and SpaceX to succeed. Here was a tough leader who could grab back power from Twitter’s entitled workforce, motivate them to get “extremely hardcore,” and supercharge Twitter’s profit and potential. And it was all out of the goodness of his own heart, rooted in his fervent belief in the necessity of making Twitter friendlier to free speech. "I didn’t do it to make more money,” Musk said. “I did it to try and help humanity, whom I love.” 

Once Musk charged into the Twitter headquarters, the command-and-control playbook Musk honed at Tesla and SpaceX went off the rails immediately. Distilling hundreds of hours of interviews with more than sixty employees, thousands of pages of internal documents, Slack messages, presentations, as well as court filings and congressional testimony, Extremely Hardcore is the true story of how Musk reshaped the world’s online public square into his own personal megaphone. 

You’ll hear from employees who witnessed the destruction of their workplace in real-time, seeing years of progress to fight disinformation and hate speech wiped out within a matter of months. There’s the machine-learning savant who went all-in on Twitter 2.0 before getting betrayed by his new CEO, the father whose need for healthcare swept him into Musk’s inner circle, the trust and safety expert who became the subject of a harassment campaign his former boss incited, and the many other employees who tried to save the company from their new boss’s worst instincts. This is the story of Twitter, but it’s also a chronicle of the post-pandemic labor movement, a war between executives and a workforce newly awakened to their rights and needs.

Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It’s the next best thing to being there, and you won’t have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.

*LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD* Chosen by WATERSTONES as one of their BEST POLITICS BOOKS of 2024 ‘Anupreeta Das tracks the ups and downs of Bill Gates’s career in her eye-opening book’ The Times Bill Gates is one of the most powerful figures of the past four decades. But the world-famous public image he has so carefully crafted is not the whole truth. In this explosive new book, Anupreeta Das (finance editor of the New York Times) takes you behind the façade. From his early years, when he was a divisive figure in the burgeoning tech industry, we see the Microsoft co-founder morph into a ruthless capitalist, only to change yet again when he fashions himself into a global do-gooder. But as Das’s revelatory reporting shows us: billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates’s relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates and others to uncover the man behind the persona. In telling Gates’s story, Das also provides a new way to think about how billionaires wield their influence, manipulate their image and pursue philanthropy to achieve their own ends. Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King is a gripping story of wealth, power and reputation; it will open your eyes to the ways in which the world’s richest people hold us in their thrall.

Ernest Starling (1866-1927) was pre-eminent in the golden age of British Physiology. His name is usually associated with his ???Law of the Heart, ??? but his discovery of secretin (the first hormone whose mode of action was explained) and his work on capillaries were more important contributions. He coined the word 'hormone' one hundred years ago. His analysis of capillary function demonstrated that equal and opposite forces move across the capillary wall--an outward (hydrostatic) force and an inward (osmotic) force derived from plasma proteins.
Starling??'s contributions include:
*Developing the "Frank-Starling Law of the Heart," presented in 1915 and modified in 1919.
*The Starling equation, describing fluid shifts in the body (1896)
*The discovery of secretin, the first hormone, with Bayliss (1902) and the introduction of the concept of hormones (1905).

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk offers the most intimate, complete and revelatory portrait of the most fascinating and controversial innovator in the world.
 
For two years, Isaacson had unprecedented access to Musk, his workplaces, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries – nothing was off-limits.

Musk’s journey from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet is a thrilling, mind-bending story and nobody could tell it better. Filled with amazing tales of triumph and turmoil, and lessons about leadership and business, it ultimately addresses the question everyone wants to ask: why is Elon Musk so successful?

This book includes over 100 integrated black and white images.

A lively account of how Darwin’s work on natural selection transformed science and society, and an investigation into the mysterious illness that plagued its author.

By early morning of June 30, 1860, a large crowd began to congregate in front of Oxford University’s brand-new Museum of Natural History. The occasion was the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the subject of discussion was Charles Darwin’s new treatise: fact or fiction?

Darwin, a simultaneously reclusive and intellectually audacious squire from Kent, claimed to have solved “that mystery of mysteries,” introducing a logical explanation of the origin of species―how they adapted, even transmogrified, through natural selection. At stake, on that summer’s day of spirited debate, was the very foundation of modern biology, not to mention the future of the church. Without fear of exaggeration, Darwin’s thesis would forever change our understanding of the life sciences and the natural world. And yet the author himself was nowhere to be found in the debate hall―instead, he was miles away, seeking respite from a spate of illnesses that had plagued him for much of his adult life.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin’s writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians. The result is a colorful portrait of the man, his friends and enemies, and his seminal work, which resonates to this day.

A Best Book of 2020: The Washington Post * NPR * Chicago Tribune * Smithsonian A "remarkable" (Los Angeles Times), "seductive" (The Wall Street Journal) debut from the new cohost of Radiolab, Why Fish Don't Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and--possibly--even murder. "At one point, Miller dives into the ocean into a school of fish...comes up for air, and realizes she's in love. That's how I felt: Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten." --The New York Times Book Review David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake--which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life's work was shattered. Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world. When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool--a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet. Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don't Exist is a wondrous fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.

AI tech giant Nvidia is the world's first $4-trillion company.

It has shaped life as we know it.

This is the inside story of the company that is inventing the future and its charismatic CEO Jensen Huang.

In June 2024, Nvidia became the most valuable corporation on Earth. The Thinking Machine is the astonishing story of how a designer of videogame equipment conquered the market for AI hardware, and in the process reinvented the computer.

It is the story of a determined entrepreneur who defied Wall Street to push his radical vision for computing, becoming one of the wealthiest men alive.

And it’s the story of our awesome and terrifying AI future, as a new kind of microchip unlocks hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, self-driving cars and new movies, art and books, generated on command.

From an acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter comes the first biography of the enigmatic leader of the AI revolution, charting his ascent within the tech world as well as his ambitions for this powerful new technology.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot that captivated the world with its uncanny ability to hold humanlike conversations. Not even a year later, on November 17, 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was summarily fired on a video call by the company’s board. The firing made headlines around the globe: OpenAI is the leader in the race to build AGI―artificial general intelligence, or AI that can think like a human being―and Altman is the most prominent figure in the field. Yet it was mere days before Altman was back running the company he had co-founded, with most of the directors who voted to fire him themselves removed from the board.

The episode was a demonstration of how quickly the industry is moving, and of Altman’s power to bend reality to his will. In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk, a former friend and now Altman’s bitter opponent.

Hagey conducted more than 250 interviews, with Altman’s family, friends, teachers, mentors, co-founders, colleagues, investors, and portfolio companies, in addition to spending hours with Altman himself. The person who emerges in her portrait is a brilliant dealmaker with a love of risk, who believes in technological progress with an almost religious conviction―yet who sometimes moves too fast for the people around him. With both the promise and peril of AI increasing by the day, Hagey delivers a nuanced, balanced, revelatory account of the individual who is leading us into what he himself has called “the intelligence age.”

Altman is a figure out of Isaac Asimov or Neal Stephenson. Or he is the author himself: if it feels as though we have all collectively stepped into a science fiction short story, it is Altman who is writing it.

Join Hloni Bookholane on his journey of becoming a doctor: from student to intern at the world-famous Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town to the best school of public health in the world across the Atlantic, and back home amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are highs and lows – learnings and unlearnings – about the personal versus political as he discovers how government policy, socioeconomics and more influence disease and medicine.