BRITAIN’S EMPIRE
By Richard Gott
RESISTANCE, REPRESSION AND REVOLT
Contrary to nationalist legend and schoolboy history lessons, the British Empire was not a great civilizing power bringing light to the darker corners of the earth. Richard Gott’s magisterial work recounts the empire’s misdeeds from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the red-patched imperial globe from Ireland to Australia, telling a story of almost continuous colonialist violence. Recounting events from the perspective of the colonized, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream British histories.
WHO WAS MICHELANGELO ?
By Kirsten Anderson and Who HQ
Illustrated by Gregory Copeland
Travel to Renaissance Italy and learn about the young apprentice who went on become a true master, and one of the most beloved sculptors and painters of all time, Michelangelo!
Michelangelo created some of the world’s most recognizable art, from the statue of David to the intricate ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel. Beyond his well-known painting and sculpting, he was a gifted poet and architect. Young readers can learn about the entirety of Michelangelo’s life, from his time as a young apprentice, his relationships with several Catholic popes and the Medici family, to his unwillingness to stop working into his late eighties. A perfect read for art lovers and fans of the Renaissance.
SINKABLE
By Daniel Stone
OBSESSION, THE DEEP SEA, AND THE SHIPWRECK OF THE TITANIC
From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer, a fascinating and rollicking plunge into the story of the world’s most famous shipwreck, the RMS Titanic
On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one?
In Sinkable, Daniel Stone spins a fascinating tale of history, science, and obsession, uncovering the untold story of the Titanic not as a ship but as a shipwreck. He explores generations of eccentrics, like American Charles Smith, whose 1914 recovery plan using a synchronized armada of ships bearing electromagnets was complex, convincing, and utterly impossible; Jack Grimm, a Texas oil magnate who fruitlessly dropped a fortune to find the wreck after failing to find Noah’s Ark; and the British Doug Woolley, a former pantyhose factory worker who has claimed, since the 1960s, to be the true owner of the Titanic wreckage.
Along the way, Sinkable takes readers through the two miles of ocean water in which the Titanic sank, showing how the ship broke apart and why, and delves into the odd history of our understanding of such depths. Author Daniel Stone studies the landscape of the seabed, which in the Titanic’s day was thought to be as smooth and featureless as a bathtub. He interviews scientists to understand the decades of rust and decomposition that are slowly but surely consuming the ship. (She’s expected to disappear entirely within a few decades!) He even journeys over the Atlantic, during a global pandemic, to track down the elusive Doug Woolley. And Stone turns inward, looking at his own dark obsession with both the Titanic and shipwrecks in general, and why he spends hours watching ships sink on YouTube.
Brimming with humor, curiosity and wit, Sinkable follows in the tradition of Susan Orlean and Bill Bryson, offering up a page-turning work of personal journalism and an immensely entertaining romp through the deep sea and the nature of obsession.
LEADERSHIP
By Henry Kissinger
SIX STUDIES IN WORLD STRATEGY
Henry Kissinger, consummate diplomat and statesman, examines the strategies of six great twentieth-century figures and brings to life a unifying theory of leadership and diplomacy.
In Leadership, Henry Kissinger presents a far-reaching study of six impactful leaders in modern history: Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. Emerging in a period of institutional and imperial collapse across the globe, these leaders created a new international order from the vestiges of the old. Drawing not only on his deep study of history, but also his distinguished career in government, Kissinger pulls back the curtain to expose the masterful strategies of these great geopolitical minds. What results is a subtle and discerning portrait of modern statecraft, revealing timeless lessons on strategy, diplomacy, and leadership.
Looking far beyond their well-known victories and defeats, Kissinger contextualizes their highly individual strategies of statecraft over the scope of their lives – from their rise to power, to controversies and reversals, to epoch-making decisions and achievements. From Kissinger’s unique vantage point and through his personal relationships with his subjects, we see not only the impact of these far-sighted statesmen during their period in power, but also their legacies.
Throughout, Kissinger sheds light on leadership in times of war and peace and negotiation across gaping divides. Essential reading for all hoping to master the arts of command, persuasion, and inspiration, Leadership is at once sweeping in its scope and intimate in its perspective.
FOSSIL FUTURE
By Alex Epstein
WHY GLOBAL HUMAN FLOURISHING REQUIRES MORE OIL, COAL, AND NATURAL GAS–NOT LESS
The New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy
For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing–including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people. And contrary to what we hear from media “experts” about today’s “renewable revolution” and “climate emergency,” reality has proven Epstein right:
• Fact: Fossil fuels are still the dominant source of energy around the world, and growing fast—while much-hyped renewables are causing skyrocketing electricity prices and increased blackouts.
• Fact: Fossil-fueled development has brought global poverty to an all-time low.
• Fact: While fossil fuels have contributed to the 1 degree of warming in the last 170 years, climate-related deaths are at all-time lows thanks to fossil-fueled development.
What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential.
Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.
