Izikhothane―township youth from impoverished backgrounds who engage in mock battles of conspicuous consumption where luxury items are often destroyed―gained notoriety in South Africa in the early 2000s.

Sifiso Mnisi delves into the life of the izikhothane, providing an in-depth account of what it means to be a young man within the ukukhothana (Zulu slang for “boasting”) subculture and showing how their seemingly destructive behavior can be a complex way of asserting their masculinity and demanding recognition in a society that has historically dehumanized them.

From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response

The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel’s right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust’s singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization.

The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North’s triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South’s hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world’s balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other.

As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis — about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.

Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg’s Urban Margins explores the dynamic everyday life-making strategies of young men in Zandspruit, a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In many ways, Zandspruit typifies the precariousness of life in South Africa, where two-thirds of young people lack waged employment. However, rather than seeing Zandspruit as dumping ground, Hannah J. Dawson calls for an integrated understanding of the complex linkages between people’s lives and livelihoods, and the multifaceted sociopolitical landscape of urban settlements.

Based on 14 months of ethnographic research, Dawson investigates how social belonging, identity and economic realities intertwine in informal settlements like Zandspruit. This approach not only challenges conventional approaches to studying work; it also questions the increasingly prevalent perspective that romanticises the adaptive survival strategies of the urban poor. By exploring the intricate connections between those with and without waged employment, the author shows how young men manage complex social, political and economic conditions.

Making a Life offers insights into issues such as urban work, citizenship, un(der) employment and inequality in South Africa. At the same time, it contributes to a global understanding of how young people – men especially – manage economic uncertainty.

Wild Fictions brings together Amitav Ghosh's extraordinary writing on the subjects that have obsessed him over the last twenty-five years: literature and language; climate change and the environment; human lives, travel, and discoveries. The spaces that we inhabit, and the way in which we occupy them, is a constant thread throughout this striking and expansive collection.

From the significance of the commodification of the clove, the diversity of the mangrove forests in West Bengal and the radical fluidity of multilingualism, Wild Fictions is a powerful refutation of imperial violence, a fascinating exploration of the fictions we weave to absorb history, and a reminder of the importance of empathy.

With the combination of moral passion, intellectual curiosity and literary elegance that defines his writing, Amitav Ghosh makes us understand the world in new, and urgent, ways. Together, the pieces within Wild Fictions chart a course that allows us to heal our relationships and restore a delicate balance with the volatile landscapes to which we all belong.

African Doctoral and Masters researchers in Environmental Humanities, in the past 6 years, working in Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Tanzania, Lesotho, Kenya, and DR Congo have consistently and independently come up against a similar story: that struggles in rural Africa are against neoliberal ideas of market-driven development, and neoliberal notions of environmentalism, that have proven fundamentally at odds with both economic and ecological wellbeing. Building on Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge (HSRC 2013; 275 citations to date), this volume develops an approach that identifies the ways in which environment and society is conceptualized by development “experts”, environmentalists and state officials, and contrasts those conceptualizations with understandings of ecology and wellbeing at ground level.

No comparable work on this topic has been done across ten African countries. Drawing on in-depth field research by African graduates, many of whom have pursued field research in their home languages, the collection makes a sustained and powerful case that local people’s struggles for livelihood have intensified against globalized corporate extractivism across the continent. Individual papers describe struggles over soil, mining, water, seed, pastoralism, energy, technology, forestry, and carbon trading.

Linking African struggles to Latin American rejection of extractivism and South Asian resistance to industrial agriculture and monocropping, the collection will be the first of its kind to make the case that indigenous and other political minorities’ forms of relation to land are vital resources for the protection of African ecological wellbeing, and that they define a contemporary African environmentalism that makes a crucial contribution to rethinking and re-storying climate negotiations, conservation, and development.

The power of the presidential pardon has our national attention now more than ever before. In The Pardon, New York Times bestselling author and CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin provides a timely and compelling narrative of the most controversial presidential pardon in American history—Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, revealing the profound implications for our current political landscape, and how it is already affecting the legacies of both Presidents Biden and Trump.

In this deeply reported book, Toobin explores why the Founding Fathers gave the power of pardon to the President and recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period around Nixon’s resignation. The story features a rich cast of characters, including Alexander Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification.

Ford’s shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country. But Toobin argues that Ford’s pardon was an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient and an unsettling political precedent. The Pardon explores those that followed: Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and the extraordinary story of Trump’s unprecedented pardons at the end of his first term.

The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.

Worldwide, suicide is one of the leading causes of death among young people, and numbers continue to increase. Many young people have experienced suicidal thoughts, self-harmed or attempted suicide. What makes someone particularly vulnerable? Why do proportionally more young men than women resort to suicide? What can be done to support people and prevent young deaths?

The Long Sleep explores the origins, symptoms and meanings of young peoples' suicidal crises and argues the need for sensitive responses and improved understanding if current rates are to be curbed. Combining moving accounts from relatives and young people who have attempted suicide with the evidence of extensive research into the subject, Kate Hill offers important and timely insights into an area fraught with fear and denial.

This classic self-help book has been fully revised and considers:

• Current perspectives around mental and physical healthcare development
• Social, environmental and personal factors that may be triggers
• How to listen to and support young people at risk
• Where and when to seek professional help and support

From the bestselling author of THE HOLOCAUST, a groundbreaking narrative history of the motivation and mentality behind the Nazis and their supporters.

How could the Nazis have committed the crimes they did? Why did commandants of concentration and death camps willingly – often enthusiastically – oversee mass murder? How could ordinary Germans have tolerated the removal of the Jews? In THE NAZI MIND, bestselling author Laurence Rees combines history and the latest research in psychology to help answer some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world. Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of ‘twelve warnings’ – from talk about ‘them’ and ‘us’ to the escalation of racism – whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders.

Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth psychological insights including cutting edge work on obedience, authority and the brain. THE NAZI MIND is a revelatory new way of understanding how so many people committed the most appalling crime of the 20th century.

It is often remarked that Johannesburg is exceptional as a major city in that it has no large body of water. While it may be true that the city does not boast commercial harbours, busy canals, or navigable rivers, spruits and wetlands saturate the city, and are home to many of its non-human inhabitants. These have largely been overlooked as participants in the urbanization of Johannesburg despite shaping, and being shaped by, the city’s development. This book’s focus on the Jukskei river—in which some of the first gold was found on the Witwatersrand—invites a re-centering of waterways as a device to organize how we think about this baffling city.

The river, after all, runs past many notable features of Johannesburg’s landscape. Starting under Ellis Park (due to a lack of any environmental planning when the city was built), it first sees daylight in the poor urban neighborhood of Bertrams before flowing northwest to Hartbeespoort Dam, on the way passing through Alexandra township, Leeuwkop Prison, and the upscale gated estates of Waterfall, Dainfern, and Steyn City. This volume brings together a variety of activists, community members, journalists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists to examine the relationship that Johannesburg has to the Jukskei. Centering the river as environmental, urban, socio-economic, political and cultural artefact from which to further understand Johannesburg offers an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human-environment interface. Such an exercise is crucial at a time when the urgency of climate change has made that interface especially volatile, and disciplinary distinctions untenable.

Urban rivers like the Jukskei, even if not especially useful to industry, are important in our collective socio-ecological efforts to live better together, in cities and with nature. This will be the first volume to critically consider the role of the river in the cultural, social, political and scientific life of the city of Johannesburg. As the main economic hub in the country, and indeed one of the main economic hubs on the continent, Johannesburg rightly garners a lot of critical and scholarly attention.

The Jukskei river, which not only runs through the city but emerges from beneath the weight of its concrete, is neglected not only by urban planning and the city’s inhabitants, but by critical theory and research. This book brings together a collection of writings from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, that navigate Johannesburg’s Jukskei.

In times of collapse, we need a movement that recognizes injustice as a reflection of collective trauma and embraces its role as a catalyst for collective healing through transformative action.

We are living in a world where the depths of division, violence, and destruction can no longer be ignored. From political polarization leading to the erosion of the democratic process to the climate crisis continuing to perpetuate racial inequity, we need changes that heal harms at the personal and systemic levels.

Escalated forms of harm require an equally escalated response. Yet social movements often use tactics that have a tendency to escalate an “us vs. them,” “right vs. wrong” worldview not conducive to healing.

In Fierce Vulnerability, activist and author Kazu Haga argues this binary worldview is at the heart of what is destroying our relationships and our planet and offers a new way to create healing by combining the time-honored lineage of nonviolent action with the sciences of trauma healing and the promises of spiritual practice. Fierce Vulnerability realizes we can’t “shut down” injustice any more than we can “shut down” trauma; if healing is our goal, we need social movements that center relationships and promote healing.

Discover the power of hope, reconciliation, and strength.

Messages Of Hope For South Africa is a remarkable book that brings together the voices of 30 South Africans who share their heartfelt perspectives on hope and resilience in the face of adversity.

Dive into this collection of meaningful stories and gain a deeper understanding of the journeys and wisdom of those who have faced life’s challenges with courage and optimism.

A paradigm shifting look at the landscape of disabled parenting—the joys, stigma, and discrimination—and how disability culture holds the key to transforming the way we all raise our kids

Jessica Slice’s disability is exactly what her child needed as a newborn. After becoming disabled a handful of years prior from a shift in her autonomic nervous system, Jessica had done the hard work of disentangling her worth from productivity and learning how to prepare for an unpredictable and fragile world. Despite evidence to the contrary, nondisabled people and systems often worry that disabled people cannot keep kids safe and cared for, labeling disabled parents “unfit,” but disabled parents and culture provide valuable lessons for rejecting societal rules that encourage perfectionism and lead to isolation.

Blending her experience of becoming disabled in adulthood and later becoming a parent with interviews, social research, and disability studies, Slice describes what the landscape is like for disabled parents. From expensive or non-existent adaptive equipment to inaccessible healthcare and schools to the terror of parenting while disabled in public and threat of child protective services, Slice uncovers how disabled parents, out of necessity, must reject the rules and unrealistic expectations that all parents face. She writes about how disabled parents are often more prepared than nondisabled parents to navigate the uncertainty of losing control over bodily autonomy. In doing so, she highlights the joy, creativity, and radical acceptance that comes with being a disabled parent.

While disabled parents have been omitted from mainstream parenting conversations, Slice argues that disabled bodies and minds give us the hopeful perspectives and solutions we need for transforming a societal system that has left parents exhausted, stuck, and alone.

From the bestselling author of The Taking of Jemima Boone, the unbelievable true story of a real-life Swiss Family Robinson (and their dog) who faced sharks, shipwreck, and betrayal.

On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers—the ship’s captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog—along with the ship’s crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea.

When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore—on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans. Hans appeared to have been there for a while and could quickly educate the Walkers and their crew on the island’s resources. But Hans had a secret . . . and as the Walker family gradually came to learn more, what seemed like a stroke of luck to have the mysterious man’s assistance became something ominous, something darker.

Like David Grann and Stacy Schiff, Matthew Pearl unveils one of the most incredible yet little-known historical true stories, and the only known instance in history of an actual family of castaways. Save Our Souls asks us to consider who we might become if we found ourselves trapped on a deserted island.