The book we need NOW to avoid a social recession, Murthy’s prescient message is about the importance of human connection, the hidden impact of loneliness on our health, and the social power of community.

Humans are social creatures: In this simple and obvious fact lies both the problem and the solution to the current crisis of loneliness. In his groundbreaking book, the 19th surgeon general of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy makes a case for loneliness as a public health concern: a root cause and contributor to many of the epidemics sweeping the world today from alcohol and drug addiction to violence to depression and anxiety. Loneliness, he argues, is affecting not only our health, but also how our children experience school, how we perform in the workplace, and the sense of division and polarization in our society.

But, at the center of our loneliness is our innate desire to connect. We have evolved to participate in community, to forge lasting bonds with others, to help one another, and to share life experiences. We are, simply, better together.

The lessons in Together have immediate relevance and application. These four key strategies will help us not only to weather this crisis, but also to heal our social world far into the future.

• Spend time each day with those you love. Devote at least 15 minutes each day to connecting with those you most care about.
• Focus on each other. Forget about multitasking and give the other person the gift of your full attention, making eye contact, if possible, and genuinely listening.
• Embrace solitude. The first step toward building stronger connections with others is to build a stronger connection with oneself. Meditation, prayer, art, music, and time spent outdoors can all be sources of solitary comfort and joy.
• Help and be helped. Service is a form of human connection that reminds us of our value and purpose in life. Checking on a neighbor, seeking advice, even just offering a smile to a stranger six feet away, all can make us stronger.

During Murthy’s research for Together, he found that there were few issues that elicited as much enthusiastic interest from both very conservative and very liberal members of Congress, from young and old people, or from urban and rural residents alike. Loneliness was something so many people have known themselves or have seen in the people around them. In the book, Murthy also shares his own deeply personal experiences with the subject—from struggling with loneliness in school, to the devastating loss of his uncle who succumbed to his own loneliness, as well as the important example of community and connection that his parents modeled. Simply, it’s a universal condition that affects all of us directly or through the people we love—now more than ever.

Contesting one’s place remains central to confronting the lingering impact of colonisation and apartheid, emerging as it does out of the intermingling of our environments, histories, languages and experiences. In this volume, architects, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, activists and historians examine the ways in which people are rethinking, repurposing and reusing colonial and apartheid architecture and infrastructure. They seek to engage with ways in which history, art and architecture practices contest and subvert these protracted conditions in terms of social justice, development, conservation, heritage, land reclamation and urban renewal.

The focus is on colonial environments in different parts of South Africa and Africa to understand the history of disputed places and responses of remembrance, communal consideration, revival and conflict. In recent years, public awareness of the physical and environmental reminders of this past has been sharpened by sporadic campaigns and ongoing disputes around land, gentrification, repatriation and heritage. Globally, there has been a wave of public outcry and contestation about the place of racist names and statues in public spaces, litigation over abandoned and toxic sites, with calls for removal and restitution as an integral part of decolonisation. And there has been recognition of the lived experiences, knowledge and activities through which people and communities build their heritage.

In this context, questions about the place of colonial and apartheid planning and architecture and their past acquire salience and urgency in the present.

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

A powerful, gripping story about an extraordinary herd of elephants, and the woman dedicated to keeping them safe.

Thula Thula game reserve in South Africa is home to a herd of elephants who have 4,000 hectares to roam. So owner Françoise was taken aback to find the herd’s matriarch Frankie – a feisty character – roaming her garden and eating her daisies. Was Frankie pointing out who was really in charge, or was there another reason for her presence?

The Elephants of Thula Thula is a heart-warming, sometimes funny, often moving account of life on a game reserve dedicated to saving endangered species. As Françoise struggles with bureaucracy and with the ever-present threat from poachers she is determined to keep Thula Thula going. The search is on to get a girlfriend for rhino Thabo – and then, as his behaviour becomes increasingly aggressive, a big brother to teach him manners. She realizes a dream with the arrival of Savannah the cheetah – an endangered species not seen in the area since the 1940s. But will Thula Thula survive the pandemic, and the threat from a mining company wanting access to its land?

