RSA Fellows' Library

RSA Library Update - October 2008

2008-10-31T04:53:00.001-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of October 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

200s – Religion

John Cornwell
Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to The God Delusion
Profile, 2008, 211.8 COR
Richard Dawkins' apologia for atheism has attracted huge attention, and sales, all over the world. In a telling critique cast in the classical form of a letter to Dawkins John Cornwell takes issue with it. John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel is not so much a combative repudiation of Dawkins' arguments as a playful conversation with them, posing alternative viewpoints, exposing lapses in logic and errors of fact, from the vantage point of a friendly Guardian Angel.

Geoffrey Moorhouse
The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 271.0094 MOO
What happened to the monks, their orders and the communities they served after Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1536? In The Last Office, Geoffrey Moorhouse reveals how the Dissolution of the Monasteries affected the great Benedictine priory at Durham, drawing for his sources on material that has lain forgotten in the recesses of one of our great cathedrals.

300s – Social Sciences

Michael Hanlon
Eternity: Humanity’s Next Billion Years
Macmillan Science, 2008, 304.20112 HAN
Humankind is not doomed - we may be around for millions of years yet, having already survived one of the most extraordinary planet-wide catastrophes - the Ice Ages. Michael Hanlon argues that the species will survive as the planet changes around us. Not only is humankind not doomed, but that we may be around for millions, if not hundreds of millions of years. We have already survived one of the most extraordinary planet-wide catastrophes - the great Ice Ages. Equipped with the simplest technology, Homo sapiens sailed through the great glaciations, and profited from them.

Ziauddin Sardar
Balti Britain: Journeys through the British Asian Experience
Granta, 2008, 305.8914041 SAR
Ziauddin Sardar travels to the main Asian communities in the UK, to Leicester and Birmingham, Glasgow and Bradford, Tower Hamlets and Oldham, to tell the history of Asians in Britain - from the arrival of the first Indian in Britain in 1614, through the entagled days of colonialism, to the young extremists in Walthamstow mosque in 2006. He interweaves throughout an illuminating account of his own life, describing his carefree childhood in Pakistan, his family's emigration to racist 1950s Britain, and his adulthood straddling two cultures. Along the way he questions: are arranged marriages a good thing? Does the term 'Asian' obscure more than it conveys? Do Vindaloo and Balti actually exist? How far does 'the disease that is in us is of us and within us' describe Islamic terrorism? And is multiculturalism an impossible dream? Funny, surprising, touching and controversial, Balti Britain is a fascinating blend of history, reportage and memoir, which will make all Britons, Asian or otherwise, see their country through fresh eyes.

Michael Bywater
Big Babies, or, Why Can’t we just Grow Up?
Granta, 2006, 306 BYW
Michael Bywater turns his penetrating eye on the state of Western culture, from politics and the media to show business and science, and concludes we are all Big Babies now. He argues that the Baby-Boom generation is now running the show, and its own commitment to perpetual infantility is reflected in its unstoppable drive to infantilize the rest of us. Ranging from the White House to Buckingham Palace, from MTV to the BBC, from mission statements to Viagra spam, Bywater examines advertising, music, politics, the health industry, education, religion, fashion, sport and publishing, and makes a fierce and often hilarious case that, in almost every area of our lives, we are inexorably becoming...Big Babies.

Francis Gilbert
Yob Nation: The Truth about Britain’s Yob Culture
Piatkus, 2007, 306.10941 GIL
Francis Gilbert's new book shows how the relentless march of yobbery has infected every aspect of our lives; violent crime has quadrupled since 1979, and foul language and abusive behaviour has permeated the whole of society. It's not just football hooligans (and footballers) who've gloried in yobbish behaviour; politicians like Alistair Campbell and John Prescott have played their part. With the old moral codes no longer existing, society has become engulfed with fear and distrust. Francis Gilbert draws on his own experiences (working in a tough inner-city comprehensive), and of people all round Britain, to vividly illustrate his thesis. This item was donated to the Library by its author, a Fellow of the RSA.

Niall Ferguson
The Ascent of Money: A Financial history of the World
Allen Lane, 2008, 330.9 FER
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it's the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it's the chains of labour. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of human progress. What's more, he reveals financial history as the essential back-story behind all history. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, with banks provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, while the bond market was the decisive factor in conflicts from the Seven Years' War to the American Civil War. The most important lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts - sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers - sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that's why, whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

Hsiao-Hung Pai
Chinese Whispers: The True Story behind Britain’s Hidden Army of Labour
Penguin, 2008, 331.6251041 PAI
There are hundreds of thousands of undocumented Chinese immigrants in Britain. They've travelled here because of desperate poverty, and must keep their heads down and work themselves to the bone. Hsiao-Hung Pai, the only journalist who knows this community, went undercover to hear the stories of this hidden work force. She reveals a scary, shadowy world where human beings are exploited in ways unimaginable in our civilized twenty-first century. Chinese Whispers exposes the truth behind the lives of a hidden work force here in Britain. You owe it to yourself, and them, to read it.

Selwyn Parker
The Great Crash: How the Stock Market Crash of 1929 Plunged the World into Depression
Piatkus, 2008, 338.54209042 PAR
This is the story of the financial cataclysm that started with the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929, and set in motion a series of economic, political and social events that affected many millions of people in America, Britain, Europe and Australia. The Crash rolled across the world like a tidal wave, toppling governments, spreading the wave of dictatorships in Italy and Germany, infecting entire industries and plunging millions into unemployment and poverty. By the time it began to lift in 1935, the lives of people in scores of countries had changed forever. Selwyn Parker's book also poses the question: could it happen again?

Amar Bhide
The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a more Connected World
Princeton University Press, 2008, 338.926 BHI
Many warn that the next stage of globalization, the offshoring of research and development to China and India, threatens the foundations of Western prosperity. But in The Venturesome Economy, acclaimed business and economics scholar Amar Bhide shows how wrong the doomsayers are. Using extensive field studies on venture-capital-backed businesses to examine how technology really advances in modern economies, Bhide explains why know-how developed abroad enhances, not diminishes, prosperity at home, and why trying to maintain the U.S. lead by subsidizing more research or training more scientists will do more harm than good.

Gilles Kepel
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East
Belknap, 2008, 363.3250956 KEP
President Bush's War on Terror masks a complex political agenda in the Middle East - enforcing democracy, accessing Iraqi oil, securing Israel, and seeking regime change in Iran. Osama bin Laden's call for martyrs to rise up against the apostate and hasten the dawn of a universal Islamic state papers over a fractured, fragmented Islamic world that is waging war against itself. Beyond Terror and Martyrdom sounds the alarm to the West and to Islam that both of these exhausted narratives are bankrupt - neither productive of democratic change in the Middle East nor of unity in Islam. Gilles Kepel urges us to escape the ideological quagmire of terrorism and martyrdom and explore the terms of a new and constructive dialogue between Islam and the West, one for which Europe, with its expanding and restless Muslim populations, may be the proving ground.

The Howard League for Penal Reform
Community Programmes Handbook
The Howard league for Penal Reform, 2008, 370 HLPR
The Howard League for Penal Reform has compiled Community Programmes Handbook which identifies positive, creative and effective community programmes from around the UK. This handbook has detailed information about more than 20 different schemes: some working with children, others with high-risk offenders; some use restorative justice techniques while others help develop skills or find employment to help reduce the risk of re-offending. This is an essential read for practitioners and students as well as those commissioning and designing services.

Francis Gilbert
Parent Power: The Complete Guide to Getting the Best Education for you Child
Portrait, 2008, 370.941 GIL
Francis Gilbert explains that many schools are actually selective when they pretend not to be, and shows you how to get your child into the best school. He also highlights the bullying and backstabbing that can blight the lives of pupils and their parents, and shows how you can help your children to deal with it. This item was donated to the Library by its author, a Fellow of the RSA.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Richard Holmes
The Age of Wonder
HarperPress, 2008, 509.4109033 HOL
Richard Holmes's exuberant group biography celebrates the scientific revolution that preceded and outsoared the political one, changing life, the universe and everything in the last decades of the 18th century, proposing a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats.

Rupert Wright
Take Me to the Source: In Search of Water
Harvill Secker, 2008, 553.7 WRI
We cannot live without it, yet it kills six thousand children a day. It is the ultimate renewable resource, but we pollute it on a heroic scale. In this enthralling voyage of discovery, Rupert Wright sets out to discover exactly what water is and why it plays such an important role in history, culture, art and literature. Why, if water is so valuable does nobody want to pay for it unless it comes in a designer bottle? Is it really the oil of the twenty-first century? Will we all soon be fighting over it, or can it lead countries into co-operation rather than conflict? Part cultural history, part reportage and part personal journey, Take Me to the Source is the fascinating story of the substance that makes life on earth possible.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Scott E. Page
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies
Princeton University Press, 2007, 658.3008 PAG
In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups - and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity - not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. Page changes the way we understand diversity - how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all.

Tom Himpe
Advertising is Dead - Long Live Advertising!
Thames & Hudson, 2006, 659.1 HIM
As more and more conventional advertising channels become blocked, brands are beginning to renounce routine practice and take alternative and more exclusive routes. Here is a book that provides a comprehensive overview of these revolutionary new techniques, media and ideas. As the only fully illustrated survey of the global shift affecting all kinds of business, this book will be vital reading for every advertising, marketing, design and communication professional and student.

700s – The Arts

Edward W. Said
Music at the Limits
Bloomsbury, 2008, 780.9 SAI
Addressing the work of a wide variety of composers, musicians, and performers, from Mozart to Alfred Brendel, Edward Said analyses music's social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained pianist, provides rich and often surprising assessments of classical music and opera. This book offers both a fresh perspective on well-known pieces and a celebration of neglected works. Said wrote his incisive critiques as both an insider and an authority. Always eloquent and often surprising, Music at the Limits preserves an important dimension of Said's brilliant intellectual work and cements his reputation as one of the most influential and groundbreaking writers of the twentieth century.

Michael Holroyd
A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families
Chatto & Windus, 2008, 792.028092241 HOL
At the Lyceum Theatre in London, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving created a grand Cathedral of the Arts. Their intimately-involved lives exceeded in plot the Shakespearean dramas they performed on stage - and indeed were curiously affected by them. They also influenced the life and work of their remarkable children, Ellen's children in particular. Edy Craig, who founded a feminist theatre group, The Pioneer Players, established a lesbian community whose complex love-affairs make those of the Bloomsbury Group appear quite conventional. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary stage designer who collaborated with Stanislavski on a spectacular production of Hamlet in Moscow, is revealed by this book to be the forgotten man of modernism. He had 13 children by 8 women (including the famous American dancer Isadora Duncan) - perhaps the most extraordinary man Michael Holroyd has ever written about.

Katie Salen (ed.)
The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning
MIT, 2008, 794.8 SAL
This book offers an exploration of games as systems in which young people participate as gamers, producers, and learners. In the many studies of games and young people's use of them, little has been written about an overall ecology of gaming, game design and play - mapping the ways that all the various elements, from coding to social practices to aesthetics, coexist in the game world. This volume looks at games as systems in which young users participate, as gamers, producers, and learners, and aims to expand upon and add nuance to the debate over the value of games - which so far has been vociferous but overly polemical and surprisingly shallow. Game play is credited with fostering new forms of social organization and new ways of thinking and interacting; the contributors work to situate this within a dynamic media ecology that has the participatory nature of gaming at its core. They look at the ways in which youth are empowered through their participation in the creation, uptake, and revision of games; emergent gaming literacies, including modding, world-building, and learning how to navigate a complex system; and how games act as points of departure for other forms of knowledge, literacy, and social organization.

800s – Literature

Umberto Eco
Turning Back the Clock
Vintage, 2008, 854.914 ECO
After the Cold War, the 'Hot War' has made its comeback in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exhuming Kipling's Great Game, we have gone back to the clash between Islam and Christianity. The ghost of the Yellow Peril has been resurrected, the nineteenth-century anti-Darwin debate has been reopened, right-wing governments predominate. It almost seems like history, tired of the big steps forward it has taken in the past two millennia, has gone into reverse. With his customary sharpness and wit, Eco proposes, not so much that we resume a forward march, but at the very least that we cease marching backwards.

900s – Geography & History

Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford
The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way we Live
Thames & Hudson, 2008, 912 DOR
This is one of the most significant works of reference ever published. Here is our planet as you've never seen it before: 366 digitally modified maps known as cartograms depict the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a vast range of topics, ranging from basic data on population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who's eating their vegetables. Created by the team behind worldmapper.org, this compelling reference is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in understanding the new world order: how trends and statistics determine our planets future and success.

RSA Library Update - September 2008

2008-10-03T04:48:00.000-07:00

RSA Library Update - September 2008

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of September 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Gary Marcus
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Faber, 2008, 153 MAR
A 'kluge' is an engineering term for a makeshift solution, an inelegant construction that somehow works. This is Gary Marcus' analogy for the way the human mind has evolved. Arguing against a whole tradition that praises our human minds as the most perfect result of evolution, Marcus shows how imperfect and ill-adapted our brains really are. They have had to adapt from the environment of our early hominid origins to a complex world in which our penchant for short-term satisfactions is literally fatal. We are prone to rages, addictions and other habits that limit our capacity for rational action in every sphere, from food to politics.

Jurgen Wolff
Focus: The Power of Targeted Thinking
Prentice Hall Life, 2008, 153.733 WOL
Time management has evolved. No longer can traditional methods, the type suited to making repetitive tasks more efficient, be used. The age of 24/7 connectivity and constant demands has lead to frantic multi-tasking and fire-fighting. The result: lots of activity, not much achievement. Most time management books are written for left-brain people who are already organized and see things in an analytical way, and some still use age-old techniques. With Focus, you are exposed to recent discoveries that allow you to achieve a state of flow that can lead to maximum achievement in minimum time.

A. C. Grayling
The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 171.2 GRA
Duty or Pleasure? This was the legendary choice which faced Hercules, and which pre-eminent philosopher AC Grayling uses as the starting point of his masterful new book. He shows us how much more people can understand about themselves and their world by reflecting on today's moral challenges. Above all, he explores the idea that certain demands and certain pleasures are necessary, not just because of their intrinsic merits but because of what they do for each other. The Good Life or the good life? With exceptional clarity and unrivalled prose, Grayling addresses the everyday ethical choices which confront us all.

200s – Religion

Mark Vernon
After Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 211.7 VER
The broadside against religion launched by a new breed of evangelical atheists has generated much heat but little light. Locked in battle against their Christian opponents the argument goes nowhere fast, and in an age of extremism, nurtures the dangerous vice of intolerance. Mark Vernon was an Anglican priest, left a conviction atheist, but now finds himself to be a committed and increasingly passionate agnostic. Part personal story, part philosophical search, After Atheism argues that the contemporary lust for certainty is demeaning of our humanity. The key to wisdom - as Socrates, the great theologians and the best scientists know - is understanding the limits of our knowledge.

300s – Social Sciences

Hans Lrause Hansen and Jens Hoff (eds.)
Digital Governance, Networked Societies: Creating Authority, Community and Identity in a Globalized World
Samfundslitteratur, 2006, 302.231 SAN
This volume explores the role of the Internet in the creation and reconfiguration of political authority, community and identity in a globalising world. A string of case studies demonstrates how the Internet and connectivity facilitate the creation of political authorities 'within' and 'beyond' the nation state, and how it lies at the core of the formation of automated forms of power and the emergence of a plethora of communities with global reach and outlook, affecting identity formation processes and social dynamics. These developments have important repercussions for politics and democracy. Politics in the Information Age becomes a 'politics of presence' and a 'politics of becoming', as expressed through multiple practices, connections and organisational forms, as well as the complex formation of political identities. In such a set-up, democracy comes to depend more on ethics and less on procedures. This volume lays the foundation for further work on politics and democracy in the Information Age.

Bruno Latour
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
Oxford University Press, 2007, 302.3 LAT
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it is a misnomer. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory.

David Nye
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
MIT, 2007, 303.483 NYE
We use technology to shape our world, yet we think little about the choices we are making. In Technology Matters, Nye tackles ten central questions about our relationship to technology, integrating a half-century of ideas about technology into ten cogent and concise chapters, with wide-ranging historical examples from many societies. Among them: Does technology shape us, or do we shape it? Is technology inevitable or unpredictable? Are we using modern technology to create cultural uniformity, or diversity? To create abundance, or an ecological crisis? To destroy jobs, or create new opportunities? Should the market choose our technologies? Does ubiquitous technology expand our mental horizons, or encapsulate us in artifice? These large questions may have no final answers yet, but we need to wrestle with them - to live them, so that we may, as Rilke puts it, live along some distant day into the answers.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Harvard Business Press, 2008, 303.4833 BER
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff define 'the groundswell' as a social structure in which technology puts power into the hands of individuals and communities, not institutions. We see examples of this all around us: Second Life, You Tube, Twitter, etc. The technology that is enabling this has created a permanent, long lasting shift in the way the world works. This compelling, research-based book will not only identify the emerging components of this shift, but will also help companies build their businesses around it with data and advice, regardless of what specific new technologies come along. Li and Bernoff, well-known thought leaders in the area of social technology, have used their considerable resources at Forrester Research to generate hard consumer data that quantifies a viable business opportunity. Based on their work with dozens of companies presented in the book, the authors are able to credibly describe how business can participate in the new social medium in order to communicate with, energize, support, and learn from their customers.

Richard Watson
Future Files: 5 Trends for the next 50 Years
Nicholas Brealey, 2008, 303.49 WAT
Filled with provocative forecasts about how the world might change in the next half century, Future Files examines emerging patterns and developments in society, technology, economy, and business, and makes educated speculations as to where they might take us. It is indispensable to business analysts, strategists and organisations who need to stay ahead of the game as well as providing rich and fascinating material for dinner party conversations.

Julia Neuberger
Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age
HarperCollins, 2008, 305.260941 NEU
Britain is getting old -- and fast. Due to the combination of a decline in birth rates and an increase in life expectancy we are rapidly heading towards a crisis -- in health, housing, finance and long-term care. Despite this seismic shift in our demographic makeup, the way we view and treat the old has barely adjusted. It is shocking, for example, that despite less than 1 in 20 British people wanting to reside in a care home in their old age, 1 in 5 die in one. It is time that we examined how we look after ourselves as we age -- and address the issues that when young we take for granted as a right, not a privilege.

Hugh Miles
Playing Cards in Cairo
Abacus, 2008, 305.486970962 MIL
Recently installed in Cairo as a freelance journalist and expat barfly, Hugh Miles soon meets and falls in love with Roda, a beautiful Egyptian doctor, who introduces him to Egypt's favourite pastime, the card game tarneeb, to her all-female card circle, and to a previously unseen side of life in the Middle East's greatest city. While the women cut and shuffle, Miles listens to their stories and learns about what it means to be a young Muslim woman, dating, dieting and divorcing in a country where traditional Islamic values are in the ascendant. Yosra struggles with an addiction to prescription drugs; Nadia copes with a baby and an abusive husband; neighbour Reem comes to terms with plastic surgery gone wrong; while her sister attempts to conceal her secret love-marriage from her family and to breathe life into a clothes shop run by a regime apparatchik with an Islamist vision of retail. Hugh Miles takes a fascinating sideways look at the lives of young Egyptians, and finds himself on a romantic adventure that will lead him to Islam and bind him to the Arab world for ever.