As tragedy strikes the herd, Françoise mourns the loss of Frankie and watches as a new matriarch steps up to lead the family. She realizes once again that with their wisdom, resilience and communal bonds, the elephants have much to teach us.

From the bestselling author of The Lost City of Z, and the Number One international bestseller The Wager, comes a true-life murder story which became one of the FBI’s first major homicide investigations.

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to unravel the mystery. Together with the Osage he and his undercover team began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

Community development both a collective effort and an achievement driven by individual facilitators with the aim of lifting a community out of poverty. The sixth edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty continues to be a definitive guide for community development workers, students and practitioners alike. The book contextualises poverty and explains the process of community development.

It pays attention to the development environment and explains concepts such as asset-based community development and the social enterprise sector. In addition to context and process, the book details the skills required by a community development worker to function in the field. It also explains how to empower the development worker to train others in order to build capacity in the community and work towards breaking the cycle of poverty.

This edition of Community Development: Breaking the cycle of poverty is strengthened by the inclusion of extensive support material. More practical case studies, specifically relevant to the South African environment, have been added and questions on the case studies are included in the book.

The 1930s and 40s were tumultuous decades in South Africa’s history. The economy declined sharply in the wake of the Wall Street crash, giving rise to a huge number of poor whites and the growth of a militant and aggressive Afrikaner nationalism that often took its lead from the Nazis in Germany.

A Perfect Storm reveals how the right-wing’s malevolent message moved from the margins to the centre of political life; how antisemitism seeped into mainstream political life with real and lasting consequences. Milton Shain, South Africa’s leading scholar of modern Jewish history, brings into sharp relief the ‘Jewish Problem’, detailing the rise of influential organisations such as the Grey Shirts and the New Order, which fanned the flames of antisemitism. He devotes considerable attention to the Ossewa-Brandwag, which, by 1941, constituted the largest yet mobilisation of Afrikaners.

The National Party itself contributed to the climate of hostility to Jews. It was instrumental in ensuring that only few of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and elsewhere were permitted as immigrants. The National Party contributed to the prevailing climate of Jew-baiting. Indeed, some of its worst offenders were accorded high office after 1948 when the National Party came to power.

Every decision we make is a decision about the future. We constantly make choices that affect the next week, year or decade, but get blinded by what we want or expect the future to be. Cognitive traps lie everywhere: failing to question our assumptions; believing in greater certainty and personal control than life allows; or missing signals because we’re distracted by the noise.

The post-2020 world demands a revolutionary way of looking ahead, and in these unpredictable times, the key to good futures thinking is good thinking. The goal of constructive futurism is not to forecast specific events, but to plot a series of scenarios that show what could happen. Consequently, we can work towards the future we want, avoid the ones we don’t, and be prepared to manage the risks and opportunities no matter what.

In Thinking the Future, scenario specialists Clem Sunter and Mitch Ilbury teach us the futurist’s art of decision-making, where the flexibility of thinking like a fox plays a key role in adapting to a complex and interconnected world. The book rejects the appealing but misleading self-help narrative that you can decide your future through sheer determination in pursuit of your goals and replaces it with a more dynamic approach.

Isaac Newton said: ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ By reimagining seminal concepts thought up by some of history’s greatest thinkers, the authors detail the dos and don’ts for thinking the future and handling its uncertainty in a constructive way.

A searing investigation that challenges everything you thought you knew about domestic abuse.

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience – abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today.

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.

A powerful, eye-opening account of how social welfare, distributed in the form of cash transfers, shapes inequality in contemporary South Africa.

In a narrative style, following individual stories, Erin Torkelson challenges the widely held belief that simply giving money to the poor can solve poverty. Cash transfers are often presented as a straightforward, humane solution embraced across the political spectrum, from global development agencies to progressive academics, to alleviate poverty. But this deeply researched and compelling book reveals a far more complicated and troubling reality.

Drawing on seven years of immersive fieldwork in South Africa — from grant payment queues and grocery stores to Parliament and the Constitutional Court — Torkelson shows how a flagship antipoverty programme became entangled with predatory finance. Instead of offering relief, cash transfers are often leveraged bylenders as collateral, pulling recipients, especially Black women, into cycles of debt. The very survival strategies people are pushed into are later framed as personal failings rather than the result of long-standing structural inequality. In the process, individuals are racialised as inadequate managers of money and marked as risky financial subjects.

The book also traces how civil society campaigns forced the state in 2018 to reclaim control of the payment system from private companies. Yet even this victory revealed new challenges: austerity, weak infrastructure and ongoing financial pressures continued to expose recipients to hardship in new forms.

Blending sharp analysis with vivid storytelling, Predatory Welfare offers a bold rethinking of welfare, development and racial inequality. It argues that social grants cannot be understood as neutral or purely benevolent and that economic justice requires far more than cash alone. A timely and urgent intervention, Predatory Welfare asks readers to reconsider what real economic justice looks like — and what it will take to achieve it.

A hybrid narrative, blending memoir with social commentary and political analysis.

Always in search of "home", the book tracks Ismail Lagardien's vast experiences of a deeply lived life, always against a backdrop of "unbelonging" - first as a reporter in the turbulent 80s, to studying economics at the LSE, then achieving a doctorate at the University of Wales, to working as a speechwriter at the World Bank in Washington.

A unique and brilliant read.

'I do not hate boys, I hate men.'

This provocative statement sets the stage for a searing exploration of the complex relationship South African society holds with its Black and Coloured men and boys. Dr Mzamo Masito's urgent new book, This Country hates Our Boys, confronts the pervasive 'cold and hot love' that often translates into collective male guilt. When a child goes missing, a collective sigh of relief by men is heard when the blame points to maternal filicide, such as headlines like 'South African woman guilty of kidnapping and trafficking daughter aged 6' (BBC).

The widely accepted phrase 'amadoda zizinja' – men are dogs – is more than a colloquialism; it's a symptom of a society where positive masculine role models are scarce. This linguistic shortcut flattens the nuanced reality of masculinity into a single, simplistic concept of patriarchy, obscuring the complex, chaotic social issues at play.

Through the vital work of African Men Care, a non-profit organisation, Dr Masito unpacks the interlocking crises facing Black boys and men: educational disparities, mental health struggles, pervasive violence, and fractured relationships. More crucially, the book illuminates a clear path forward.

'Every man is every boy' is not merely an observation but a powerful call to action. The struggles of adult men today are often rooted in the unaddressed needs and unrealised potential of the boys they once were. The lament 'awekho amadoda' (there are no men) serves as a stark warning: without decisive intervention, we risk losing entire generations. This book reveals how individual trauma metastasises into a collective crisis. When boys lack robust interior lives and positive identity models, the repercussions echo through families, schools, and communities. Hurt boys mature into hurting men, perpetuating cycles that impact everyone, including the girls and women in their lives.

¬This Country Hates Our Boys is essential reading for men, educators, policymakers, community leaders, parents, and anyone committed to breaking cycles of hurt and forging futures where all young people can thrive. The ultimate goal is revolutionary in its simplicity: to empower both girls and boys, ensuring no child is left behind.

The book behind the headlines. The story the powerful hoped would disappear.

Written by the world's bestselling storyteller James Patterson, this is the original and definitive account of how Epstein built his fortune, abused his power, and evaded justice for years - hiding in plain sight among the global elite.

Drawing on original police interviews, court documents and victims' testimonies, the book traces the earliest investigations, Epstein's guilty plea and the shockingly lenient sentence that allowed his crimes to continue. Filthy Rich is also a chilling examination of how power protects itself - and how institutions failed those most vulnerable.

An instant New York Times bestseller and the basis of the hit Netflix documentary series, this updated edition includes a new introduction covering Epstein's final arrest and death in custody.

Mosibudi Mangena has been a life-long member of the Black Consciousness Movement, which led to his incarceration on Robben Island from 1973–8. After his release, he went into exile in 1981, spending time in Botswana and Zimbabwe, before returning to South Africa in 1994.

Triumphs & Heartaches provides fascinating insight into Mangena’s varied life, including his time as the leader of AZAPO and his service in government as the deputy minister of Education and then the minister of Science and Technology.