Amy Spencer
DIY: The Rise of Lo-fi Culture
Marion Boyars, 2008, 306.48426 SPE
Since the ‘90s, hundreds of zines, records and CDs have been produced by individuals in reaction to the shortcomings of the mainstream media. The central message: if you can find the cultural experience you are looking for, create your own alternative! This exploration of lo-fi culture traces the origin of the DIY ethics back to the sci-fi zines of the ‘30s, the self-publishing of the beats, the skiffle movement of the ‘50s, and the ‘70s punk scne.

David Marquand
Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy
Orion, 2008, 320.94109042 MAR
The story of British democracy opens more than 350 years ago: The Levellers of the 17th century, 18th-century radicals, the Chartists and the Reform Acts are all part of the unsteady and fiercely contested progress towards a democratic constitution and universal male suffrage in 1918. Dreams, visions and ideals are important too - of George Orwell, and Enoch Powell, Milton, Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, Churchill and Lord Salisbury, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Benn - for they have also shaped our outlook. BRITAIN SINCE 1918 is a formidable combination of narrative and analysis: entertaining, instructive and thought-provoking.

Michael Moore
Mike’s Election Guide 2008
Penguin Books, 2008, 324.60973 MOO
Michael Moore returns to give you the low-down on the ins and outs of voting, answering all those pressing questions you've always wondered about, such as, Why should I vote? It only encourages them. Can my vote be bought (and what's the starting price)? The candidates seem to think I'm stupid. Should I just go along to keep them happy? It seems like just anyone can run for office. Is that a good idea? For anyone who thought voting was just a load of ballots, this is the book you need to read before marking your X. Enfranchisement has never been so exciting!

Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Unjust Rewards: Exposing Greed and Inequality in Britain Today
Granta, 2008, 339.20941 TOY
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. City workers earn millions and manual workers earn less than they did thirty years ago. The widening gap is tearing apart the fabric of our society. In this urgent polemic, Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee and the Guardian's economics editor David Walker present a worrying portrait of Britain today. Their gripping investigation takes them to a Cable and Wireless AGM, a chairman of a FTSE 100 company, a council estate, an inner city school and a Sure-Start programme. High earners have little idea that half of British people earn less that GBP22,300, and are amazed to learn that a third of the population live below the poverty line. Unjust Rewards sets the agenda for the next general election.

Trevor Paglen
I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me
Melville House Publishing, 2008, 355.13420973 PAG
They're on the shoulder of all military personnel: patches that symbolize what a soldier's unit does. But what happens if it's top secret? Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches, worn by military units working on classified missions, are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known. By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume one of the best available surveys of the military's black world - a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11. Trevor Paglen is a geographer by training, and an expert on clandestine military installations, and leads expeditions to the secret bases of the American West.

Catherine Arnold
Bedlam: London and Madness
Simon & Schuster, 2008, 362.209421 ARN
'Bedlam!' The very name conjures up graphic images of naked patients chained among filthy straw, or parading untended wards deluded that they are Napoleon or Jesus Christ. We owe this image of madness to William Hogarth, who, in plate eight of his 1735 Rake's Progress series, depicts the anti-hero in Bedlam, the latest addition to a freak show providing entertainment for Londoners between trips to the Tower Zoo, puppet shows and public executions. Following the historical narrative structure of her acclaimed Necropolis, Bedlam examines the capital's treatment of the insane over the centuries, from the founding of Bethlehem Hospital in 1247 through the heyday of the great Victorian asylums to the more enlightened attitudes that prevail today.

David Simon
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
Canongate, 2008, 363.25952097526 SIM
The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the centre of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of men confronted by the darkest of American visions. David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and his remarkable book is both a compelling account of casework and an investigation into our culture of violence. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator nearing the end of his career; Harry Edgerton, an iconoclastic black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year's most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

Kelly Grovier
The Gaol: The Story of Newgate, London’s Most Notorious Prison
John Murray, 2008, 365.9421 GRO
For over 800 years, Newgate was the grimy axel around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London’s theatres came and went, the gaol endured as its unofficial stage. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prisons links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.

Guy Claxton
What’s the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education
Oneworld, 2008, 370.1 CLA
With their emphasis on regurgitated knowledge and stressful exams, today's schools actually do more harm than good. Guiding readers past the sterile debates about City Academies and dumbed-down exams, Claxton proves that education's key responsibility should be to create enthusiastic learners who will go on to thrive as adults in a swiftly-changing, dynamic world. Students must be encouraged to sharpen their wits, ask questions, and think for themselves - all without chucking out Shakespeare or the Periodic Table. Blending down-to-earth examples with the latest advances in brain science, and written with passion, wit, and authority, this brilliant book will inspire teachers, parents, and readers of all backgrounds to join a practical revolution and foster in the next generation a natural curiosity and the spirit of adventure.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Marcus Chown
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Faber, 2008, 530.12 CHO
The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einstein's general theory of relativity. But, almost a century after their advent, most people haven't the slightest clue what either is about. Did you know that there's so much empty space inside matter that the entire human race could be squeezed into the volume of a sugar cube? Or that you grow old more quickly on the top floor of a building than on the ground floor? Get set for the most entertaining science book of the year.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Lisa Appignanesi
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present
Virago, 2008, 616.890082 APP
This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists. Here, too, is the story of the professions that have grown up to offer treatment, of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded or sometimes failed, even when those providing care were women too. Mad, Bad and Sad takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind.

Tom Vanderbilt
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way we do (and What it Says about Us)
Allen Lane, 2008, 629.283 VAN
Why does the other lane always seem to be moving faster? Why are people so different inside their cars than they are outside them? Is traffic a microcosm of society, or does the road make its own rules? Traffic speaks volumes: bringing together people from every walk of life. In this hugely enjoyable, curiosity-filled book, Tom Vanderbilt explains why traffic problems are really people problems. Traffic shows that how we behave walking the streets, on our bikes and in our cars is an astonishing cultural indicator; a living, constantly surprising model, what physicists call 'emergent collective behaviour'. Vanderbilt chauffeurs us through why it's so hard to pay attention in traffic, why women cause more congestion than men, what factors make us more likely to honk our horns amongst a host of eye-opening highway conundrums. This book will change the way you view the world and help you better navigate it.

Luke Johnson
The Maverick: Dispatches from an Unrepentant Capitalist
Harriman House, 2007, 650 JOH
For eight years between 1998 and 2006, Luke Johnson wrote a regular column as The Maverick in The Sunday Telegraph. His short, pithy essays tackled subjects ranging from rich lists to bankrupt companies, from high finance to investment techniques, from philanthropy to trophy wives, bringing a practitioner's eye to the commercial world and the people in it. The Maverick quickly developed a cult following among readers who wanted to understand the blunt truth about investment, entrepreneurs, business history, and corporate life. This book brings together 84 of the best articles, with updates, in a single volume. What makes them unique is that Luke Johnson is not just a first-class writer, he is also one of Britain's most successful entrepreneurs. He is the Chairman of Channel 4, and made his name with Pizza Express, has run and owned businesses in many different sectors, and now takes stakes in fast-growing businesses through his company, Risk Capital Partners. The diversity of his experience enables him to write with insight and perspective about the very serious matter of making and losing money. If you are in business, you will find The Maverick entertaining, informative and inspiring. If you are not in business, you will discover what makes business people tick, the hurdles they have to overcome to succeed, and the substantial benefits they bring to society.

Jeff Howe
Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business
Random House Business, 2008, 658.405802854678 HOW
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in an article in Wired in June 2006, Crowdsourcing describes the process by which the power of the many can be harnessed together on the internet to build and to innovate. Now he shows precisely how this has become possible - how complex social, technological and economic developments have fused together to make Crowdsourcing an increasingly powerful force in more and more areas of our daily lives. Crowdsourcing is now a part of our lives, whether we're aware of it or not. If we're to benefit from what it can achieve, we need to understand where it's come from and how it works - and where it's taking us.

Peter M. Senge
The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World
Nicholas Brealey, 2008, 658.408 SEN
The Necessary Revolution reveals how corporations and organizations are, in the face of looming environmental crises and pressure from social issues, finding solutions that ensure both long- term survival and real-time business success. It is destined to become the essential handbook for everyone who understands the need to act and work together now to create a sustainable world for ourselves and the generations to come. The Necessary Revolution contains a wealth of strategies to help anyone, regardless of role or title, build the confidence and competence to respond effectively to the greatest challenge of our time. It is destined to become the essential handbook for everyone who understands the need to act and work together-now-to create a sustainable world for ourselves and the generations to follow.

Julie Perigo
Winners in the Second Half: A Guide for Executives at the Top of their Game
John Wiley, 2008, 658.409 PER
Later career, 'the second half of the game', is not, as it is often perceived to be, a period of decline or a black hole, but an inspirational time of Generative Leadership and a challenging opportunity for better tactics. This book explores common fears and uncertainties about the second half of the game, enabling you to feel comfortable exploring opportunities previously outside of your comfort zone and feel confident about your future.

700s – The Arts

Don Thompson
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses
Aurum, 2008, 706.88 THO
The Twelve Million Dollar Stuffed Shark is the first book to look at the economics of the modern art world and the marketing strategies which power the market to produce such astronomical prices. Don Thompson, an economics professor specializing in art and auctions, talks to auction houses, dealers, and collectors to find out the source of Charles Saatchi's Midas touch, and how far a gallery like White Cube has contributed to Damien Hirst becoming the highest-earning artist in the world. He unravels the Byzantine sale procedures by which the top auction houses maintain both premium prices for what they sell and their own pre-eminence, but also shows us a market whose most spectacular excesses are driven just as often by far simpler human urges like lust and self-aggrandizement. It is a world in which brand is all-important, and which in many ways has most in common with the branded world of luxury fashion. The result is a fascinating, shrewd and highly readable insight into a modern-day phenomenon.

Tom McCarthy
Tintin and the Secret of Literature
Granta, 2007, 741.59493 MCC
Herge's Tintin cartoon adventures have been translated into more than fifty languages and read by tens of millions of children aged, as their publishers like to say, 'from 7 to 77.' Arguing that their characters are as strong and their plots as complex as any dreamt up by the great novelists, Tom McCarthy asks a simple question: is Tintin literature? McCarthy takes a cue from Tintin himself, who spends much of his time tracking down illicit radio signals, entering crypts and decoding puzzles and suggests that we too need to 'tune in' and decode if we want to capture what's going on in Herge's work. What emerges is a remarkable story of hushed-up royal descent, in both Herge's work and his own family history. McCarthy shows how the themes this story generates - expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour, and anxieties around questions of forgery and fakeness - are the same that have fuelled and troubled writers from the classical era to the present day. His startling conclusion is that Tintin's ultimate 'secret' is that of literature itself.

Michael Peppiatt
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma
Constable, 2008, 759.2 PEP
Published in 1996, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma was the first in-depth study of the artist's life. It has not been superseded. In this substantially revised, updated edition to coincide with the artist's centenary, Peppiatt has incorporated confidential material Bacon gave him, which he did not include in the first edition. This valuable, first-hand information comes from the hundreds of conversations Bacon had with Peppiatt, often late into the night, over thirty years, particularly during the periods Bacon spent living and working in Paris. It includes insights into Bacon's intimate relationships, his artistic convictions and his general view of life, as well as his acerbic comments on his contemporaries. Similarly, his recent research into the artist's background - his tortured affair with the sadistic Peter Lacy in Tangier, for instance, and the baffling circumstances of his death in Madrid - shed light on unexplored areas of Bacon's life and work.

Daniel Barenboim
Everything is Connected: The Power of Music
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, 780 BAR
Daniel Barenboim's new book vividly describes his lifelong pursuit of knowledge and understanding, not only of music and of life, but of one through the other. As he himself says in the introduction,” This is not a book for musicians, nor is it one for non-musicians, but rather for the curious mind that wishes to discover the parallels between music and life and the wisdom that becomes audible to the thinking ear.” From the problems of timing - whether in a piece of music or a political process - to the philosophy of Spinoza and its relevance to musical interpretation, Barenboim advocates the integration of music and musical thought into our everyday lives.

Sarah Street
British National Cinema
Routledge, 2008, 791.430941 STR
With films as diverse as Bhaji on the Beach, The Dam Busters, Trainspotting, The Draughtsman's Contract, Prick Up Your Ears, Ratcatcher, This Is England and Atonement, British cinema has produced wide-ranging notions of British culture, identity and nationhood. British National Cinema is a comprehensive introduction to the British film industry within an economic, political and social context.

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
MIT, 2003, 794.8 SAL
As pop culture, games are as important as film or television--but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games, and Rules of Play is a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games.. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like play, design, and interactivity.

John Carlin
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation
Atlantic, 2008, 796.3330964 CAR
24 June 1995. Ellis Park in Johannesburg. The Springboks versus The All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup final. Nelson Mandela steps onto the pitch wearing a Springboks shirt and, before a global audience of millions, a new country is born. This book tells the incredible story of Mandela's journey to that moment. As the day of the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup dawned, and the Springboks faced New Zealand's all-conquering All Blacks, more was at stake than a sporting trophy. When Nelson Mandela appeared wearing a Springboks jersey and led the all-white Afrikaner-dominated team in singing South Africa's new national anthem, he conquered white South Africa. Playing the Enemy tells the extraordinary human story of how that moment became possible. It shows how a sport, once the preserve of South Africa's Afrikaans-speaking minority, came to unify the new rainbow nation, and tells of how - just occasionally - something as simple as a game really can help people to rise above themselves and see beyond their differences.

800s – Literature

Michael Chabon
Maps and Legends
McSweeney's Publishing, 2008, 801.95 CHA
The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay pens a work of literary non-fiction--a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing.

Haruki Murakami
What I Talk about when I Talk about Running
Harvill Secker, 2008, 895.635 MUR
In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he'd completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and on his writing. Equal parts travelogue, training log, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and settings ranging from Tokyo's Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs, and the experience, after fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back.

900s – Geography & History

David Andress
1789: The Threshold of the Modern Age
Little, Brown, 2008, 909.7 AND
In 1789 the world stood at the threshold of the modern age. While the French Revolution and the election of George Washington seemed to herald a new global order, Britain stood shocked at the new world unfolding before her. Two documents were drafted which would change the very meanings of citizens and statehood: the US Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The age of royal despotism had ended. But beneath this veneer of progress, darker forces were at work: the French Revolution spiralled out of control, American slavery expanded and the armed forces of the British Empire were unleashed in India. From 'mad' King George III to J.J. Rousseau and Thomas Paine, from Pitt the Younger to Robespierre, David Andress illuminates a world on the brink through the men who held its future in their hands.

Chris Patten
What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century
Allen Lane, 2008, 909.83 PAT
Globalisation, energy, international crime, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear proliferation, small arms proliferation, international drugs trafficking, climate change, water shortage, migration, epidemic disease, the fraying of the nation state: the list of challenges facing our world is itself proliferating rapidly, and nobody seems to have much of a grip on what is going on. Digesting vast amounts of information from a multiplicity of sources, and drawing on his experience at the highest levels of national and international politics, Chris Patten analyses what we know in each of these areas and argues how in each of them we could get somewhere we might want to be. Very little, he says, has turned out as we might have expected twenty years ago, but there is plenty we can still do. Readers of Patten's previous books will know what a penetrating analyst and engaging writer he is. This is his most ambitious and impressive yet.

Andrew Mueller
I Wouldn’t Start from Here: The 21st Century and where it all went wrong
Portobello, 2008, 909.831 MUE
What is a jaded rock journalist doing in the company of mercenaries, terrorists, warmongers and hitmen? Andrew Mueller doesn’t consider himself a ‘proper’ reporter; yet somehow he’s found himself skidding around the globe from failed state to ravaged warzone to desolate no-man’s-land in an attempt to unpick why we humans seem so prone to plucking war from the jaws of peace, why so much that can go wrong does go wrong, and why some conflicts suddenly seem to find themselves resolved. Here we travel with him as he ducks for cover in Gaza, runs roadblocks in Iraq, hang out with Hezbollah, and gets arrested in Cameroon.

London through a Lens
Time Out, 2008, 914.2100222 TIM
The capital like you've never seen it before. London through a Lens brings together over 200 images of the city from the birth of photography to the present. Based on the popular slot in the weekly Time Out magazine, it avoids the usual tourist cliches in favour of beautiful, shocking, intriguing and amusing pictures - each with explanatory text - that create a vibrant portrait of London's many faces. Taken from the vast archives of Getty Images, the photos mix the momentous and the mundane, cultural highs and sporting lows, iconic buildings and forgotten streets, famous figures and ordinary Londoners. Some are by acclaimed photographers, some by anonymous snappers, and many are rare or never published. The result: a rich and arresting visual biography - and the perfect gift for anyone interested in London.

Frank Westerman
Ararat
Harvill Secker, 2008, 915.662 WES
Ararat is a breathtaking journey along the fault-line between religion and science, a pilgrimage by a non-believer that takes Frank Westerman to Mount Ararat where, as biblical tradition has it, Noah's Ark ran aground and God made his covenant with mankind. Mount Ararat is now a geographical, political and cultural crossroads, bound up with the centuries-old history of warfare between different cultures in this region.As Westerman stands at its foot it poses both a physical and a religious challenge: where is the God from my children's bible? Who or what has taken his place? Can one free oneself of a religious upbringing? He meets geologists, priests, and, on the mountain's high slopes, an expedition in search of the Ark's remains. And also a Russian astronaut who observes that 'there is something between heaven and earth about which we humans know nothing'. Ararat is a dazzling, highly personal book about science, religion and all that lies between, by one of Europe's most celebrated young writers.

Richard Grant
Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of Mexico
Little, Brown, 2008, 917.21 GRA
There are many ways to die in the Sierra Madre, a notorious nine-hundred-mile mountain range in northern Mexico where AK-47s are fetish objects, the law is almost non-existent and power lies in the hands of brutal drug mafias. Thousands of tons of opium and marijuana are produced there every year. Richard Grant thought it would be a good idea to travel the length of the Sierra Madre and write a book about it. He was warned before he left that he would be killed. But driven by what he calls 'an unfortunate fascination' for this mysterious region, Grant sets off anyway. In a remarkable piece of investigative writing, he evokes a sinister, surreal landscape of lonely mesas, canyons sometimes deeper than the Grand Canyon, hostile villages and an outlaw culture where homicide is the most common cause of death and grandmothers sell cocaine. Finally his luck runs out and he finds himself fleeing for his life, pursued by men who would murder a stranger in their territory 'to please the trigger finger'.

Ophelia Field
The Kit-Cat Club: Friends who Imagined a Nation
HarperPress, 2008, 941.0680922 FIE
The fascinating history of the male-only members of the Kit-Cat Club, the unofficial centre of Whig power in 17th century Britain, and home to the greatest political and artistic thinkers of a generation. The Kit-Cat Club was founded in the late 1690s when London bookseller Jacob Tonson forged a partnership with pie-maker Christopher (Kit) Cat. What began as an eccentric publishing rights deal - Tonson paying to feed talented young writers and receiving first option on their works - developed into a unique gathering of intellects and interests, then into an unofficial centre of Whig power during the reigns of William & Mary, Anne and George I. With consummate skill, Ophelia Field portrays this formative period in British history through the club's intimate lens, describing the vicious Tory-Whig 'paper wars' and the mechanics of aristocratic patronage, the London theatre world and its battles over sexual morality, England's Union with Scotland and the hurly-burly of Westminster politics. Tracing the Kit-Cat Club's far-reaching influence for the first time, this group biography illuminates a period when the British were searching for, and just beginning to find, a new national identity.

Orlando Figes
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
Penguin, 2008, 947.0842 FIG
Drawing on a huge range of sources, Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

Richard Dowden
Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
Portobello, 2008, 960.32 DOW
Richard Dowden is a leading Africa correspondent; since first arriving in Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1971, he has never stopped learning about and reporting on real Africans and the realities of lie in Africa’s many and varied lands. Dowden combines on a novelist’s gift for atmosphere with the unblinking scholar’s grasp of historical change to produce one of the most compelling and revealing accounts of modern sub-Saharan Africa yet. His experiences there required him to re-evaluate all he had been taught to believe, and his landmark book enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent in a new light.

Featured Book - "What's the Point of School?"

2008-09-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

Guy Claxton
What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education
Oneworld, 2008, 370.1 CLA

With the opening of the RSA Academy in Tipton this September, the first school in the country to be designed and built around the principles of our Opening Minds curriculum, it's timely that the RSA is hosting a discussion of Guy Claxton's new book, What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education.

Claxton, a profressor in Education as well as fellow of the British Psychological Society, has long advocated learning styles similar to Opening Mind's competency-based teaching, arguing for the replacment of the traditional three-R's with a new set of four: resilience, resourcefulness, reflection, and relationships, and as co-director of Winchester University's Centre for Real-world Learning, he has worked to understand how people learn the skills to that they need to accomplish real-world tasks, from writing stories to resolving heated arguments.

Guy Claxton will be in discussion with educationalists Mike Gibbons, deputy director of The Innovation Unit and Dylan William on 2 October 2008, at 1pm, as part of our RSA Thursday strand. Follow this link to book your place, and email the RSA Library to borrow a copy of What's the Point of School? and other Claxton publications.

Open House London 2008

2008-09-12T04:08:00.000-07:00

Open House
Open House London: Architecture Up Close
Open House Press, 2008, REF 720 OPE

On Sunday 21st September, the doors of 8 John Adam Street will be opened up to the public as the RSA once again takes part in the annual London Open House weekend.

Open House is an architecture education organisation that runs a public programme of events which aims to raise the standard of London’s built environment and encourage people to experience and engage with good design. The premier event on their calendar, the annual London Open House weekend is London’s largest architectural ‘exhibition’ and gives everyone the opportunity to visit over 700 buildings old and new across London – many of which are normally closed to the public.

For London Open House, not only will you be able to tour the Adam brothers- designed properties of their Adelphi Development that the RSA now inhabits, including a pub, some wine cellars and an underground street, but there will be a display of materials from our Archive, detailing this history of the Society; staff from our Projects department will be there to explain the work we do now; and our Fellowship team will be there to discuss how you can get involved in its future.

The full 70 page colour guide to the event can be purchase or downloaded from Open House’s shop, for £4.50 and £3.50 respectively. Alternatively, copies are available free of charge from participating London Borough libraries, or for RSA Fellows, from the RSA Library, and you can search their listings here.

The RSA House will be open from 12pm to 5pm on Sunday 21 September, with last entry at 4.30pm, no booking is required. All building taking part in London Open House can be viewed free of charge, however a significant number of them require advanced bookings.

RSA Library Update - August 2008

2008-09-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of August 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

200s – Religion

Alister E. McGrath
The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine
SPCK, 2007, 211.8 MCG
World-renowned scientist Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” Once an atheist himself, Alister McGrath gained a doctorate in molecular biophysics before going on to become a leading Christian theologian. He wonders how two people, who have reflected at length on substantially the same world, could possibly have come to such different conclusions about God, asking if faith is intellectual nonsense, if science and religion locked in a battle to the death and can the roots of Christianity be explained away scientifically?

300s – Social Sciences

Stephen Gundle
Glamour: A History
Oxford University Press, 2008, 306.4 GUN
Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture - but also one of the most elusive. The aura of celebrity, the style of the fashion world, the vanity of the rich and beautiful, and the publicity-driven rites of cafe society are all imbued with its irresistible magnetism. But what exactly is glamour? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle answers all these questions and more in this first ever history of the phenomenon, from Paris in the tumultuous final decades of the eighteenth century through to Hollywood, New York, and Monte Carlo. Throughout, the book captures the excitement and sex appeal of glamour while exposing its mechanisms and exploring its sleazy and sometimes tragic underside. As Gundle shows, while glamour is exciting and magnetic, its promise is ultimately an illusion that can only ever be partially fulfilled.

Jennifer Worth
Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the1950s
Phoenix, 2008, 306.87439421 WOR
Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction. Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the community of nuns (including one who was accused of stealing jewels from Hatton Garden) and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained. Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, Jennifer's stories bring to life the colourful world of the East End in the 1950s.

Diane Duncan
Teaching Children’s Literature
Routledge, 2008, 372.64 DUN
Drawing on a series of recently conducted classroom workshops and live interviews with the authors, this inspiring book examines five popular children's authors: Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Michael Morpurgo, Anthony Browne, Jacqueline Wilson and the genre of comic books. Teaching Children's Literature provides detailed literary knowledge about the chosen authors and genres alongside clear, structured guidelines and creative ideas to help teachers, student teachers and classroom assistants make some immensely popular children's books come alive in the classroom. This accessible and inspiring text for teachers, parents, student teachers and students of children's literature includes a variety of discussion, drama, writing and drawing activities, with ideas for Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning which can be used to plan a unit of work or series of interrelated lessons for pupils aged between seven and fourteen years. It provides detailed, literary knowledge about the authors, their works, language, plot and characterisation, including exclusive transcripts of interviews with three contemporary children's book authors, and shows teachers how pupils can be encouraged to become more critical and knowledgeable about screen, picture and comic narratives as well as written narratives. Teaching Children’s Literature has kindly been donated to the Library by Diane Duncan, a Fellow of the RSA.

Oliver Tickell
Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse
Zed, 2008, 363.738746 TIC
The Kyoto Protocol, the world's first tentative step towards avoiding the threat of climate change, has failed. We urgently need a new course of action. In Kyoto2, the writer, journalist and broadcaster Oliver Tickell puts forward a strikingly original new solution. Using a system of finite production rights for greenhouse gases, which would be traded by organisations on a global auction, Kyoto2 seeks to succeed where the original agreement failed. Regulated by an independent body, the funds could be poured back into healing the wounds inflicted by climate change. In his combination of idealism with realistic proposals, Tickell exposes the flaws in current approaches, and envisions a fairer and more effective system. Kyoto2 promises to banish the dejection of the post-Kyoto era, reviving hope that the cure for the crisis facing our planet is still achievable.

Carolyn Steel
Hungry City: How Food Shapes our Lives
Chatto & Windus, 2008, 363.8 STE
Cities were shaped by food and its demands, and to ignore this as we plan the urban future is to pervert the basis of our social existence - and to risk the future of the planet. Hungry City examines the way in which modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence. It reveals that we have yet to solve a centuries-old dilemma - one which holds the key to a host of 21st century ills, from obesity, social exclusion and poverty, to the destruction of the natural world. Carolyn Steel follows food on its journey - from the farms where it is grown, through the public and private spaces of the city and back to the land - showing how our environment is being manipulated by the dictates of modern food production, and explaining how we can change things for the better.

Charles Leadbeater
What’s Next? 21 Ideas for a 21st Century Learning
The Innovation Unit, 2008, 370 LEA
How can we build on the most racial innovations in today’s schools to create a new approach to learning fit for the century to come? Charles Leadbeater argues that the current approach to educational reform is running out of steam. Improvements in results have reached a plateau, and educational inequality remains stubbornly high. What’s Next? makes 21 recommendations to create an approach centred on children learning with, as well as from, teachers at schools that would feel smaller and offer more personalised learning. But just as important, Leadbeater’s vision of relationships for learning embraces the family, workplace and community as well as the school as centres for learning.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

700s – The Arts

Miles Wynn Cato
Parry
WelshArt, 2008, 757 CAT
William Parry was a familiar figure in the artistic community of late 18th century London. Most crucially, he was also well known to many of the major gentry families of north Wales, especially those with connections to the Williams Wynns. Yet his reputation fell into obscurity after his death and he has never before been the subject of in-depth academic study. Parry’s output as an artist appears to have been relatively small. Many of his paintings and drawings have been lost and the majority of those that have survived have been attributed to other important British artists of the period such as Wheatley, Opie and Wilson. A number of his most important surviving works have been re-identified in the course of researching this book and are published for the first time. Miles Wynn Cato read history at Cambridge and is the author of two other Welsh history books – Old Blood of Merioneth and A Perfect Patriarch.

800s – Literature

900s – Geography & History

RSA Library Update - July 2008

2008-08-05T08:44:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of July 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence
Bantam Books, 2005, 152.4 GOL
Everyone knows that high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, but until Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman's brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our two minds--the rational and the emotional--and how they together shape our destiny. Through vivid examples, Goleman delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and shows how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart. The best news is that emotional literacy is not fixed early in life. Every parent, every teacher, every business leader, and everyone interested in a more civil society, has a stake in this compelling vision of human possibility.

Noah Goldstein, Steve Marin and Robert Cialdini
Yes! What Science tells us about how to be Persuasive
Profile, 2007, 153.852 GOL
Most of us are only too aware that, whatever roles we have in today's fast-moving world, much of our success lies in getting others to say 'yes' to our requests. What many people might not be aware of, though, is the vast amount of research that has been conducted on the influence process. What factors cause one person to say 'yes' to the request of another? Yes! is full of practical tips based on recent academic research that shows how the psychology of persuasion can provide valuable insights for anyone interested in improving their ability to persuade others - whether in the workplace, at home or even on the internet.

200s – Religion

Trevor Beeson
Round the Church in Fifty Years: An Intimate Journey
SCM Press, 2007, 283.4209045 BEE
One of the most perceptive and entertaining of writers, Trevor Beeson, takes us on a fascinating and amusing journey through the Church of England in the last fifty years. From the publication of Honest to God and to the ordination of women and rows over sexuality, it has been an extraordinary time, with its moments of exhilaration and absurdity. We travel a decade a time, taking in the Swinging Sixties and the Gay Nineties, enjoying an overview of both momentous change and obscure events in the Church, on the international stage and at a local level. In the Thatcher years, when the Church was the government's most effective opposition, what foolish or trivial things were exciting the minds of local preachers and editors of parish magazines? This wonderful book embraces both. Each section comprises 50 vignettes that capture the spirit of the age in which they were written.

300s – Social Sciences

Chip and Dan Heath
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuck
Arrow Books, 2008, 302.2 HEA
What is that makes urban myths so persistent but many everyday truths so eminently forgettable? How do newspapers set about ensuring that their headlines make you want to read on? And why do we remember complicated stories but not complicated facts? In the course of over ten years of study, Chip and Dan Heath have established what it is that determines whether particular ideas or stories stick in our minds or not, and Made to Stick is the fascinating outcome of their painstaking research. Packed full of case histories and thought-provoking anecdotes, it shows, among other things, how one Australian scientist convinced the world he'd discovered the cause of stomach ulcers by drinking a glass filled with bacteria, and how a gifted sports reporter got people to watch a football match by showing them the outside of the stadium. Entertaining and informative by turns, this is a fascinating and multi-faceted account of a key area of human behaviour. At the same time, by showing how we can all use such cleverly devised strategies as the 'Velcro Theory of Memory' and 'curiosity gaps', it offers superbly practical insights, setting out principles we all can adopt to make sure that we get our ideas across effectively.

Richard Seyler Ling
New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication is Reshaping Social Cohesion
MIT, 2008, 303.4833 LIN
This book looks at how cell phones and mobile communication may in many cases strengthen social cohesion. The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is there; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us? In New Tech, New Ties , Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions - those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, which documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.

Kenan Malik
Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
Oneworld, 2008, 305.8 MAL
The debate about race is back - and with a vengeance. In the past, scientific ideas of race reflected political ideas of inferiority and superiority, whereas today it reflects contemporary notions of diversity. Kenan Malik challenges both sides of the race debate, controversially revealing that it is not through the scientific study of human differences but through our political obsession with identity and diversity that racial ideas are once more catching fire. Weaving together politics, history, science, and philosophy, Strange Fruit discusses issues ranging from the science of skull measurement to the politics of the Holocaust; from diabetes rates among Hispanics to the fate of the Elgin Marbles; from the genetics of altruism to the struggle for Aboriginal rights; and, from the successes of Human Genome Project to the failures of multiculturalism. Huge in its reach and powerful in its grasp, the book uproots the conventional ways of thinking about race, science, and identity.

John Naish
Enough
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, 306.3 NAI
For millions of years, humankind has used a brilliantly successful survival strategy. If we like something, we chase after more of it: more status, more food, more info, more stuff. Then we chase again. It's how we survived famine, disease and disaster to colonise the world. But now, thanks to technology, we've suddenly got more of everything than we can ever use, enjoy or afford. That doesn't stop us from striving though and it's making us sick, tired, overweight, angry and in debt. It burns up our personal ecologies and the planet's ecology too. We urgently need to develop a sense of 'enough'. Our culture keeps telling us that we don't yet have all we need to be happy, but in fact we need to nurture a new skill -- the ability to bask in the bounties all around us. Enough explores how our Neolithic brain-wiring spurs us to build a world of overabundance that keeps us hooked on 'more'. John explains how, through adopting the art of enoughness, we can break from this wrecking cycle. With ten chapters on topics such as Enough food, Enough stuff, Enough hurry and Enough information, he explores how we created the problem and gives us practical ways to make our lives better.

Stella Creast (ed.)
Participation Nation: Reconnecting Citizens to the Public Realm
The Involve Foundation, 2007, 323.042 CRE
Whether through online consultations, deliberative focus groups or citizens’ juries, never before have there been so many opportunities for citizens to influence public services. There is now a growing consensus that the state can no longer direct the actions of citizens without their cooperation any more than the market alone can be relied upon to address the challenges of modernity. Whether in dealing with climate change, public health concerns or tackling international terrorism and promoting pro-social behaviour, we are entering an era in which progress can only be made in a society in which individuals, communities and public services are each able and willing to play their own part. For this to happen, public participation must become the core, not the counterpart, of the future of public service decision marking. The time has come, it appears, for people power.

John Bolton
Surrender is not an Option: Defending American at the United Nations and Abroad
Simon & Schuster, 2007, 341.2373 BOL
The son of a Baltimore fireman and the first person in his family to go to university, with scholarships to Yale College and Yale Law School, John Bolton candidly recounts his sixteen month tenure as US Ambassador to the United Nations, his Senate confirmation battle, and the highlights of his career in public service in two prior Republican administrations. In this explosive book, Bolton details how he made sure that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan did not run for a third term and that another 'secular Pope' did not succeed him and why no country except the United States has done much about ending the genocide in Darfur. With a no-holds barred approach, John Bolton provides a unique insight into the workings of this monolithic institution and America's place within it.

Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg
The Devil Came on Horseback
Dogwoof Pictures, 2008, 355.0218 STE
An up-close, honest, and uncompromising look at the crisis in Darfur, The Devil Came on Horseback exposes the on-going tragedy taking place in Sudan as seen through the eyes of one American witness. Using the exclusive photographs and first-hand testimony of former U.S. Marine Captain Brian Steidle, the film goes on an emotionally charged journey into the heart of Darfurm Sudan, where in 2004 Steidle became witness to a genocide that to date has claimed over 400,000 lives. As an official military observer, Steidle had access to parts of the country that no journalist could penetrate. A film which demands to be watched by as many people as possible, The Devil Came on Horseback is a heartfelt account of what this particular American witness saw and, just as important, what he did afterwards.

Christopher Booker and Richard North
Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming, How Scares are Costing us the Earth
Continuum, 2007, 363.1 BOO
From salmonella in eggs to BSE, from the Millennium Bug to bird 'flu, from DDT to passive smoking, from asbestos to global warming, 'scares' have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. This book for the first time tells the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades, showing how they have followed a remarkably consistent pattern. It analyses the crucial role played in each case by scientists who have misread or manipulated the evidence; by the media and lobbyists who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts; and finally by the politicians and officials who come up with an absurdly disproportionate response, leaving us all to pay a colossal price, which may run into billions or even hundreds of billions of pounds. In an epilogue the authors compare our credulity in falling for scares to mass-hysterias of previous ages such as the post-mediaeval 'witch craze', describing our time as a 'new age of superstition'.

Robert Kunzig and Wallace S. Broecker
Fixing Climate: The Story of Climate Science, and How to Stop Global Warming
GreenProfile, 2008, 363.738747 KUN
We've heard a lot about climate change - but what can we do about it? Wallace Broecker, the eminent scientist who coined the term global warming way back in 1975, believes in a solution emerging on the horizon: 'artificial trees' designed to remove CO2 directly from the air. Penned by Broeker with award-winning science writer Robert Kunzig, this riveting and important book looks back at Earth's volatile climate history to shed light on the challenges we face ahead. Ice ages, planetary orbits, a giant 'conveyor belt' in the ocean...it's a story full of extraordinary discoveries and maverick thinkers. Broecker likens climate to a slumbering beast, ready to react to the smallest of prods. And prodding it we are, by pumping 70 million tonnes of CO2 into the air each year. Fixing Climate explains why we need not just to reduce emissions but to start removing our carbon waste from our atmosphere. And in a thrilling last section of the book, we learn how this could become reality, using 'artificial trees' and underground storage.

Jane Martin and Ann Holt
Joined-up Governance: Making Sense of the Role of the School Governor
Adamson, 2007, 371.2011 MAR
Written by two leading experts on governance, Joined-up Governance establishes the underlying principles of the governors’ work and links them to their responsibilities. The result is to reveal and pattern and a purpose which will help governors to focus on the essential tasks and give them the confidence to do less of what others could or should be doing.

Alex Gibney
Taxi to the Dark Side
Revolver Entertainment, 2008, 399 GIB
As US Soldiers occupied war-torn Afghanistan in 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar was arrested, along with his passengers, at a checkpoint for an alleged involvement in a Taliban rocket attack. Confined to a solitary cell at Bagram, Dilawar was chained and exposed to continuous beatings and torture from the US soldiers. Five days after his arrest, Dilawar died.

400s – Language

Maryanne Wolf
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Icon, 2008, 418.4019 WOL
'We were never born to read', says Maryanne Wolf. 'No specific genes ever dictated reading's development. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we changed the very organisation of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.' In Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf explores our brains' near-miraculous ability to arrange and re-arrange themselves in response to external circumstances. She examines how this 'open architecture', the elasticity of our brains, helps and hinders humans in their attempts to learn to read, and to process the written language. She also investigates what happens to people whose brains make it difficult to acquire these skills, such as those with dyslexia .Wolf, a world expert on the reading brain, brings both a personal passion and deft style to this, the story of the reading brain. It is a pop science masterpiece on a subject that anyone who loves reading will be sure to find fascinating.

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Michio Kaku
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Tour beyond Science Fiction, Fantasy and Magic
Allen Lane, 2008, 509.05 KAK
Physics of the Impossible takes us on a journey to the frontiers of science and beyond, giving us an exhilarating insight into what we can really hope to achieve in the future. Everyday we see that what was once declared 'impossible' by scientists has become part of our everyday lives: fax machines, glass sky-scrapers, gas-powered automobiles, a worldwide communications network and high-speed elevated trains. Here, internationally bestselling author Micho Kaku confidently hurdles today's frontier of science, presenting the first truly authoritative exploration of the real science of tomorrow; a field normally left to writers of science fiction. He reveals the actual possibilities of perpetual motion, force fields, invisibility, ray guns, anti-gravity and anti-matter, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, robots and cyborgs, faster than light travel, time travel, zero-point energy, extraterrestrial life, even clairvoyance. And he shows how few of these ideas actually violate the laws of physics. The real differences between the impossible, the unlikely and the imminent have never been so clear.

Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack
The View from the Centre of the Universe
Fourth Estate, 2006, 523.1 ABR
Ever since Galileo discovered that Earth is not the centre of the universe, we've thought of 'the universe' as either an enormous ice-cold vacuum or a setting for science fiction. Now, thanks to startling discoveries in astronomy and physics, we can see that the universe is far more coherent than anyone ever imagined it to be. For the first time in history, we have the necessary tools, theories and thinking to create a science-based cosmology (the study of the origin and structure of the universe) that explains not only how the universe works but what our place in it really is. This emerging cosmology explains how the universe operates, what the universe is made of, where it may have come from, how it is evolving and why it makes sense that humans are on Earth at all. Authors Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams, a world-renowned astrophysicist and a science philosopher, explain these astonishing new ideas in ways that will literally change how we view the world, showing us how intellectually thrilling and intuitively meaningful these new concepts are.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Julia Middleton
Beyond Authority: Leadership in a Changing World
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 658.4092 MID
Many leaders have established their reputation in the internal silo environment of their organization. When they extend their leadership role beyond the organization, authority and legitimacy are constantly in question. Julia Middleton argues that new leaders need to be confident to legitimize themselves and challenge old ways. They need to develop a leadership style that will enable them to lead beyond the traditional boundaries and constraints of the organization. This book provides many challenging and compelling ideas and examples.

700s – The Arts

Rebecca Jenkins
The First London Olympics, 1908
Portrait, 2008, 796.48 JEN
A hundred years ago a 140-acre site of scrubland in London was transformed into the White City, which housed the 1908 Franco British Exhibition and a state-of-the-art stadium built to house the first London Olympics. The Olympics were organised by volunteers in 18 months, at a fraction of the cost of the modern Olympics and yet, just as today, the sport was overshadowed by doping scandals, and the protests of an occupied nation seeking independence. The British team were pitted against a US team dominated by Irish Americans and lost. The Games culminated in the historic marathon when Italian baker Dorando Pietri was disqualified, after he was helped across the finish line. Rebecca Jenkins's book, aided by over 70 charming illustrations, is a fascinating slice of social and sporting history and provides a thought-provoking contrast to the forthcoming London Olympics of 2012.

800s – Literature

David Foster Wallace
Consider the Lobster
Abacus, 2007, 814.54 WAL
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike's deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News' Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in his new book of hilarious non-fiction. For this collection, David Foster Wallace immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. Then he wheedles his way into an L.A. radio studio, armed with tubs of chicken, to get the behind-the-scenes view of a conservative talkshow featuring a host with an unnatural penchant for clothing that only looks good on the radio. In what is sure to be a much-talked-about exploration of distinctly modern subjects, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life's most delicious topics.

900s – Geography & History

Fareed Zakaria
The Post-American World
Allen Lane, 2008, 909.83 ZAK
'This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else'. So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the 'rise of the rest' - the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others - as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination.

Simon Foxell
Mapping London: Making Sense of the City
Black Dog, 2007, 911.421 FOX
Mapping London: Making Sense of the City is a beautiful, compelling anthology that explores over six centuries of London maps. The book is a cartographic journey through the city, tracing its fascinating evolution and exploring the hopes and fears of its inhabitants as events unfold. Mapping London is lavishly illustrated with over 150 maps - from the earliest Roman and Saxon maps, contemporary town planning, literary imaginings and utopian prophecies through to the renderings of artists and comics, as well as timeless icons such as the London Underground map and the Monopoly board.

Sukhdev Sandhu
Night Haunts
Artangel/Verso, 2007, 914.210486 SAN
London at night, from Shakespeare's time to Dickens to Jack the Ripper, was always seen as a lawless orgy of depravity and pestilence, teeming with rogues and bandits. But is it now as bland and unthreatening as any new town? Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across London to find out whether the London night really has been rendered neutral by street lighting and CCTV cameras. Sandhu's forays see him prospecting in the London night with the people who drive its pulse, from the avian police to security guards, zookeepers and exorcists. He wades through the sewers, hangs out with pirate DJs and accompanies the marine patrol looking for midnight corpses. In a beautifully written and wonderfully illustrated book he seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city - to revitalise the great myth of London for a new century.

Sarah Wise
The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
Bodley Head, 2008, 942.1081 WIS
In 1887, Government inspectors were sent to explore the horrifying - often lethal - living conditions of the Old Nichol, a notorious 15-acre slum in London's East End. Among much else they found that the rotting 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords. Peers of the Realm, local politicians, churchmen and lawyers were making profits on these death-traps of as much as 150 per cent per annum. Before long, the Old Nichol became a focus of public attention, with journalists, the clergy, charity workers and others condemned its 6,000 inhabitants for their drunkenness and criminality. The solution to this 'problem' lay in internment camps, said some, or forced emigration - even policies designed to prevent breeding. Concentrating on the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period in London's history, when revolution was very much in the air - when unemployment, agricultural depression and a crackdown on parish relief provided a breeding ground for Communists and Anarchists. Sarah Wise explores the real lives behind the statistics - the woodworkers, fish smokers, street hawkers and many more. She excavates the Old Nichol from the ruins of history, laying bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire.

Jonathan Fenby
The Britannica Guide to Modern China
Robinson, 2008, 951 FEN
In 2008, as Beijing hosts the Olympic Games, the world's attention is focused on China - yet the most populous nation on the planet is still something of a mystery for many. This comprehensive introduction to the country gives an unbiased and lively overview of China's people, its culture and recent history. In an illuminating account of the rise of modern China, The Britannica Guide shows how this former peasant economy has been transformed in the last three decades to achieve its present position as a super-power - and the future looks set to be even more impressive. Drawing together the most up-to-date material, and presenting it in a clear, reader-friendly style, it is the perfect companion for travellers who wish to know the country beyond the tourist trail, students and business people who need an overview of the culture and society, and of course the general reader, who wants to understand China's remarkable legacy and potent future.

Danny Postel
Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007, 955 POS
The Iran depicted in the headlines is a rogue state ruled by ever-more-defiant Islamic fundamentalists. Yet inside the borders, an unheralded transformation of a wholly different political bent is occurring. A liberal renaissance, as one Iranian thinker terms it, is emerging in Iran, and in this pamphlet, Danny Postel charts the contours of the intellectual upheaval. Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran examines the conflicted positions of the Left toward Iran since 1979, and, in particular, critically reconsiders Foucault's connection to the Iranian Revolution. Postel explores the various elements of the subtle liberal revolution and proposes a host of potential implications of this transformation for Western liberalism. He examines the appeal of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin among Iranian intellectuals and ponders how their ideas appear back to us when refracted through a Persian prism. Postel closes with a thought-provoking conversation with eminent Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo. A provocative and incisive polemic highly relevant to our times, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran will be of interest to anyone who wants to get beyond alarmist rhetoric and truly understand contemporary Iran.

Featured Book - "Nudge"

2008-07-11T06:04:00.000-07:00

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Yale University Press, 2008, 300.01 SUN

Economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein have been formulating their ideas about “libertarian paternalism” in various articles for several years, drawing on the works of behavioural economists that explain the irrationality of human behaviour, and suggest new economic models that take these in to account.

Their new book, Nudge, goes beyond explaining our decisions about our own health, wealth and happiness to devising new policies that could, as the title suggests, nudge us towards making better ones. The BBC’s Mark Easton has drawn parallels between their work, current policy debates within the Conservative party and our chief executive Matthew Taylor, and recent review highlighted recent advances in neurology as expanding further still our possibility to understand and control our own decisions.

The RSA has been thinking publically about just possibilities recently, and so it is only fitting that Richard Thaler will be speaking here on Thursday 17 July at 1pm. To borrow a copy of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, please contact the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - June 2008

2008-06-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of June 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

Ruth DeSouza and Andy Williamson
Researching with Communities: Grounded Perspectives on Engaging Communities in Research
Muddy Creak Press, 2007, 001.42 DES
Researching with communities presents a range of personal and grounded perspectives from academics, researchers and practitioners on undertaking research in ways that promote and privilege the voice of the community, is respectful of local or indigenous practices, and is culturally safe.

Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard
Urban Computing and its Discontents
The Architectural League of New York, 2007, 004 GRE
The first in a series of pamphlets on the merging field of situated technologies, Urban Computing and its Discontents looks at how our experiences of cities is changing, and will continued change, as a result of the increased mobile communication and internet-connected devices. This pamphlet is also freely available online.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Astra Taylor
Žižek!
ICA Films, 2008, 150.195 TAY
The author of works on subjects as wide-ranging as Alfred Hitchcock, 9/11, opera, Christianity, Lenin and David Lynch, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is one of the most important - and outrageous - cultural theorists working today. This documentary explores the eccentric personality and esoteric work of this incomparable academic and writer.

David Gauntlett
Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences
Routledge, 2007, 155.2 GAU
Drawing upon an array of disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy, and art to social theory, David Gauntlett explores the ways in which researchers can embrace people's everyday creativity in order to understand social experience. Seeking an alternative to traditional interviews and focus groups, he outlines studies in which people have been asked to make visual things - such as video, collage, metaphorical models of their identities in Lego, and drawing - and then interpret them. This creative reflective method provides insights into how individuals present themselves, understand their own life story, and connect with the social world. Creative Explorations is a lively, readable and original discussion of identities, media influences, and creativity, which will be of interest to both students and academics.

200s – Religion

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Jesus Camp
ICA Films, 2006, 261.7 EWI
A growing number of evangelical Christians believe there is a revival underway in America that requires Christian youth to assume leadership roles in advocating the causes of their religious movement. Jesus Camp follows Levi, Rachael and Tory to Pastor Becky Fischer’s “Kid’s on Fire” summer camp in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, where children as young as six are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in “God’s Army”. The film follows these children at camp as they hone their “prophetic gifts” and are schooled in how to “take back America for Christ”.

300s – Social Sciences

Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley
Going Global: Key Questions for the Twenty-First Century
A. & C. Black, 2008, 303.482 MOY
'Globalisation' is an extremely popular business buzzword, but people are often unsure about what it actually means - let alone its implications. In this unique book, the authors not only explain how we can make sense of globalisation, but also address the 12 questions most commonly asked about the world today -and tomorrow. Some of the many hot topics scrutinised by the authors include climate change, terrorism, energy supply, population, and business.

Julia Margo, Mike Dixon, Nick Pearce and Howard Reed (eds.)
Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World
IPPR, 2006, 305.235 MAR
This report responds to an extensive debate among academics, practitioners and commentators – even the Archbishop of Canterbury – on the ‘problems of modern youth’. Analysing evidence from across the world, it concludes that both the frequent condemnation of teenagers and recent attempts to absolve them from blame are misplaced. It says that changes in the family, local communities and the economy have combined to cause deep inequalities in the transition to modern adult life and leave increasing numbers of young people incapable of growing up safely and successfully.

Alain De Botton
Status Anxiety
Penguin, 2005, 305.5 BOT
We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment from status anxiety. For the first time, Alain de Botton gives a name to this universal condition and sets out to investigate both its origins and possible solutions. He looks at history, philosophy, economics, art and politics and reveals the many ingenious ways that great minds have overcome their worries. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking but genuinely wise and helpful as well.

Christina Julios
Contemporary British Identity: English Language, Migrants and Public Discourse
Ashgate, 2008, 305.800941 JUL
Against the background of an increasingly multicultural British society, this book traces the evolution of British identity in the 20th century. Debates around British multiculturalism and multi-ethnic identity are deconstructed through a linguistic lens, which explores the role played by the English language in these debates. Examination of the expansionism of the 19th century British Empire and the rise of the United States to the position of the world's superpower during the 20th century is provided. The book raises questions about the collective ability and willingness to redress the imbalance between the majority white population and the country's marginalised minority ethnic communities, providing enlightening clues to the likely course that the prevailing public discourse on British identity will take in the 21st century. This item has kindly been donated to the Library by its author, Christina Julios, a Fellow of the RSA.

Leo Hollis
The Phoenix: St. Paul’s Cathedral and the men who made Modern London
Orion, 2008, 307.34160942109032 HOL
Opening in the 1640s, as the city was gripped in tumult leading up to the English Civil War, The Phoenix charts the lives and works of five extraordinary men, who would grow up in the chaos of a world turned upside down: the architect, Sir Christopher Wren; gardener and virtuosi, John Evelyn; the scientist, Robert Hooke; the radical philosopher, John Locke and the builder, Nicholas Barbon. At the heart of the story is the rebuilding of London's iconic cathedral, St Paul's. Interweaving science, architecture, history and philosophy, The Phoenix tells the story of the formation of the first modern city.

Richard Burdett
The Endless City: The Urban Age Project
Phaidon, 2008, 307.76 BUR
If the late twentieth century was the age of economic globalization, the first part of the twenty-first century will be the age of the city; the urban age, where more than half of the earth's population live in urban areas. Questions regarding the shape, size, density and distribution of the city have become increasingly complex and politicized, and the impact of the built environment on social inclusion and quality of life are at the forefront of discussions about urban planning. These are the issues that have led to the creation of The Urban Age Project, a network of organizations, individuals and research projects that focus on sustainable development in the world's cities. It offers a platform from which to discuss how architects, urbanists and politicians should plan infrastructure and development without constraining growth and promote a better social and economic life. This book is the result of the discussions and extensive research produced for these conferences.

Anne Power and John Houghton
Jigsaw Cities: Big Places, Small Spaces
Policy, 2007, 307.760942 HOU
This new book explores Britain's intensely urban and increasingly global communities as interlocking pieces of a complex jigsaw, which are hard to see apart yet they are deeply unequal. How did our major cities become so divided? How do they respond to housing and neighbourhood decay? Jigsaw City examines these issues using Birmingham, Britain's second largest city and pioneer of the modern urban order, as our strongest model of the drive to create public solutions to private squalor is in three parts: the origins of Britain's acute urban decline; the idea that one size doesn't fit all; and the continuing urban flight that traps the poor and pays the rich to move out. This item was kindly donated to the Library by John Houghton, a UK-US Fulbright Humphrey Scholar 2005-06.

Hans Blix
Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms
WMDC, 2006, 327.1747 BLI
Nuclear, biological and chemical arms are the most inhumane of all weapons. They are rightly called weapons of mass destruction and weapons of terror. Designed to terrify as well as destroy, these weapons can, in the hands of either states or terrorists, cause destruction on a vastly greater scale than any conventional weapons. In this report, in independent Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, chaired by Dr. Hans Blix, confronts this global challenge and presents 60 recommendations on what the world community - national governments and civil society - can and should do.

Hans Blix
Why Nuclear Disarmament Happens
MIT Press, 2008, 327.1747 BLI
This book from the former UN head weapons inspector in Iraq is a plea for a renewed global disarmament movement.In 2002 Dr. Hans Blix, then chief United Nations weapons inspector, lead his team on a search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Before the United States went to war with Iraq the next March, he maintained there were no WMD in Iraq, and history proved him right. For more than forty years Dr. Blix has worked on global disarmament, and with this new book he renews the call for nuclear non-proliferation; it is not a recipe for success for nuclear states to tell the rest of the world that it must stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable. We will never be able to convince rogue states to halt the pursuit of nuclear weapons programs unless we take the lead in a new nonproliferation and disarmament movement. Why Nuclear Disarmament Matters includes specific suggestions - how the UN can set the stage for a credible multilateral disarmament and nonproliferation process; what kind of treaties would be most helpful - and recommendations for regional policy, including providing the Middle East with enriched uranium for civilian nuclear power production but not allowing uranium enrichment there.

Arien Boin, Paul ‘t Hart, Eric Stern and Bengt Sundelius
The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 352.3 BOI
Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact of the crisis at hand, while critics and bureaucratic competitors try to seize the moment to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policy makers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue.

James Orbinski
An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century
Rider, 2008, 361.26092 ORB
In An Imperfect Offering, James Orbinski expands on the theme of his recent RSA Lecture, telling his own extraordinary story of being a doctor, as well as discussing the nature of humanitarian action today and our responsibilities as citizens of the world. Born in Britain in 1960, James Orbinski's family moved to Canada when he was seven years old. As a young man, he became a medic to learn how to help, and deal with, the suffering of others. From then on he was plunged into many highly demanding situations, including being Head of Mission for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) during the Rwandan genocide; engaging with the politics of humanitarian work as the President of MSF; being in New York when the towers fell on 9/11; co-founding Dignitas International (an AIDS charity); and finally, returning to Rwanda on the 10th anniversary of the crisis there. In An Imperfect Offering, Orbinski not only tells his own inspiring story but is also remarkably provocative about what governments and agencies should and shouldn't be doing to help the world's poor and very sick. At the same time, he addresses what part each of us can play, so that we never lose sight of the dignity of those being helped, or deny them the right to act in their own lives.

Barton Jay Hirsch
A Place to Call Home: After-school Programs for Urban Youth
American Psychological Association, 2005, 362.712 HIR
Across the political spectrum, there is enormous interest in how local community organizations can help raise children who are growing up in poverty. This timely book examines the processes and outcomes at six inner-city Boys & Girls Clubs - one of the leading youth development organizations in the country. Featuring critical analysis and practical guidelines from a well-known authority on early adolescence, this information-packed volume, demonstrates how after-school programs emphasizing staff mentoring can provide critical resources for helping urban youth navigate the tumult of early adolescence.

Damian Tambini and Jamie Cowling (eds.)
From Public Service Broadcasting to Public Service Communications
Institute for Public Policy Research, 2004, 384.540941 COW
Public service broadcasting must change if it is to survive. The licensing and funding arrangements that support it are challenged by long-term technical and market changes including the proliferation of channels and services, the rise of new interactive services and the shift away from mass access to niche services and alternative platforms for content delivery. Although in the short term UK public service broadcasters are in a state of rude health, they neglect these longer-term challenges at their peril.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
On Intelligence
Owl Books, 2005, 612.82 HAW
Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself. Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines. The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.

Sally Goddard Blythe
What Babies and Children Really Need
Hawthorn, 2008, 649.122 GOD
This book represents a milestone in our understanding of child development and what parents can do to provide their children with the best start in life. The author uses the latest scientific research to demonstrate how a baby's relationship with its mother has a lasting and fundamental impact. She argues that changes in society over the past 50 years - such as delayed motherhood, limited uptake of breastfeeding and early return to work - are interfering with the key developmental milestones essential to success and wellbeing in later life. This item was kindly donated to the Library by its author, Sally Goddard Blythe, a Fellow of the RSA.

700s – The Arts

Amir Bar-Lev
My Kid Could Paint That
Sony, 200, 702.874 BAR
In this documentary, Amir Bar-Lev tracks the overnight celebrity of Marla Olmstead, a toddler who creates gallery-worthy paintings on the dining room table of her family home. A media sensation by the age of four, critics compare her work with that of Jackson Pollock, and sales reach $300,000. But when a 2005 60 Minutes profile suggest that Maria had help making her paintings, the finger is pointed at her father, a keen amateur artist. Almost overnight, her family is ensnared in a web of accusation and denial, with the burden of proof placed squarely in their lap: is Maria a child prodigy or an innocent victim of a hoax?

Susan Glyn
The Word and the Image: A Contemporary Artist’s Vision of the Bible
2008, 704.948 GLY
This unpublished monograph pairs images of artworks by Susan Glyn with poems by both herself and Caroline Glyn, created in response to selected Bible passages. It has kindly been donated to the Library by Susan Glyn, a Fellow of the RSA.