Mangena provides an insider’s view of life in exile as a political refugee, followed by the hardships of repatriation and the hard-won successes of democracy. He reflects eloquently on the role of Black Consciousness and its potential place in the future of South Africa, and does not flinch from exploring the disappointments of the liberation struggle and the challenges that lie ahead for the country.

Renowned South African photographer Ranjith Kally captured iconic scenes throughout his career, such as his portrait Umkumbane, which has come to symbolise the shimmering jazz age of African townships in the 1950s.

When Miriam Makeba returned to Maseru, Lesotho, for a concert for black South Africans at the height of apartheid, Ranjith, too ventured to Lesotho and returned home with a remarkable image of an exiled singer poised between joy and heartbreak. And in a series of unflinching portraits, he documented with probity the horror of the forced removals in Natal.

As one of our country’s most prolific photojournalists, Ranjith’s pictures provide us with a glimpse into the tensions of the past and the events that shaped our future.

A prominent public intellectual tackles one of the most crucial political ideas of our moment.

Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political issues.

This short book is the first to examine settler colonialism critically for a general readership. By critiquing the most important writers, texts, and ideas in the field, Adam Kirsch shows how the concept emerged in the context of North American and Australian history and how it is being applied to Israel. He examines the sources of its appeal, which, he argues, are spiritual as much as political; how it works to delegitimize nations; and why it has the potential to turn indignation at past injustices into a source of new injustices today.

A compact and accessible introduction, rich with historical detail, the book will speak to readers interested in the Middle East, American history, and today’s most urgent cultural-political debates.

A searing account of medical controversy, complexity and conspiracy, diagnosing both healthy and unhealthy doubt.

In today’s medical world, scepticism is marginalised: dissenting doctors and uncertain patients are seen as hardly more rational than anti-vaxx conspiracists or questionable wellness gurus. Yet legitimate doubts have been raised throughout human history―and persist for a reason.

This sharp, compassionate book rejects unhelpful binary thinking to explore the vast middle ground where we all really live. Many of us need medicine, and trust science―but still feel wary of big pharma, unsure about new treatments, and let down by a healthcare culture that gaslights and prejudges as often as it helps or heals. From chronic sufferers to minoritised communities, Caitjan Gainty tells the stories of medicine’s critics, victims and outsiders, and unveils the illogical thinking that created both modern medicine and its many sceptics.

Entertaining, enlightening and occasionally enraging, Healthy Scepticism revisits our ancient tradition of distrusting doctors and prescribes a new course of treatment. With a well-founded dose of doubt, we can see medicine’s successes and shortcomings―and understand where our broken system went wrong.

RW Johnson's bestselling book How Long Will South Africa Survive? was published at the height of the Zuma presidency. Since then, Cyril Ramaphosa has taken over as president and there have been some attempts to clean up government. But the brief period of 'Ramaphoria' is over and the threat to both the economy and the dream of a non-racial democracy is as real as ever.

As national elections loom, Johnson examines the state of the nation with pinpoint accuracy. On the one hand state-owned institutions are near collapse, municipalities are defunct and civil strife is rampant. On the other, Ramaphosa and his team have come up with a plan to curb corruption and create growth and prosperity.

But will it work?

This story of a middle-class white South African family unfolds between the years 1939 and 1964 - a transformative period in South Africa’s political landscape.

It is told through the eyes and experiences of the younger son and his rite of passage into a country of racial segregation that gradually opens his eyes to the many injustices imposed upon the majority of the country’s population, coupled with a realization that his white privileges are sustained at the brutal expense of others.

Can people who live in shantytowns, shacks and favelas teach us anything about democracy? About how to govern society in a way that is inclusive, participatory and addresses popular needs? This book argues that they can.

In a study conducted in dozens of South Africa’s shack settlements, where more than 9 million people live, Trevor Ngwane finds thriving shack dwellers’ committees that govern local life, are responsive to popular needs and provide a voice for the community. These committees, called ‘amakomiti’ in the Zulu language, organise the provision of basic services such as water, sanitation, public works and crime prevention especially during settlement establishment.