Jonathan Black
Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Designer and Artist
Philip Wilson, 2008, 730.92 BLA
In 1938, Dora Gordine was hailed as 'possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor in the world.' For over thirty years she was widely perceived as a major presence in European sculpture; for her contribution to the inter-war art movement known as the rappel a l'ordre, as a prominent member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and as a founder of the Society of Portrait Sculptors. This book is the first to reveal the reality of her colourful life, containing a wealth of previously unpublished material, as well as providing a comprehensive assessment of her undoubted achievements as a talented and versatile sculptor and artist who, possessed a distinct flair for architectural and interior design. This item has kindly been donated to the Library by Dr. DGC Allen, a Fellow of the RSA.

Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić
Icons of Graphic Design
Thames & Hudson, 2008, 741.60904 HEL
Here is a unique history of graphic design that charts over a century of creative brilliance, showcasing the most influential graphic designs from 1900 to the present. Organized chronologically to illustrate how one great concept can inspire the next, each year features a seminal piece of work by a graphic artist some famous, some anonymous the designs that originally inspired them and later works that show their influence. The evolution of ideas is brought alive through the encyclopaedic format and Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić’s revealing observations highlighting the manner in which graphic styles and artistic devices flow with times, thereby guaranteeing the books appeal to designers and students of design everywhere.

Cynthia E. Smith
Design for the Other 90%
Cooper-Hewitt, 2008, 745.2091724 SMI
Of the world’s total population of 6.5 billion, close to 5.8 billion, 90%, have little or no access to products and services many of us take for granted; nearly half do not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. Design for the Other 90% explores more than thirty projects which reflect the growing movement among designers, engineers, students and professors, architects, and social entrepreneurs to design low-cost solutions to meet these needs.

Jasmine Dellal
Gypsy Caravan: When the Road Bends
ICA Films, 2006, 780.91497 DEL
This documentary follows five Gypsy bands from four countries who unite for the “Gypsy Caravan” as they take their show around North America for a sex-week tour, astounding every audience they meet. Their musical styles range from flamenco to brass band, Romanian violin to Indian folk.

Tony Palmer
All You Need is Love
Plastic Head, 2008, 781.63 PAL
Popular music is now an essential part of our daily lives, yet we know comparatively little about it: where it came from; how it developed; how is has influenced or been influenced by social change. Today, the popular music industry controls billions of dollars, yet it depends, ultimately, on the creative talents of a group of remarkable individuals. The story of popular music, therefore, is a story of the struggle by these individuals to survive the demands of an avaricious, thieving and capricious industry. The 17 episodes of this critically acclaimed TV series, originally broadcast worldwide between 1976 and 1980, are featured here, fully restored across 5 DVDs.

Andy Kimpton-Nye
Derek Jarman: Life as Art
400Blows Productions, 2004, 791.43 JAR/KIM
Derek Jarman was the most imaginative, innovative and controversial film-maker in Britain throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s – an extraordinary talent, the like of which we may never see again. This documentary explores his life and career as a film-maker. This otherwise-unavailable documentary was kindly donated to the Library by its director, Andy Kimpton-Nye.

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
Artificial Eye, 2006, 796.33092 GOR
Artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, cinematographer Darius Khondji and 17 movie cameras film Zinédine Zidane for the entirety of Real Madrid vs. Villareal, with the legend’s thoughts and observations on his career and a magnificent score by the band Mogwai.

Douglas Beattie
The Rivals Game: Inside the British Derby
Know the Score!, 2008, 796.3340941 BEA
Why do football supporters choose one club rather than the other in a city where intense, often deep-seated rivalries exist? What made the choice for them; family ties, politics, religion, race, gang membership? Or were the clubs just different in what they stood for on the field as much as off it? Douglas Beattie spent two years getting underneath the skin of mainland Britain's biggest derby rivalries. These are the matches that are built up by the media as passionate, divisive and vitally important for the entire cities they are played in. These are the games that have a history of violence, fueds, social unrest and bigotry. With divisions going back as far as the English Civil War and preconceptions - mostly wrong - littering the landscape, Douglas visited Sheffield, Birmingham, north London, Manchester, Liverpool, the north east, Edinburgh and Glasgow to discover why.

800s – Literature

900s – Geography & History

Alan Mumford
Lordly Cartoons
Burke's Peerage & Gentry, 2003, 929.72 MUM
Burke's Peerage presents here a very different view of Lords and Ladies, through cartoons published over the last 250 years, frequently lending a critical view of events. Beginning with William Hogarth's eighteenth-century depiction of the last Lord to be hanged for treason, they cover amongst other things the activities of the House of Lords and its reform, and many major personalities involved in political life, from the Earl of Beaconsfield (Disraeli) to Asquith, Lloyd George, the Earl of Stockton (Macmillan), Lord Home and Baroness Thatcher.

Stephen Inwood
Historic London: An Explorer’s Companion
Macmillan, 2008, 942.1 INW
There is hardly a city in the world with richer historical and cultural associations than London. It is a place where history has been made for thousands of years, and where it is still being made today. It is not a city frozen in time, preserved in its ancient medieval pomp but a place that has been at or near the centre of national life for a thousand years and at the forefront of international political, cultural and economic history for each of the past five centuries. Here Stephen Inwood offers an explorer's guide to London's past. As you walk the streets of the capital, whether you live in the city or are just visiting it, Inwood will show you London's history all around you: stretches of Roman wall; medieval churches and Tudor houses that survived the Great Fire; monastic buildings that survived the Reformation; street markets first established centuries ago that survive today; Georgian streets and squares that were spared the wreckers' ball; Wren churches; Victorian terraces; and, Inns of Court that survived the Blitz. He takes you to the London of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuels Pepys and Johnson; Dickens and Darwin, T.S Eliot and George Orwell. It is the perfect book to have in your pocket or your bag as you go about your business in this most fascinating of cities.

Featured Book - "Complaint"

2008-06-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

Julian Baggini
Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protest
Profile, 2008, 302.24 BAG

Julian Baggini, co-founder of The Philosophers’ Magazine and columnist for the Guardian and the Herald, has always taken a practical approach to philosophical problems.

While no fan of bad complaining, his new book is a principled defence of taking it to the level of an artform. From its function as a social glue in the face of a fragmenting society, to the whingeing roots of social reform movements, Baggini outlines how to complain and what’s worth complaining about.

Julian Baggini will be speaking at the RSA on Thursday 19 June, and to borrow a copy of Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protest, please email the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - May 2008

2008-05-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of May 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items.

000s – Generalities

Patrick Russell
Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950
BFI Video, 2008, 070.18 RUS
Featuring 40 films over four DVDs, this extensive collection is a major retrospective of the British documentary film movement during its period of greatest influence. These films - many of which are available here for the first time since their original release - capture the spirit and strength, concerns and resolve of Britain and its people before, during, and after the Second World War.

Sandhya Suri
I for India
ICA Films, 2008, 070.18 SUR
In 1965, Yash Pal Suri left India for the U.K. The first thing he does on his arrival in England is to buy two Super-8 cameras, two projectors and two reel to reel recorders. One set of equipment he sends to his family in India, the other he keeps for himself, and for 40 years he uses it to share his new life abroad with those back home, while in India, his relatives in turn, respond with their own 'cine-letters' telling tales of weddings, festivals and village life. A bitter-sweet time capsule of alienation, discovery, racism and belonging, I for India is a chronicle of immigration in sixties Britain and beyond, seen through the eyes of one Asian family and their movie camera.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions
HarperCollins, 2008, 153.83 ARI
Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? The answers will surprise you. Predictably Irrational is an intriguing, witty and utterly original look at why we all make illogical decisions. Why is everything relative, even when it shouldn't be? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? In this astounding book, behavioural economist Dan Ariely cuts to the heart of our strange behaviour, demonstrating how irrationality often supplants rational thought and that the reason for this is embedded in the very structure of our minds, showing that we can make better decisions in business, in matters of collective welfare, and in our everyday lives from drinking coffee to losing weight, buying a car to choosing a romantic partner.

Geoff Mulgan
Good and Bad Power: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government
Penguin, 2007, 172 MUL
The old democracies of western Europe and north America have achieved a rough balance between being too strong in their control of their citizens, and too weak in their ability to help them, yet still suffer from constant crises of moral purpose. There is a growing trend of anti-politics, manifest in falling turnouts and party membership, and an assumption that politicians represent the worst venality rather than the highest ideals. Something has gone badly wrong in our relationship with power. This book explains why we have arrived at this point, what can be done to change the world, and how the power of governments can be used for good.

200s – Religion

300s – Social Sciences

Paul Kingsnorth
Real England: The Battle Against the Bland
Portobello, 2008, 303.4480942 KIN
We see the signs around us every day: the chain cafés and mobile phone outlets that dominate our high streets; the decline of small farms and the loss of our rural post-offices; the headlines about yet another traditional industry going to the wall In Real England Paul Kingsnorth makes a connection between these isolated, incremental, local changes and the bigger picture of a nation whose identity is being eroded. As he travels around the country meeting fruit-growers, lock-keepers, stall-owners and the inhabitants of London’s Chinatown, Paul Kingsworth records the kind of conversations that are taking place in country pubs and corner shops across the land - while warning people that these quintessentially English institutions may soon cease to exist.

Malcolm McCullough
Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing
MIT, 2005, 303.4834 MCC
Digital Ground is an architect's response to the design challenge posed by pervasive computing. As digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, and an ever-increasing number of activities become mediated through electronic interactions, networks extend rather than replace architecture. Malcolm McCullough’s concept of digital ground expresses an alternative to anytime-anyplace sameness in computing, and shows that context not only shapes usability but ideally becomes the subject matter of interaction design and that environmental knowing is a process that technology may serve and not erode.

Dave Eggers, Lola Vollen and Chris Ying (eds.)
Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath
McSweeney’s Books, 2007, 303.48576335 EGG
Stranded in a city submerged, the narrators of Voices from the Storm survived the devastation brought on by Hurricane Katrina only to find themselves abandoned - and even victimised - by their own government. These thirteen men and women of New Orleans recount, in astonishing and heartrending detail, the worst natural disaster in American history.

Robert J. Shapiro
2020: A Global Blueprint
Profile, 2008, 303.49 SHA
The world is entering an unprecedented age. Rapid technological advances, globalisation, unparalleled demographic changes and the rise of China as a superpower mean that we are entering a unique era of history. Robert Shapiro employs his immense experience in international politics to sketch a blueprint for the coming fifteen years, tracing the path combined global forces may lead us. This is neither hopelessly idealistic nor a tale of woe and Armageddon: Shapiro is persistently lucid, penetrating and even-handed in delineating the world as it stands and predicting the way it will walk.

Matt Mason
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism
Allen Lane, 2008, 305.235 MAS
What's the connection between the nun who invented disco, and the effect of file sharing? How does hip-hop manage to be an underground movement and a multi-billion dollar business at the same time? And how are pirates, of the kind who started commercial radio in the twentieth century, changing society in the 21st? The Pirate's Dilemma tells the stories of youth culture uncovering, for the first time, what it is that transforms underground scenes into global industries. Matt Mason, a successful entrepreneur, argues that from the youth culture, out on the edges of the mainstream, come the ideas that ultimately change the mainstream itself - whether it's graffiti, piracy, hacking, open source culture or remixing.

Matt Frei
Only in America
Fourth Estate, 2008, 306.09753 FRE
Matt Frei, the BBC's Washington correspondent, goes under the skin of America’s capital to discover the paradox of the world's last remaining superpower. It is a place that inspires awe, revulsion or analysis but rarely affection. Every newspaper editor tells his new Washington correspondent to travel outside 'the Beltway', to get under the skin of the real America beyond the 495 Interstate that snakes the city with its glutinous flow of traffic all day long. But after almost four years in Washington, Matt Frei has realised that the key to understanding America lies within the walls of the diamond shaped District of Columbia.

Loïc Wacquant
Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality
Polity, 2007, 307.76 WAC
Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to show that urban marginality is not the same everywhere. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due, not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos, but instead stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

David Runciman
Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond
Princeton University Press, 2008, 320.101 RUN
What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical but, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. The most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Written in a lively style, this book will change how we look at political hypocrisy and how we answer some basic questions about politics: What are the limits of truthfulness in politics? And when, where, and how should we expect our politicians to be honest with us, and about what? Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves.

Deepak Lal
Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
Princeton University Press, 2006, 320.512 LAL
Reviving the Invisible Hand is an uncompromising call for a global return to a classical liberal economic order, free of interference from governments and international organizations. Arguing for a revival of the invisible hand of free international trade and global capital, eminent economist Deepak Lal vigorously defends the view that statist attempts to ameliorate the impact of markets threaten global economic progress and stability. And in an unusual move, he not only defends globalization economically, but also answers the cultural and moral objections of antiglobalizers. Arguing that the new dirigisme is the thin edge of a wedge that could return the world to excessive economic intervention by states and international organizations, Lal does not shrink from controversial stands such as advocating the abolishment of these organizations and defending the existence of child labour in the Third World. Deepak Lal will be speaking at the RSA on 5 June 2008.

Gerry Hassan (ed.)
After Blair: Politics and the New Labour Decade
Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, 320.94109049 HAS
Analyzing the last 10 years of British parliament, contributors examine the age of Tony Blair as Prime Minister and the time of Labour Party dominance as it comes to an end. Comparing previous Labour Party governments to the current, scholars reflect on the past, present, and future of British politics and whether a Labour dominated government will outlast Blair's period in office. Offering opinions and political forecasting from some of the most respected experts in their fields, Blair's political history is examined and critiqued, contemplating the outcome and effects of his decisions and policies as Prime Minister since 1997.

Colin J. Bennett and Charles D. Raab
The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective
MIT, 2006, 323.4 BEN
This work analyses privacy policy instruments available to contemporary industrial states, from government regulations and transnational regimes to self-regulation and privacy enhancing technologies. Privacy protection, according to Colin Bennett and Charles Raab, involves politics and public policy as much as it does law and technology. Moreover, the protection of our personal information in a globalised, borderless world means that privacy-related policies are inextricably interdependent. In The Governance of Privacy, Bennett and Raab analyse a broad range of privacy policy instruments available to contemporary advanced industrial states, from government regulations and transnational regimes to self-regulation and privacy enhancing technologies. The RSA will hold a symposium on social attitudes to privacy on 19 June 2008.

David J. Rothkopf
The Superclass; The Global Power Elite and the World they are Making
Little, Brown, 2008, 327.10905 ROT
David Rothkopf offers a provocative and trenchant examination of the overlapping international power clusters. He reveals who is a member of the global Superclass and who is likely to be joining it and transforming it in the years ahead. And he will explore how the aggressive pursuit of self-interest by some in this class helped to create a world in which inequity is greater than ever - something that may well threaten international stability in our lifetimes.

Tom Porteous
Britain in Africa: African Arguments
Zed Books, 2008, 327.4106 POR
Why has Africa become such an important priority for Britain's foreign policy under New Labour? What interests and values is the UK seeking to uphold by intervening? Why has aid to Africa more than tripled over the past decade? How has the UK's involvement in the War on Terror affected its efforts there? In Britain in Africa, Tom Porteous seeks to answer these and other questions about Britain's role in Africa since 1997. He provides an account of the key players, the policies they constructed in the shadow of the war in Iraq and the future of Britain's engagement with the continent. This book sets out the balance sheet of what Britain has achieved, and where and why it failed in Africa. A compelling read, whose importance for international politics reaches far beyond Britain or Africa.

Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness
Yale University Press, 2008, 330.01 THA
Every day we make decisions on topics ranging from the personal investments we select to the schools we pick for our children to the foods we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, as authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein astutely observe, we don't always choose well. The reason, the authors explain, is that we all are susceptible to cognitive biases and blunders that make us human, fallible, and prone to error. Thaler and Sunstein expand on their concept of libertarian paternalism (.PDF), inviting us to enter an alternative world, one that recognizes our humanness as a given. They show that the way we think can be used to our advantage: it is possible to design environments - ‘choice architectures’ - that make it more likely for us to act in our own interests.

Dai Rodrik
One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth
Princeton University Press, 2007, 338.9 ROD
In One Economics, Many Recipes, leading economist Dani Rodrik argues that neither globalisers nor antiglobalisers have got it right. Rodrik rejects the simplifications of both sides, showing that poor countries get rich not by copying what Washington technocrats preach or what others have done, but by overcoming their own highly specific constraints. And, far from conflicting with economic science, this is exactly what good economics teaches.

Philippe Sands
Torture Team: An Investigation into Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law
Allen Lane, 2008, 341.48 SAN
This is the biography of a one page memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld on 2nd December, 2002 authorising 18 techniques of interrogation not previously allowed by the United States. The memorandum was in effect for six weeks during which at least two detainees at Guantanamo and the US airbase at Bagram died and a third was tortured over a period of seven weeks. 18 Techniques traces the life of the memorandum and explores issues of individual responsibility. Four individuals dominate the story: Rumsfeld, US lawyer John Yoo, victim Mohammed al-Qahtani and X, an anonymous European prosecutor.

Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen (eds.)
Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated
McSweeney's Books, 2005, 347.7312 EGG
After spending years behind bars, hundreds of men and women with incontrovertible proof of their innocence have been released from America's prisons. They were wrongfully convicted because of problems that plague many criminal proceedings -- inept defence lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful interrogation tactics, misidentifications, and more. Finally free, usually after more than a decade of incarceration, the wrongly condemned re-enter society with nothing but scars from prison life only to struggle for survival on the outside. The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. By all estimates, there are thousands of innocent victims in prison today. Surviving Justice tells their unimaginable and inspiring stories.

Patrick Diamond
Public Matters: The Renewal of the Public Realm
Politico's, 2007, 351.0941 DIA
The modernisation of public services is one of the central challenges facing any government. There are enormous expectations surrounding the public service reform agenda but also real anxieties - there have been prominent public management failings in recent years and the record of delivery in key areas remains patchy. Public Matters addresses the issues facing the public sector through clear, incisive, empirically rigorous and theoretically informed analysis of the issues from leading experts in the field. It covers general themes (inequality, choice, funding etc.) and specific areas (education, work, environment etc.) with equal authority.

John Seddon
Systems Thinking in the Public Sector
Triarchy, 2008, 351.41 SED
John Seddon here dissects the changes that have been made in a range of services, including housing benefits, social care and policing. His descriptions beggar belief, though they would be funnier if it wasn't our money that was being wasted. In place of the current mess, he advocates a Systems Thinking approach where individuals come first, waste is reduced and responsibility replaces blame. It's an approach that is proven, successful and relatively cheap - and one that governments around the world, and their advisers, need to adopt urgently.

Eugene Jarecki
Why we Fight
Axiom Films, 2008, 355.0213 JAR
Released as the American military continues to make its presence felt in Iraq and across the globe, Eugene Jarecki's Why we Fight asks some pertinent questions about the economic necessities of war. Speaking to a number of key figures including Republican Senator John McCain and author Gore Vidal, Jarecki's film is a bipartisan treatise that was inspired by Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address to the nation, warning against the military-industrial complex.

Tess Kingham
The Good Campaigns Guide: Campaigning for Impact
NCVO, 2005, 361.70681 KIN
The Good Campaigns Guide enables campaigners to use their skills, judgement and energy to transform available resources into positive social change, Using a range of newly developed tools, this guide examines how to achieve maximum impact.

Misha Glenny
McMafia: Crime without Frontiers
Bodley Head, 2008, 364.106 GLE
For three years, Misha Glenny has been recording the stories of gun runners in Ukraine, money launderers in Dubai, drug syndicates in Canada, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan and many more. During his investigation of the dark side, he has spoken to countless gangsters, policemen and victims of organised crime while also exploring the ferocious consumer demand for drugs, trafficked women, illegal labour and arms across five continents. This consistently riveting account unveils the nature of crime in today's world but it also offers profound insights into the pitfalls of a globalisation where the rules dividing the legal from the illegal are often far from clear. It also argues that conventional policing methods are no longer appropriate to deal with a problem whose roots lie in global poverty and the ever widening divisions between rich and poor.

René Allio
I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother
Tartan Video, 364.1523 ALL
Based on documents compiled by Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brother before fleeing to the countryside. With a cast made up of real-life villagers from the area where the events took place, the detailed re-enactments and careful attention to the gestures of their ancestors serve to create an intense and sometimes disturbing atmosphere of hyper-realism. Radical, bold and uncompromising, director René Allio's extraordinary work at once an ethnographic enquiry, an historical reconstruction, and an unflinching portrait of psychopathology and its aftermath. The RSA Library also holds Back to Normandy, a documentary about I, Pierre Rivière… by Nicolas Philibert, Allio's assistant on the film.

Colleen McLaughlin
Networking Practitioner Research
Routledge, 2007, 370.72 MCL
This book provides readers with a strong theoretical framework for school-based research as well as valuable advice on the ways in which networks of specialist groups can work together to create a broad-ranging approach to educational research. Through a critical examination of existing research and current thinking, the authors draw out implications for the effective policy and practice of school-based research. Illustrated throughout with case studies and including a full and detailed literature review, this book will be a vital resource for all academics pursuing research into education.

Julia Flutter and Jean Rudduck
Consulting Pupils
RoutledgeFalmer, 2004, 371.59 FLU
In this book, Jean Rudduck and Julia Flutter consider the potential benefits and implications of talking to students about teaching and learning in schools. Using examples of pupil consultation initiatives in primary and secondary schools, the authors demonstrate how an agenda for change based on pupils perspectives on teaching and learning can be used to improve classroom practice. This book will be a valuable resource for practitioners, students and researchers interested in exploring pupils' perspectives on teaching and learning.

Colleen McLaughlin
Researching Schools
Routledge, 2006, 378.103 MCL
There has been a debate in both academic and educational policy arenas around the generation and use of educational knowledge. In the UK, this has led to many recent and far-reaching initiatives, which aim to enhance the relationship between universities and schools and develop new ways of supporting practitioner research and enquiry. This book presents the work of a highly innovative partnership between the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, and eight secondary schools. This networked learning community has helped to define the use and production of educational knowledge and research within and between various partners. This book explores the central questions and gives examples of the outcomes of the development that will assist any researchers, especially teachers undertaking research, to develop school-university partnerships.

400s – Language

Steven Pinker
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Allen Lane, 2007, 401.9 PIN
Steven Pinker analyses what words actually mean and how we use them, and he reveals what this can tell us about ourselves. He shows how we use space and motion as metaphors for more abstract ideas, and uncovers the deeper structures of human thought that have been shaped by evolutionary history. He also explores the emotional impact of language, from names to swear words, and shows us the full power that it can have over us. And, with this book, he also shows just how stimulating and entertaining language can be. Steve Pinker will be talking at the RSA on 5 June 2008.

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

George Johnson
The Ten most Beautiful Experiments
Bodley Head, 2008, 507.8 JOH
From the universally praised New York Times science writer George Johnson), an irresistible book on the ten most fascinating experiments in the history of science - moments when a curious soul posed a particularly eloquent question to nature and received a crisp, unambiguous reply. George Johnson will be talking at the RSA on 2 June 2008.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Paul M. Churchland
Neurophilosophy at Work
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 612.801 CHU
Paul Churchland explores the unfolding impact of the several empirical sciences of the mind, especially cognitive neurobiology and computational neuroscience on a variety of traditional issues central to the discipline of philosophy. Representing Churchland's most recent research, they continue his research program, launched over thirty years ago which has evolved into the field of neurophilosophy. Topics such as the nature of consciousness, the nature of cognition and intelligence, the nature of moral knowledge and moral reasoning, neurosemantics or world-representation in the brain, the nature of our subjective sensory qualia and their relation to objective science, and the future of philosophy itself are here addressed in a lively, graphical, and accessible manner. Throughout the volume, Churchland's view that science is as important as philosophy is emphasised. Several of the color figures in the volume will allow the reader to perform some novel phenomenological experiments on his/her own visual system.

700s – The Arts

Douglas Wolk
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and what they Mean
Da Capo Press, 2007, 741.53 WOL
This is the first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics criticism by the leading critic in the field. Suddenly, comics are everywhere: a newly matured art form, filling bookshelves with brilliant, innovative work and shaping the ideas and images of the rest of contemporary culture. In Reading Comics, critic Douglas Wolk shows us why this is and how it came to be. Wolk illuminates the most dazzling creators of modern comics and introduces a critical theory that explains where each fits into the pantheon of art. Reading Comics is accessible to the hardcore fan and the curious newcomer; it is the first book for people who want to know not just what comics are worth reading, but also the ways to think and talk and argue about them.

David Friend and Terence Pepper
Vanity Fair Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, 2008, 770 FRI
Vanity Fair Portraits traces the cultural history of twentieth century portrait photography and celebrates the acknowledged masters of this great art form, from Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton to Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino. The catalogue sets out the two eras of Vanity Fair's life. The first period from 1913 to 1936 covers subjects drawn from art, dance, music, film and architecture including personalities such as Pablo Picasso, Fred and Adele Astaire, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The second period-from the reincarnation of the magazine in 1983 up to the present day-includes stars of film and theatre as well as writers, athletes, style icons, and business titans with portraits of Robert De Niro, Arthur Miller, Demi Moore, Margaret Thatcher and Lance Armstrong amongst many others. With forewords by Graydon Carter and Sandy Nairne, and essays by Christopher Hitchens and the exhibition curators, David Friend and Terence Pepper, the catalogue explores the power of the magazine that once promised to 'ignite a dinner party at fifty yards' as well as the history of celebrity portraiture.

Amy Raphael
Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh
Faber, 2008, 791.430233092 RAP/LEI
Five-time Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner, the only British director to have won the top prize at both Cannes (for Secrets and Lies) and Venice (for Vera Drake), Mike Leigh is unquestionably one of world cinema's pre-eminent figures. Now, in this definitive career-length interview, he reflects on all that has gone into the making of his unique body of work. Leigh's work has always reflected its times, whether the harsh studies of Meantime and Naked or the humor of the now-legendary Abigail's Party and Nuts in May. Above all, Leigh is an accomplished storyteller, and these films deal with universal themes: births, marriages and deaths, parenthood and failed relationships, families and their secrets and lies.

800s – Literature

Frank Luntz
Words that Work: It’s not what you Say, It’s what People Hear
Hyperion, 2008, 808.042 LUN
Communications expert Luntz offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the tactical use of words and phrases affects what we buy, who we vote for, and even what we believe in. Luntz has used his knowledge of words to help more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies grow. He tells us why Rupert Murdoch's six-billion-dollar decision to buy DirectTV was smart because satellite was more cutting edge than digital cable, and why pharmaceutical companies transitioned their message from treatment to prevention and wellness. If you ever wanted to learn how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket or talk your way into a raise, this book is for you.

Nina L. Krushcheva
Imagining Nabokov: Russia between Art and Politics
Yale University Press, 2008, 813.54 KRU
In Imagining Nabokov, Nina Khrushcheva offers the novel hypothesis that because of his migration from Russia to America, the works of Russian-turned-American Vladimir Nabokov are highly relevant to the political transformation underway in Russia today. Khrushcheva, a Russian living in America, finds in Nabokov's novels a useful guide for Russia's integration into the globalized world. Now one of Nabokov's 'Western' characters herself, she discusses the cultural and social realities of contemporary Russia that he foresaw a half-century earlier. In Pale Fire, Ada, or Ardor, Pnin and other works, Nabokov reinterpreted the traditions of Russian fiction, shifting emphasis from personal misery and communal life to the notion of forging one's own 'happy' destiny. In the twenty-first century, Russia faces a similar challenge, Khrushcheva contends, and Nabokov's work reveals how skills may be acquired to cope with the advent of democracy, capitalism, and open borders. Nina Khrushcheva will be speaking at the RSA on 25 June 2008.

900s – Geography & History

Elizabeth Eger
Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings
National Portrait Gallery, 2008, REF RSA 942.073 EGE
From Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Germaine Greer, influential women have lamented their lack of foremothers. But why has the remarkable group of creative and intellectual women who flourished in eighteenth-century Britain been overlooked? Publicly celebrated in their time, these women's achievements in the worlds of art, literature and even political thought came to symbolize the progress of a civilized and commercial nation. It accompanies an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, 13 March-15 June 2008.

Rosemary Baird
Goodwood: Art and Architecture, Sport and Family
Frances Lincoln, 2007, 942.2262 BAI
The estate of Goodwood is glorious not only for its famous racecourse and motor racing circuit but also for its magnificent art collection. Curator of the Goodwood Collection, Rosemary Baird tells the story of the Dukes of Richmond, from the birth of the 1st Duke (son of Louise de Keroualle and Charles II), who purchased Goodwood. She describes events such as the Duchess of Richmond's famous ball, from which officers were called to fight in the Battle of Waterloo ('some arrived at the field of battle in silk stockings and dancing shoes') and how, with wealth largely derived from a tax on coal leaving Newcastle, the Richmond family developed Goodwood and acquired works of art to adorn it.

Richard Ben Cramer
How Israel Lost: The Four Questions at the Heart of the Middle East Crisis
Free Press, 2005, 956.05 CRA
The ebbing support for Israel among Western governments is a major landmark in the history of the last decade. It is, without doubt, an issue that has already influenced many international events. Richard Ben Cramer, who has won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Middle East, now presents readers with How Israel Lost, a brilliant polemic looking at four key questions that define this conflict and explaining how the policies of Ariel Sharon have ostracised his country in the eyes of the world. With the same meticulous research and intelligence that has made Richard Ben Cramer one of America's most highly regarded journalists, How Israel Lost is a timely, powerful and important look at one of the most pivotal points of the world -- and in history.

Featured Books - the "Voice of Witness" series

2008-05-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Dave Eggers and Lola Vollen (eds.)
The Voice of Witness Series
McSweeney's

Novelist Dave Eggers and public health doctor Lola Vollen, a member of Physicians for Human Rights, founded the Voice of Witness series as a collaboration between the publisher McSweeney's and the UC Berkley School of Journalism, following Vollen's work on vaccination programmes in Somalia and identifying the bodies in Bosnia's mass graves.

Oral history has long served to highlight and promote otherwise marginalised voices, and preserve eye-witness accounts through recording and preserving interviews. The Voice of Witness series uses these techniques to highlight and illustrate human rights crises, transcribing interviews with their victims and presenting them, as Scott Turow says in a forward, not as "works of lofty philosophy or jurisprudence [but] humble first-person tales told in everyday terms, of how injustice happened, one blunder at a time." These books are a powerful record of the human cost of events and systems, from immigration law to the criminal justice system, that are often discussed in abstract terms, with little thought given to those who suffer at their margins.

There have been three books published so far, recording the experiences of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, wrongful imprisonment and the American immigration system. To borrow copies of these books, please contact the RSA Library.

Featured Book - "Political Hypocrisy"

2008-05-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

David Runciman
Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond
Princeton University Press, 2008, 320.101 RUN

David Runciman doesn’t think about hypocrisy like other people do. He doesn’t, as Strauss did — and as The Power of Nightmares showed the American neocons do — that it serves a Machiavellin purpose in politics that trancendes the society in question. And he doesn’t, like most of us do, think that it is tanatmount to lying, and that lying is the worst thing a politician can do.

In his new book, Political Hypocrisy, as its introduction explains, Runciman shows that Machiavelli has little to do with our reaction to hypocrisy, but that, as a liberal society, we should look to those philosophers who can tell us something about how hypocrisy functions in a society that votes for individuals to fight for their causes at national and international levels.

Whether he’s discussing the 2006 Labour conference or the American Primary season, Runciman shows that it’s not a simple case hypocrisy = bad, but that different kinds of hypocrisies have different effects in different circumstances, and shows that to understand that is to better understand our liberal, democratic society.

David Runciman will be discussing these issues with Matthew Taylor here at John Adam Street on Thursday 15 May, at 1pm, and to borrow a copy of Political Hypocrisy, please email the RSA Library.

Featured Book - "The Kingdom of Infinite Space"

2008-05-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Raymond Tallis
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around your Head
Atlantic, 2008, 128.2 TAL

Raymond Tallis — doctor, philosopher, author, and Kirsty young’s favourite Desert Island DJ — spent much of his working life at the practical end of neurology, but has spent his retirement writing a book about all the bits of the head that aren’t the brain.

Apparently once called My Head: Portrait in a Foxed Mirror, The Kingdom of Infinite Space contends that [t]here is no shortage of books on the brain. Indeed, I would venture that there is a serious lack of such a shortage,” and rather then add to the problem by chasing down consciousness in a single, physical organ, it instead carefully thinks through the various concious, preconcious and unconcious inputs our head recieves, via the senses, and signals it sends back out, through kissing, laughing, yawning, crying, and vomiting.

Tallis will be bringing his wide range of interests to the RSA on Tuesday 6th May. You can book your place for the talk here, and borrow a copy of The Kingdom of Infinite Space by emailing the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - April 2008

2008-04-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of April 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail the Library if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Adam Greenfield
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
New Riders, 2006, 004 GRE
Ubiquitous computing is the integration of computers embedded in everyday objects with an ever-present network-moving computing off the desktop and into every aspect of our lives, creating an environment where nearly every object is enabled with surprising new properties, from camera phones to Oyster cards. These ingenious systems offer convenience, innovative product opportunities, and sometimes security; but to function effectively, Everyware comes at a cost of privacy and autonomy. As consumers, we owe it to ourselves to become aware of this trend so that we can have a voice in its development. Through a series of brief, thought-provoking meditations, Adam Greenfield reveals the technologies, practices, innovations, and policies that combine to make Everyware possible. He provides clear explanations of enabling technologies such as RFID (radio-frequency ID) chips, Ipv6, ultra-wideband networking, heads-up displays, and shows how they fit into the everyware puzzle, allowing people to interact with the global network naturally, easily, and even without knowing it.

Ronald Deibert (ed.)
Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
MIT, 2008, 005.8 DEI
Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens - most often about politics, but sometimes relating to sexuality, culture, or religion. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in more than three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of an accelerating trend. Drawing on a just-completed survey of global Internet filtering undertaken by the OpenNet Initiative and relying on work by regional experts and an extensive network of researchers, Access Denied examines the political, legal, social, and cultural contexts of Internet filtering in these states from a variety of perspectives.

Nicolas Philibert
Back to Normandy
Tartan Video, 2008, 070.18 PHI
Thirty years after his film I, Pierre Rivière, Nicolas Philibert returns to Normandy to catch up on that film’s non-professional actors and the last 30 years of their lives.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Raymond Tallis
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around your Head
Atlantic, 2008, 128.2 TAL
The Kingdom of Infinite Space is a journey around the part of our anatomy to which we feel most attached: our heads. In this unique combination of biological science and philosophical interrogation, Raymond Tallis takes the head apart, piece by piece, in search of the place where our souls, and consciousness, reside. From the act of blushing and the amount of manganese in our tears (tears of pain contain more than tears of distress) to the curiousness of a kiss, The Kingdom of Infinite Space explores the astonishing range of activities that go on inside our heads, most of which are entirely beyond our control. After escorting his readers on a fantastic voyage through every chamber of the head and brain, Raymond Tallis demonstrates that not only does consciousness not reside between our ears, but that our heads are infinitely cleverer than we are.

Rita Carter
Multiplicity: The New Science of You
Little, Brown, 2008, 155.2 CAR
In Multiplicity, Rita Carter offers a new and vital understanding of personality. Rita explains that nearly every one of us is a team of personalities, working together, for the most part, to give the impression of a unified self. We are used to thinking of ourselves as one thing or the other - either introvert or extrovert, say - but things are rarely that simple for most of us. That's why we sometimes feel like a different person depending on mood, company and surroundings, why we sometimes suffer unaccountable memory lapses, why we buy something we then decide we didn't want in the first place, or why 'somebody else' turns off the alarm clock in the morning. Importantly, Multiplicity is also a practical guide to building a happy 'household' of personalities, explaining how to identify these different versions of ourselves and how to enable them to co-operate so that we can function successfully in life.

James Garvey
The Ethics of Climate Change; right and wrong in a warming world
Continuum, 2008, 179.1 GAR
James Garvey argues that climate change is largely a moral problem. This book is an introduction to the ethics of climate change; it considers climate science and moral philosophy, ultimately finding a way into the many possible positions associated with climate change. It is also a call for action, for doing something about the moral demands placed on both governments and individuals by the fact of climate change.

Bertrand Russell
History of Western Philosophy
Routledge, 2004, 190.9 RUS
First published in 1946, History of Western Philosophy went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, Russell's History of Western Philosophy is one of the most important philosophical works of all time.

200s – Religion

300s – Social Sciences

Thomas De Zengotita
Mediated: How the Media Shape your World
Bloomsbury, 2007, 302.23 ZEN
Here is the world we think we know presented to us as if for the very first time. From oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics, from Homer Simpson to O. J. Simpson, from Princess Diana's funeral to the aftermath of September 11, from reality TV to hip-hop nation, Mediated takes us on a provocative tour of our media-drunk society. It is a brilliantly satirical treatise on our culture - the real and unreal times in which we live, the cult of celebrity and our own narcissistic response to it. Read this book and nothing that you see or hear can any longer be taken for granted.

George Monbiot
Bring on the Apocalypse: Six Arguments for Global Justice
Guardian Books, 2008, 303.45 MON
In this series of essays on money, religion, war, power, culture and nature, Monbiot explains why we are heading into an uncertain future in which peace and sound politics are paramount to our survival. From his attack on the countries that deny the existence of global warming to his rally against the injustices of the Iraq war, Monbiot turns his gaze on the aspects of modernity that most endanger the prevailing world order.

Jonathan Zittrain
The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
Allen Lane, 2008, 303.4834 ZIT
In The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain explores the dangers the internet faces if it fails to balance ever more tightly controlled technologies with the flow of innovation that has generated so much progress in the field of technology. Zittrain argues that today's technological market is dominated by two contrasting business models: the generative and the non-generative. The generative models - the PCs, Windows and Macs of this world - allow third parties to build upon and share through them. The non-generative model is more restricted; appliances such as the XBox, iPod and tomtom might work well, but the only entity that can change the way they operate is the vendor. If we want the internet to survive we need to change. People must wake up to the risk or we could lose everything.

Trenna Cormack
Be the Change: Action and Reflection from People Transforming our World
Love, 2007, 303.4840922 COR
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” So Ghandh advised. Today, there’s a growing movement of people who are standing up and taking action to create positive change. Be uplifted by the stories of 28 pioneers, social entrepreneurs, activists and campaigners working in many fields - including the media, education, health, peace, finance, business and the environment.

Imtiaz H. Habib
Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible
Ashgate, 2007, 305.89604209031 HAB
Containing an urgently needed archival database of historical evidence, this volume includes both a consolidated presentation of the documentary records of black people in Tudor and Stuart England, and an interpretive narrative that confirms and significantly extends the insights of current theoretical excursus on race in early modern England. Here, for the first time, Imtiaz Habib collects the scattered references to black people - whether from Africa, India or America - in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and arranges them into a systematic, chronological descriptive index. He offers an extended historical and theoretical interpretation of the records in six chapters, which serve as an introductory guide to the index even as they articulate a specific argument about the meaning of the records. Both the archival information and interpretive scholarship provide a strong framework from which future historical debates on race in early modern England can proceed.