Amakomiti argues that, contrary to common perception, slum dwellers are in fact an essential part of the urban population, whose political agency must be recognised and respected. In a world searching for democratic alternatives that serve the many and not the few, it is to the shantytowns, rather than the seats of political power, that we should turn.

Can't afford housing or healthcare? One 1886 Supreme Court fraud gave corporations constitutional rights over you—discover how billionaire oligarchs stole your future and the constitutional amendment to take it back.

You work harder than your parents did, yet you can’t afford a home. Billionaires are richer than ever. You know the system is rigged—but no one’s told you how it happened or who rigged it.

Here’s what they don’t teach in law school: In 1886, the Supreme Court never ruled that corporations have constitutional rights. That “precedent” came from a single fraudulent sentence inserted by a court reporter working with a corrupt justice. One headnote. One lie. The greatest legal heist in American history.

That fraud did the following and more:

• Crushed unions and shipped jobs overseas
• Slashed taxes for the wealthy and gave corporations the power to buy elections
• Transferred trillions from working families to billionaire oligarchs

That’s why your paycheck doesn’t stretch. That’s why corporations have more rights than you do. That’s why democracy is eroding. For 140 years, they’ve distracted Americans by blaming immigrants, “welfare queens,” and each other—while billionaires rewrote the rules. Now people are pushing back: passing local ordinances, organizing for a constitutional amendment, and reclaiming power for We the People.

The rebellion has begun. Stop blaming your neighbors. Start demanding accountability. Learn how the system was stolen—and how to take it back.

Here’s the Thing is a new collection of thought-provoking essays from Haji Mohamed Dawjee.

Filled with stories and insights that are contemplative, comedic and controversial, you will find a touching letter to her father, the honest truth about the pain in the arse that is parenting and ponderings about struggling with the vicissitudes of the modern world filled with cancel culture and the controversies of appreciating the wrong artists. There is also a serving of the many wise lessons the game of tennis has to offer as well as hilarious insights and observations on dustbins, yes dustbins, and ageing, that ring true.

Here’s the Thing is relatable, relevant, entertaining, soothingly self-deprecating and, at times, morally challenging.

Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance.

What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? Are these vacant buildings, cemeteries, statues, and derelict grounds able to serve as inspiration in the fight against enduring racism and social neglect? Should they become exemplary as spaces for restitution and justice? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew.

Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The decades following the dismantling of apartheid are surveyed in light of contemporary heritage projects, where building ruins and abandoned spaces are challenged and renegotiated across the country to become sites of protest, inspiration and anger.

This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.

'This century's most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism' Angela Davis 'Fanon is our contemporary ... In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, Fanon showed us the internal theatre of racism' Deborah Levy Frantz Fanon's urgent, dynamic critique of the effects of racism on the psyche is a landmark study of the black experience in a white world. Drawing on his own life and his work as a psychoanalyst to explore how colonialism's subjects internalize its prejudices, eventually emulating the 'white masks' of their oppressors, it established Fanon as a revolutionary anti-colonialist thinker. 'So hard to put down ... a brilliant, vivid and hurt mind, walking the thin line that separates effective outrage from despair' The New York Times Book Review

A Nobel Prize-⁠winning economist shows us why we have to deal in trade-offs when we can't agree on what's right and what's wrong.

Some of the most intractable controversies in our divided society are, at bottom, about what actions and transactions should be banned. Should women and couples be able to purchase contraception, access in vitro fertilization, and end pregnancy by obtaining an abortion? Should people be able to buy marijuana? What about fentanyl? Can someone be paid to donate blood plasma, or a kidney?

Disagreements are fierce because arguments on both sides are often made in uncompromising moral or religious terms. But in Moral Economics, Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin E. Roth asserts that we can make progress on these and other difficult topics if we view them as markets-tools to help decide who gets what-and understand how those markets can be fine-tuned to be more functional. Markets don't have to allow everything or ban everything. Prudent market design can find a balance between preserving people's rights to pursue their own interests and protecting the most vulnerable from harms.

Combining Roth's unparalleled expertise as market design pioneer with his incisive, witty accounts of complicated issues, Moral Economics offers a powerful and innovative new framework for resolving today's hardest controversies.