Elizabeth Farrelly
Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness
The MIT Press, 2008, 306 FAR
A leading critic examines the connections between obesity and architecture, unchecked sprawl and unchecked appetites, and other forms of insatiability that are hurting our planet and bodies. Blubberland looks at our superfluous superfluity, our huge eco-footprint, and asks why we find it so hard to abandon habits we know to be destructive. As big becomes more and more pervasive, and success is seen in increasingly measurable and material terms, the goal of happiness jeopardizes our survival.

Neil Boorman
Bonfire of the Brands; How I learnt to Live Without Labels
Canongate Books Ltd, 2007, 306.3 BOO
As a product of a generation that has been sold to since birth, Neil examines the social, historical, economic and psychological ways in which brands have gripped our society; as well as documenting his personal trials and tribulations as he tries to live a life without brands. How will he cope without a hit of his Crackberry? Will he feel naked without his Nike, Gucci, and, of course, Marlboro? How do you make your own toothpaste?

Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik
Molecular Revolution in Brazil
Semiotext(e), 2008, 320.981 GUA
Following Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Felix Guattari travelled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice. Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work.

Bill Emmott
Rivals: How the Power Struggle between China, India and Japan will Shape our Next Decade
Allen Lane, 2008, 327.500905 EMM
Bill Emmott is one of the world's most authoritative international commentators. Rivals will be the book which defines the geo-politics of the world's most rapidly evolving economies and nation states, and assesses the challenge to America's global economic and military leadership posed by the emerging Asian superpowers. It is not just, as many seem to argue, a question of the rise of China. For the first time in history, Asia will not be dominated by just one country or by outside powers. It will contain three large, economically powerful countries, all with interests and ambitions that range across the whole region, and the world. The future of the world economy will be determined by the competition between these three countries, as will world politics. Rivals looks at: How the power struggle between China, India and Japan will shape our next decade, will explore the legacies of history, the likely future trajectories of China, Japan and India, and the potential collisions and intersections between them which will shape the 21st century.

Benazir Bhutto
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West
Simon & Schuster, 2008, 327.549101713 BHU
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the chairperson of the Pakistan People's Party, was seen as vital to that country's future. In exile for years, in late 2007 she felt the time had come to actively re-engage and to return to the country she loved. Reconciliation, completed just days before her assassination, was her compelling and convincing prescription for the country at the heart of the so-called 'clash of civilizations'. It argues that democracy, economic development, moderation and modernity are the greatest threats to international terrorism. She pledged to work with the United States and the West to ensure that Pakistan ceased to be the petri dish of international radicals, and to re-establish its bona fides as a realistic and effective moderate alternative for one billion Muslims around the world.

Brooke Harrington
Pop Finance: Investment Clubs and the New Investor Populism
Princeton University Press, 2008, 332.6322068 HAR
During the 1990's, the United States underwent a dramatic transformation: investing in stocks, once the province of a privileged elite, became a mass activity involving more than half of Americans. Pop Finance follows the trajectory of this new market populism via the rise of investment clubs, through which millions of people across the socioeconomic spectrum became investors for the first time. As sociologist Brooke Harrington shows, these new investors pour billions of dollars annually into the U.S. stock market and hold significant positions in some of the nation's largest firms. Drawing upon Harrington's long-term observation of investment clubs, along with in-depth interviews and extensive survey data, Pop Finance is the first book to examine the origins and impact of this mass engagement in investing.

Rob Hopkins
The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience
Green, 2008, 333.7913 HOP
We live in an oil-dependent world and most people don't want to think about what happens when the oil runs out but The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead can have a positive effect. They can lead to the rebirth of local communities, encourage the development of local currencies and can unleash a local 'skilling-up', so that people have more control over their lives. The Transition Handbook is the manual which will guide communities to begin this 'energy descent' journey.

Jeffrey Sachs
Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
Allen Lane, 2008, 338.9 SAC
This is a book about how we should address the great, and interconnected, global challenges of the twenty-first century. Our task, Sachs argues, is to achieve truly sustainable development, by which he means finding a global course which enables the world to benefit from the spread of prosperity while ensuring that we don't destroy the eco-systems which keep us alive and our place in nature which helps sustain our values. How do we move forward together, benefiting from our increasing technological mastery, avoiding the terrible dangers of climate change, mass famines, violent conflicts, population explosions in some parts of the world and collapses in others, and world-wide pandemic diseases? How do we steer global politics when there are now so many who believe they are entitled to a hand on the steering wheel? In answering these questions, Common Wealth examines, digests and judges vast quantities of information from many different fields of study which bear on each of the interconnected areas of politics, economics and ecology. It is a book which appeals equally to both head and heart, and one which no globally thinking person can ignore.

Joseph H. Hulse
Sustainable Development at Risk: Ignoring the Past
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 338.927 HUL
Over the past half-century, the idea of sustainable development has evolved and rooted itself in the lexicon of international development. But what is it? Are development agencies truly committed to long-term sustainable solutions to development issues? Are we learning from our past successes and failures? Sustainable Development at Risk seeks to help us do just that.

Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack
A Crude Awakening
Artificial Eye, 2008, 363.73874 GEL
A wake-up call for energy like An Inconvenient Truth was for the environment, A Crude Awakening is an urgent warning that the age of abundant oil is over. Featuring testimonies from the world’s top experts, this startling documentary reaches an ominous yet logical conclusion - the Earth’s oil supplies are peaking, threatening our ill-prepared, fossil-fuel addicted civilisation with a crisis of global proportions.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Bruce Sterling
Shaping Things
MIT, 2005, 620.82 STE
Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything. Bruce Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artefacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of gizmos. New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. And the future will see a new kind of object - we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable - that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers - and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.

700s – The Arts

Documentary Essentials: Music
Tartan Video, 2007, 780 DVD
This box-set collects three new music documentaries:
Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the compelling story of music, celebrity and the pursuit of fame through the eyes of pop impresario Rodney Bingenheimer. The Devil and Daniel Johnson Considered by many to be one of the world s finest musicians and once described by Kurt Cobain as 'the greatest songwriter on earth', Daniel Johnston is a man whose life has been defined not only by his musical talent but by his struggle with mental illness. Exploring the sometimes chaotic mix of genius and madness, this insightful and sensitive documentary looks at the music and the man behind it.
The End of the Century Starting with the band's origins in Forest Hills, gives a fascinating background portrait of the eccentric group of individuals who came together to be one of the most influential punk bands in history: The Ramones.

Andrew Bailey
Cinema Now
Taschen, 2007, 791.4302330922 BAI
Cinema Now examines the work and key themes of 60 filmmakers working around the world today, from the cream of the crop of young Hollywood to the new wave of Asian mavericks to burgeoning auteurs from Europe and Latin America. Cinema Now is packed with stunning full-colour photos and exclusive on-set photography supplied by the filmmakers and comes with a supplementary DVD.

800s – Literature

John Kerrigan
Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707
Oxford University Press, 2008, 820.90040941 KER
Seventeenth-century 'English Literature' has long been thought about in narrowly English terms. Archipelagic English corrects this by devolving Anglophone writing, showing how much remarkable work was produced in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. This book also shows the significance of a whole series of authors who were prominent during their lifetimes but who have since become neglected because they do not fit the Anglocentric paradigm.

Norma Clarke
Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington
Faber, 2008, 821.5 CLA
Prostitute and poetess, fallen woman and society wit, Laetitia Pilkington spent her life as close to fame as she was near to ruin. Favoured by, among others, the celebrated Jonathan Swift, she was divorced by her husband after being exposed as an adulteress. In London, she survived through her humour and her intelligence - and her skilful use of scandal - on the very fringes of respectability. Norma Clarke's hugely rich and enjoyable biography is the story of celebrity, sex and literature in the early eighteenth century. Above all, it brings to life a woman who embodied the scandal, energy and sadness of a time when literature, gossip and the lives they described were inseparable.

Simon Armitage
Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-Star Fantasist
Viking, 2008, 821.914 ARM
From punk to mod to New Romantic, and eventually to acclaimed poet, Simon Armitage writes about a life where music and poetry have been core. And about a place, the village of Marsden in west Yorkshire, where he can stand and look out across a huge circumference of inspiration and influence: Joy Division, the Smiths and The Fall to the west, the Comsat Angels and Pulp to the south, Andrew Marvell and Larkin way out east, Ted Hughes and Plath just to the north. Gig is a warm, vivid, wonderful book about music, poetry, family and, always, the North.

J.G. Ballard
Miracles of Life
Fourth Estate, 2008, 823.914 BAL
'Miracles of Life' opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G. Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai; Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war.

Robert Fisk
The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays
Author(s): Fisk, Robert.
Fourth Estate, 2008, 824.914 FIS
A selection of Robert Fisk's finest 'Comment' pieces from the Saturday Independent Robert Fisk has amassed a devoted readership over the years, with his insightful, witty and always outspoken articles on international politics and mankind's war-torn recent history. He is best known for his writing about the Middle East, its wars, dictators and international relations, but these 'Comment' articles cover an array of topics, from his soldier grandfather to handwriting to the titanic - and of course President Bush, terrorism and Iraq.

900s – Geography & History

Owen David
In Sickness and in Power: Illness in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years
Methuen, 2008, 909.8290922 DAV
In Sickness and in Power is a unique study of illness in heads of government between 1901 and 2007. It considers how illness and therapy - both physical and mental - affect the process of government and decision-making, leading to acts of folly, in the sense of stupidity or rashness. The author is particularly interested in leaders who were not ll in the conventional sense, and whose cognitive faculties functioned well, but who developed what he calls a ‘hubris syndrome,’ which powerfully affected their performance and their actions. Such leaders suffer a loss of capacity and come excessively self-confident and contemptuous of advice that runs counter to what they believe, or even of any advice at all.

Tony Benn
More Time for Politics: Diaries, 2001-2007
Hutchinson, 2007, 941.086092 BEN
When Tony Benn left Parliament after 51 years he quoted his wife Caroline's remark that now he would have 'more time for politics'. And so this has proved: in the first seven years of this century he has helped reinvigorate national debate through public meetings, mass campaigns and appearances in the media, passionately bringing moral and political issues to wide audiences. And throughout, as ever, he has been keeping his diaries. Commenting on the demise of the New Labour project from the re-election of Tony Blair in 2001 to the ultimate foreign policy disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, he gives other prescient accounts of the government's by-passing of Cabinet, parliament and the party, of the 'war on terror', the debate about Islam, globalisation and the changes in British society.

Jonathan Powell
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland
Bodley Head, 2008, 941.60824 POW
As Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and chief negotiator, Jonathan Powell was in the front line of the talks at each crucial stage. He came to know the key players on all sides, as he strove to win their trust and move the process forward. His account combines unparalleled access with an acute historical understanding, shrewd working assessments of the participants with an unerring eye for the telling human detail.

Featured Book - "Access Denied"

2008-04-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

The OpenNet Initiative
Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering
MIT Press, 2007, 005.8 ORG

As the RSA looks forward to hosting two talks next week about the future of the internet; one, between Charles Leadbeater and our own Matthew Taylor, on the former's We-Think, a book about the power of groups of individuals coming together to solve problems, and the ways that the internet can be used to organise and transform these processes.

The other, with Jonathan Zittrain and Becky Hogge, will look at The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It, discussing the physical infrastructure of the internet itself, and questions whether the current structure's provision of openness, which facilitates the positive effects Leadbeater talks about, can be sustained in the face of criminal exploits, on the one hand, and corporate interests on the other.

Zittrain and Hogge have both contributed to the OpenNet Initiative’s Access Denied, a recent study of methods and programmes designed to filter content and restrict access to certain parts of the internet for certain users through a number of different methods, from censorware programs that prevent access to collusion between governments, internet service providers and web-based companies to punish political crimes. The book provides valuable information both on how such actions are taken, and international case studies of what is happening and where.

Far from just being a problem for thsoe behind the Great Firewall of China, the OpenNet Initiative has shown that the structure of the internet is a precarious thing, and that discussions about its positive and negative cultural impact can only take place because these impacts have been allowed to happen, and that that's not something we can continue to take for granted.

To borrow any of the books discussed in this post, please contact the RSA Library.

Featured book - “Great Hatred, Little Room”

2008-04-11T09:05:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Powell
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland
Bodley Head, 2008, 941.60824 POW

Former diplomat and Blair government insider Jonathan Powell achieved his greatest success when he bought those two positions together. As detailed in his new book, Great Hatred, Little Room, Powell was Blair’s chief representative in the Northern Ireland peace process, where he worked to ensure the success of the Good Friday (Republicans)/Belfast (Unionists) Agreement that eventually led to power-sharing and peace within the province.

Powell will be talking about his time in Northern Ireland, and no doubt Number 10 as well, in a discussion chaired by fellow Blairite and RSA Chief Executive Matthew Taylor at the RSA on Thursday 17 April at 6pm. Book your place for the lecture here, and email the RSA Library to borrow a copy of Great Hatred, Little Room.

Featured Book - "The Logic of Life"

2008-04-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

Tim Harford
The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything
Little, Brown & Co., 2008, 339 HAR

Tim Harford is a leading economics pundit who uses his power for good; instead of devising dark liquidity pools, Harford uses the lessons of economic science to explain the big issues in his Financial Times column The Undercover Economist comments on the news, while his Dear Economist… blog offers advise on interpersonal relationships and snack buying.

Like Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics (330 LEV) and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day (364.1066092 VEN), Harford’s The Logic of Life is an economics book that tackles issues both great and small, explaining prostitution, professional poker and your over-paid boss in terms you’ll come to understand.

Tim Harford will be speaking at John Adam Street on Tuesday 8 April at 6pm, and you can book you place now, or contact the RSA Library about borrowing a copy of The Logic of Life.

RSA Library Update - March 2008

2008-03-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of March 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Michael Chanan
The Politics of Documentary
BFI, 2008, 070.18 CHA
Michael Chanan traces the history of the documentary from the first Lumière films to Grierson and his contemporaries, through to Free Cinema, Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema, up to the current resurgence of documentary with high profile films such as those by Michael Moore. Drawing on examples of documentary cinema in Japan, Iran and Latin America as well as Europe and the USA, Chanan argues that documentary provides a crucial public space in which ideas are debated, opinion is formed and those in authority are held to account.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Mark Vernon
What Not to Say: Finding the Right Words at Difficult Moments
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 100 VER
For those who are a little tired of feel-good self-help, or a little wary of too much psycho-babble, it offers an alternative based on the reality of cool analysis and genuine insight. What Not to Say is witty and thought-provoking, and whilst never moralising, does have a serious aim. First, to enable readers to speak more truthfully in difficult situations. Second, to allow readers to talk about personal problems in a wider perspective that can often ease the pain. Third, to gain greater clarity when discussing what to do in the future: to ask the question, How to live? In short, it is an aid in the search for the right and wise thing to say.

Jerome Kagan
What is Emotion? History, Measures and Meanings
Yale University Press, 2007, 152.4 KAG
In this sophisticated overview of human emotions, a widely respected psychologist Jerome Kagan addresses the ambiguities and embraces the controversies that surround this intriguing subject. He examines what exactly we do know about emotions, which popular assumptions about emotions are incorrect, and how scientific study must proceed if we are to uncover the answers to persistent and evasive questions about emotions.

G. E. R. Lloyd
Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
Clarendon, 2007, 153 LLO
Sir Geoffrey Lloyd presents a cross-disciplinary study of the problems posed by the unity and diversity of the human mind. On the one hand, as humans we all share broadly the same anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and certain psychological capabilities - the capacity to learn a language, for instance. On the other, different individuals and groups have very different talents, tastes, and beliefs, for instance about how they see themselves, other humans and the world around them. These issues are highly charged, for any denial of psychic unity savours of racism, while many assertions of psychic diversity raise the spectres of arbitrary relativism, the incommensurability of beliefs systems and their mutual unintelligibility.

Albert Bandura
Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control
W.H. Freeman, 1997, 155.2 BAN
This volume is the result of over 20 years of psychological research by the author. It argues that those with high self-efficacy expectancies (the belief that one can achieve what one sets out to achieve) are healthier, more effective, and generally more successful than those with low self-efficacy expectancies. After a discussion of what self-efficacy is and where it comes from, the text discusses how belief in one's abilities affects developmental, mental functioning, and health; as well as its applications to the areas of psychopathology, athletics, business, and international issues.

Slavoj Žižek
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections
Profile, 2008, 179.7 ŽIŽ
The premise of Slavoj Žižek’s new theory is that the subjective violence we see - violence with a clear identifiable agent - is only the tip of an iceberg made up of 'systemic' violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. With the help of Marx, Engels, Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Brecht and many more, Žižek examines the hidden causes of violence, delving into the supposed 'divine violence' which propels suicide bombers and the unseen 'systemic' violence which lies behind outbursts, from Parisian suburbia to New Orleans. For Žižek, the controversial truth is that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing you can do. He calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today's democracies - using an unconventional plethora of references: Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud and more.

200s – Religion

Vali Nasr
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future
W. W. Norton, 2007, 297.8 NAS
In this smart, clear and timely book Vali Nasr, one of America's leading commentators on the Middle East, dissects the political and theological antagonisms within Islam. His concise and coherent analysis provides an objective understanding of the 1,400-year struggle between Shias and Sunnis, and sheds light on its modern-day consequences.

300s – Social Sciences

Dan Gardner
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear
Virgin, 2008, 302.12 GAR
Every day, we suffer a barrage of information about the threat of terrorism, war and apocalypse. But while we are preoccupied by our fears, the real risk of these obscure annihilating events taking place is about as likely as winning the lottery. In this ground-breaking new book, Dan Gardner explains our 'risk perception' through our brain’s two simultaneous responses to risk - the ancient 'fight or flight' instinct and the rational considered response. How do we make choices amidst the bombardment of information we experience every day? And to what extent is that information manipulated to provoke a particular reaction from the public? To discover the answers, Dan Gardner speaks to economists, politicians, psychologists and media commentators, with entertaining and often surprising results.

Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisation without Organisations
Allen Lane, 2008, 303.4833 SHI
Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this. In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society. What does it mean that someone with a laptop can spark a movement that changes the fortunes of a billion-dollar-industry or help topple a government? This profound and larger social impact is only now being explored. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, one of the new culture's wisest observers, give us his lucid and penetrating analysis on what the impact of this social revolution will be - for better or worse - on what we do, and who we are.

Gene Smith
Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web
New Riders, 2008, 303.4833 SMI
Tagging is fast becoming one of the primary ways people organize and manage digital information. Tagging complements traditional organizational tools like folders and search on users’ desktops as well as on the web. These developments mean that tagging has broad implications for information management, information architecture and interface design. And its reach extends beyond these technical domains to our culture at large. This book explains the value of tagging, explores why people tag, how tagging works and when it can be used to improve the user experience. It exposes tagging's superficial simplicity to reveal interesting issues related to usability, information architecture, online community and collective intelligence.

Jenna Bailey
Can any Mother Help Me?
Faber & Faber, 2008, 305.409410904 BAI
In 1935, a young woman wrote a letter to Nursery World magazine, expressing her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Women from all over the country experiencing similar frustrations wrote back. To create an outlet for their abundant ideas and opinions they started a private magazine, The Cooperative Correspondence Club. The deep friendships formed through its pages ensured the magazine continued until 1990, fifty-five years after the first issue was put together.

Charles Leadbeater
We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity
Profile, 2008, 306 LEA
Society is based not on mass consumption now but on mass, innovative participation - as is clear in phenomena from Wikipedia, Youtube and Craigslist to new forms of scientific research and political campaigning. This new mode of 'We-think' is reshaping the way we work, play and communicate. We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves - not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations.

Damian Thompson
Counterknowledge
Atlantic, 2008, 306 THO
We are being swamped by dangerous nonsense. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial, creationism to alternative medicine, we are all experiencing an epidemic of demonstrably untrue descriptions of the world. For Damian Thompson, these unproven theories and spurious claims are forms of 'counterknowledge', and, helped by the internet, they are creating a global generation of misguided adherents who repeat these untruths and lend them credence. 'The sleep of reason brings forth monsters', warns the title of Francisco Goya's famous etching of 1799. As Damian Thompson demonstrates, unless the defenders of enlightenment values fight back soon, the counterknowledge industry has the potential to create new political, social and economic disasters.

James Mason
The London Nobody Knows
Optimum, 2008, 306.09421 MAS
The London Nobody Knows exposes the real London of the Swinging Sixties, turning its back on familiar sights to explore the hidden details of a crumbling metropolis, from abandoned music-halls to egg breaking factories.

Alan Macfarlane
Japan Through the Looking Glass
Profile, 2007, 306.0952 MAC
This entertaining and endlessly surprising book takes us on an exploration into every aspect of Japanese society from the most public to the most intimate. A series of meticulous investigations gradually uncovers the multi-faceted nature of a country and people who are even more extraordinary than they seem. Our journey encompasses religion, ritual, martial arts, manners, eating, drinking, hot baths, geishas, family, home, singing, wrestling, dancing, performing, clans, education, aspiration, sexes, generations, race, crime, gangs, terror, war, kindness, cruelty, money, art, imperialism, emperor, countryside, city, politics, government, law and a language that varies according to whom you are speaking. Clear-sighted, persistent, affectionate, unsentimental and honest - Alan Macfarlane shows us Japan as it has never been seen before.

Daniel Miller (ed.)
Materiality
Duke University Press, 2005, 306.46 MIL
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief - whether religious or secular - have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to de-center the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as seemingly diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors - most of whom are anthropologists - examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences.

Vic Gatrell
City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London
Atlantic, 2007, 306.70942109033 GAT
Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the centre of hectic social ferment and of spectacular sexual liberation. It prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities and constant debate about the relations between the sexes, and nowhere was London's lewdness and iconoclasm more vividly represented than in its satire. Combining words and images to offer a brilliantly original panorama of that time, City of Laughter is a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of seismic change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes to sex, celebrity and satire today.

Drew Westen
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
PublicAffairs, 2007, 324.9730019 WES
This book presents a groundbreaking and surprising scientific investigation into how the mind works, how the brain works and what this means for why candidates win and lose elections. Since the 18th century, the idea of mind that has captured the imagination of philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists and political scientists is of a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing evidence and reasoning to make the most valid conclusions. It bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. In this landmark book, Professor Drew Westen - a scientist and psychologist who has led a pioneering investigation into how the brain processes political information - shows through a whirlwind tour of American political leaders how electorates vote not with their heads, but with their hearts. The book, which examines data across several Presidential elections from the 1950s to the present day, is a serious and groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in driving voting behaviour.

Edward Lucas
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
Bloomsbury, 2008, 327.4 LUC
In the 1990s, Russia was the sick man of Europe, but the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin in 1999 coincided with a huge hike in world oil and gas prices, and after Yeltsin's downfall Putin set about re-establishing Russian autocracy. Using gas and oil reserves, Russia has paid off its debts and amassed huge cash reserves, investing these in easily accessible European businesses and using its valuable natural resources to develop power over Europe. Russia has so far sidelined America, its most formidable opponent in the last cold war: America needs Russia co-operation on North Korea, Iran and the Middle East, leaving the way clear for the Kremlin. The New Cold War explains both the Kremlin's tactics and the West's weaknesses. Why we are perilously close to defeat and - and how we can still win.

Firoze Madatally Manji
African Perspectives on China in Africa
Fahamu, 2007, 327.6051 MAN
Much of the commentary on China in Africa focuses either on assessing how the interests of Western capital might be affected, or on denouncing China for practises that have for centuries been the norm for US and European powers. Lost in that cacophony has been the voice of independent African analysts and activists. They are heard in this unique collection of essays from the prize-winning weekly electronic newsletter Pambazuka News.

Manuel Perez Paredes
Che Guevara As You Have Never Seen Him Before
Network, 2007, 335.4 PAR
This documentary pieces together the story of Che’s life, from early childgood to his revolutionary activities in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia. Using previously unseen archive footage and stills, this remarkable diary of events includes interview footage with his father Ernesto, Fidel Castro and many other people who met and worked with him throughout his lifetime.

Robert Service
Comrades: A World History of Communism
Macmillan, 2007, 335.4 SER
Comrades tells the story of communism from its inception to the present day. It offers a succession of incisive pen-portraits of outstanding leaders and decisive events and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, drawing on material from many national collections and several major languages and is the most up-to-date account produced since the 1960s. Service demonstrates that, while communism in its primordial form is now dead in most countries, the causes of its ability to gather support among intellectuals and ordinary people have not vanished: economic poverty and political oppression. The lasting message of the book is that something must be done to eradicate poverty and oppression if the world is to avoid a repetition of totalitarianism in some new form.

Sherene H. Razack
Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics
University of Toronto Press, 2008, 340.112 RAZ
Three stereotypical figures have come to represent the 'war on terror' - the 'dangerous' Muslim man, the 'imperilled' Muslim woman, and the 'civilized' European who anchors them. Casting Out explores the use of these figures in the formation of a story about a family of civilized white nations obliged to use force and terror to defend itself against a menacing cultural Other. It argues that this myth is promoted to justify the expulsion of Muslims from the political community; a process that takes the form of stigmatization, surveillance, incarceration, torture, and bombing. This is a study of great immediacy that uses the treatment of security detainees in the West, the flaunting of rights of Muslim populations in the name of protecting Muslim women, and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to show that the framing of Western-Muslim relations is actually part of a racial construct of long standing.

Jasvinder Sanghera
Shame
Hodder Paperbacks, 2007, 362.8292092 SAN
When she was fourteen, Jasvinder Sanghera was shown a photo of the man chosen to be her husband. She was terrified. She'd witnessed the torment her sisters endured in their arranged marriages, so she ran away from home, grief-stricken when her parents disowned her. Shame is the heart-rending true story of a young girl's attempt to escape from a cruel, claustrophobic world where family honour mattered more than anything - sometimes more than life itself. Jasvinder's story is one of terrible oppression, a harrowing struggle against a punitive code of honour - and, finally, triumph over adversity.

Robert Reiner
Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control
Polity Press, 2007, 364.941 REI
This book offers an up-to-date analysis of the twin trends of declining crime rates and rising fear of crime, providing all honest and concerned citizens with a concise yet comprehensive survey of the sources of current problems and anxieties about crime. It shows that the dominant tough law and order approach to crime is based on fallacies about its nature, sources, and what works in terms of crime control. Instead, it argues that the growth of crime has deep-seated causes, so that policing and penal policy at best can only temporarily hold a lid down on offending.

400s – Language
500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

David Attenborough
Life in Cold Blood
BBC DVD, 2008, 590 ATT
The focus of Life in Cold Blood is on reptiles and amphibians, bringing into focus a series of creatures very much of all shapes and sizes. Across the episodes that make up the series - all of which are contained in this DVD set - the programme makers delve into the lives and mannerisms of its subjects. They do so with some quite stunning camera work, bringing to our screens things that have quite simply never been seen before.

Claude Nuridsany and Jean-Marc Perennou
Microcosmos
Second Sight Films, 2008, 590 NUR
A French meadow on a summer’s day is the setting for this incredible, highly-acclaimed film that takes its microscopic cameras into the heart of the insect world. In this miniature environment where a single raindrop can cause havoc, we are treated to an array of jaw-dropping moments: an underwater spider makes a home out of an air bubble, a colony of ants face a massacre when a pheasant attacks, a determined beetle struggles to relocate his ball of dung, two snails get amorous and a mosquito is born. There’s drama, comedy, action and even a little love in this astonishing film that invites us to share the trials and tribulations of its wonderful cast.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

James Hamilton
London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World
John Murray, 2007, 609.22421 HAM
From the time of Nelson's death at Trafalgar to the opening of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park nearly fifty years later, London spread like a disease across the fields of Middlesex and Surrey. Foul and dangerous though it was to inhabit, in these decades London developed a new confidence in the intellectual purpose and lucrative promise of art, technology and science. This book is about the men and women who, through their genius and courage, luck and misfortune, anger and charm, put London at the cutting edge of cultural change. They worked in basements and drawing rooms, in studios and museums, in learned societies and in the squalor of the debtors' prison. Although it took fifty years to achieve maturity and direction, in the early decades of the nineteenth century London set itself on course to become the financial, entrepreneurial and intellectual capital of the world.

Gerald M. Edelman
Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge
Yale University Press, 2007, 612.82 EDE
Burgeoning advances in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousness - the very centre of human concern - by scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description? Edelman's brain-based approach to knowledge has rich implications for our understanding of creativity, of the normal and abnormal functioning of the brain, and of the connections among the different ways we have of knowing. While the gulf between science and the humanities and their respective views of the world has seemed enormous in the past, the author shows that their differences can be dissolved by considering their origins in brain functions. He foresees a day when brain-based devices will be conscious, and he reflects on this and other fascinating ideas about how we come to know the world and ourselves.

Steven Johnson
The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and Two Men who Battled to Save Victorian London
Penguin, 2008, 614.514 JOH
In Ghost Map, Steven Johnson tells the story of the terrifying cholera epidemic that engulfed London in 1854, and the two unlikely heroes - anaesthetist Doctor John Snow and affable clergyman Reverend Henry Whitehead - who defeated the disease through a combination of local knowledge, scientific research and map-making. In telling their extraordinary story, Johnson also explores a whole world of ideas and connections, from urban terror to microbes, ecosystems to the Great Stink, cultural phenomena to street life. Re-creating a London full of dirt, dust heaps, slaughterhouses and scavengers, Ghost Map is about how huge populations live together, how cities can kill - and how they can save us.

Adam Zeman
A Portrait of the Brain
Yale University Press, 2008, 616.8 ZEM
In this compelling book, neurologist Adam Zeman tells the stories of patients with a variety of neurological disorders, some familiar (epilepsy, chronic fatigue, stroke, memory loss) and others relatively mysterious (narcolepsy, chronic deja vu, compulsive fidgeting, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). On every page Zeman both entertains and informs, and readers will find themselves pondering the enigmas of brain and mind long after closing the covers of this thought-provoking volume.

Eric R. Kandel
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind
W. W. Norton, 2007, 616.80092 KAN
Eric R. Kandel illuminates how behavioural psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and molecular biology have converged into a powerful new science of mind, providing nuanced insights into normal mental functioning and disease, and simultaneously opens pathways to more effective healing. Beginning with his childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, In Search of Memory chronicles Kandel's outstanding career from his initial fascination with history and psychoanalysis to his groundbreaking work on the biological process of memory, which earned him the Nobel Prize.

Charlotte Gray
Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention
Arcade, 2006, 621.385092 GRA
A major new biography of one of the giants of the golden age of invention whose innovations revolutionized the modern world.

Mark Lynas
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet
Harper Perennial, 2008, 363.73874 LYN
The nightmare scenarios in Mark Lynas's incredible new book are not science-fiction; nor are they sensationalist. The titular 6° refers to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. This is the first time we have had a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. Most vitally, Lynas's book serves to highlight the fact that the world of 2100 doesn't have to be one of horror and chaos.

Peter Cook
Sex, Leadership and Rock N’ Roll
Crown House, 2006, 658.4092 COO
At last, a book that cuts through the jargon of leadership and personal development. It offers a real world source of inspiration and provocation in areas such as: creativity, innovation, relationships, motivation, leadership, high performance, learning, and reinvention. Peter Cook has been able to skilfully synthesise leading edge management concepts with wisdom of the street in the form of rock music because of his background, both as a business academic, MBA graduate and tutor, strategy consultant and thought leader and also as a musician, writing and performing music, in rock bands. The book examines the issues using the language of 'Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n'Roll' rather than that of prophets, consultants, and gurus. This book has kindly been donated to the Library by its author, a Fellow of the RSA.

Robin Ryde
Thought Leadership: Moving Hearts and Minds
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 658.4092 RYD
All leadership starts with thinking - about problems, about possibilities and about organisational capabilities, but thinking never occurs in a vacuum. Long gone are the days when a chief executive would disappear for weeks with a towel over his head, only to reappear to announce 'the answer' to the organization. Modern leadership is about shaping the social process of engagement, strategizing and decision-making so that workers can create immeasurable value. This book is about what executives can do to transform the thinking of those around them. It is about the circuitry that lies beneath the change process and the habits and norms that govern business conversations. This book will give you exemplary decision-making, quicker organizational change and focussed leadership.

700s – The Arts

Paul Goldberger
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York
Random House Trade, 2005, 725.23097471 GOL
In Up from Zero, Paul Goldberger, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the inside story of the quest to rebuild one of the most important symbolic sites in the world, the sixteen acres where the towers of the former World Trade Center stood. A story of power, politics, architecture, community, and culture, Up from Zero takes us inside the controversial struggle to create and build one of the most challenging urban-design projects in history. From the decision to reintegrate the site into the dense fabric of lower Manhattan, to the choice of Daniel Libeskind as master planner, to the appointment of a memorial jury, the process has been marked by moments of bold vision, effective community activism, and personal instinct, punctuating the often contentious politics of public participation. Up from Zero takes in the full sweep of this tremendous effort. Goldberger presents a drama of creative minds at work, solving seemingly insurmountable clashes of taste, interests, and ideas.

Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Picador, 2007, 781.11 SAC
Oliver Sacks has been hailed by the New York Times as 'one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century' and in this book, the subject of his uniquely literate scrutiny is music: our relationship with it, our facility for it, and what this most universal of passions says about us. In chapters examining savants and synaesthetics, depressives and musical dreamers, Sacks succeeds not only in articulating the musical experience but in locating it in the human brain. He shows that music is not simply about sound, but also movement, visualization, and silence.

Jason Wood
Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons
Faber & Faber, 2005, 791.430233092 WOO
Over the past twenty-five years Nick Broomfield has established himself as Britain’s best-known and most unflaggingly controversial director of documentaries. He has pursued the likes of South African supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche, comedian Lily Tomlin and rock star Courntey Love, as well as investigating Army barracks, brothels and S&M parlours. This is Broomfield in his own words, as frank and revealing as his inimitable films.

800s – Literature

James Wood
How Fiction Works
Jonathan Cape, 2008, 809.3 WOD
How Fiction Works is a scintillating and searching study of the main elements of fiction, such as narrative, detail, characterization, dialogue, realism, and style. In his first full-length book of criticism, one of the most prominent critics of our time is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, it incisively sums up two decades of bold, often controversial, and now classic critical work, and will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone interested in what happens on the page.

Anna Beer
Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot
Bloomsbury, 2008, 821.4 BEE
Of all the major English poets, John Milton was by far the most deeply involved in the political and religious controversies of his time, writing a series of pamphlets on free speech, divorce and religious, political and social rights that forced a complete rethinking of the nature and practice not only of government, but of human freedom itself. Not only did he write, but he was also actively engaged with the business of government, working as Cromwell's international secretary for all his dealings with Europe and the wider world. For centuries, Milton has emerged from biographies either as a woman-hating domestic tyrant or as a saintly figure removed from the messy business of personal affections. Neither tyrant nor saint, he was a man who had intense and often troubled relationships with both men and women throughout his life. His ideals (such as chaste love between men or intellectual companionship between men and women) invariably proved unlivable, but he emerges from Anna Beer's ground-breaking biography for the first time as a fully rounded human being.

Charles Nicholl
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
Allen Lane, 2007, 822.33 NIC
'One Mr Shakespeare that lay in the house...' In 1612 Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster - it is the only occasion his spoken words are recorded. The case seems routine - a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry - but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist's famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating episode in Shakespeare's life. Marshalling evidence from a wide variety of sources, including previously unknown documentary material on the Mountjoys, he conjures up a detailed and compelling description of the circumstances in which Shakespeare lived and worked, and in which he wrote such plays as Othello, Measure for Measure, and King Lear.

Julian Barnes
Nothing to be Frightened of
Jonathan Cape, 2008, 828.914 BAR
'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him'. Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is like a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers. When Angela Carter reviewed Barnes' first novel, Metroland, she praised the mature way he wrote about death. Now, nearly thirty years later, he returns to the subject in a wise, funny and constantly surprising book, which defies category and classification - except as Barnesian.

900s – Geography & History

Stephen Rippon
Historic Landscape Analysis: Deciphering the Countryside
Council for British Archaeology, 2005, 911.41 RIP
This handbook introduces some of the techniques that archaeologists, historians, historical geographers and planners can use to unravel the complex history of the countryside. A series of case studies demonstrate practical applications of historic landscape analysis for a broad range of uses and at a variety of national and regional levels. This well-illustrated and clear guide will be essential reading for anyone trying to understand the origins and development of regional variation in historic landscape character.

Rob Gifford
China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
Bloomsbury, 2007, 915.1046 GIF
China is a country on the move, and Route 312 - China's Route 66 - is the artery along which 150 million Chinese travel daily in search of work and a better life. Running 3,000 miles from the east-coast boomtown of Shanghai to the border of Kazakhstan in the northwest, crossing many ethnic and provincial boundaries, Rob Gifford travels the intercontinental road to get to the heart of the new China, and his ability to talk to everyone across the social spectrum - from truckers and prostitutes to yuppies and travelling salesmen - makes China Road an outstanding travel narrative.

Norma Clarke
Dr. Johnson’s Women
Pimlico, 2005, 828.609 CLA
Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs. He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters. It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors. Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case. Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.

Matthew Johnson
Ideas of Landscape
Blackwell, 2006, 936.2 JOH
Drawing on his local experience, Matthew Johnson focuses on the so-called English landscape tradition and discusses why it is so distinctive: it stands at some distance from North American and other approaches, in which theory plays a more prominent role. Johnson identifies the origins of this tradition in English Romanticism, through the influence of the father of landscape history W.G. Hoskins among others, and argues that the strengths and weaknesses of landscape archaeology can be traced back to the underlying theoretical discontents of the Romantic movement. He offers an alternative agenda, which maps more closely on to the established empirical strengths of landscape study and is more relevant both to the thrust of interdisciplinary landscape studies and to contemporary social concerns. Passionately and accessibly written, this engaging book takes up a crucial strand in archaeological thinking and examines it critically for the first time.

Richard Trank
I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
Stax Entertainment, 2007, 940.5318 TRA
Simon Weisenthal, a Holocaust survivor, helped track down numerous Nazi war criminals following World War II and then spent the latter decades of his life fighting anti-Semitism and prejudice against all people. His life’s quest began after the Americans liberated the Mauthausen death camp in Austria where Wiesenthal was a prisoner in May 1945. It was his fifth death camp among the dozen Nazi camps in which he was imprisoned, and he weighed just 99 lb when he was freed. Wiesenthal said he quickly realised “there is no freedom without justice,” and decided to dedicate “a few years” to seeking justice.

Sandra Koa Wing
Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War
Profile, 2008, 941.084 WIN
A powerful, detailed and warming story of the Second World War - told through the previously unheard voices of those who described the home front for the Mass Observation project. Using diaries that have never been published before, this book tells the story of the war - the military conflict, and, mainly, life on the home front - through the lives of the Home Front’s volunteers.

Ian Mortimer
The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, Ruler of England 1327-1330
Pimlico, 2004, 942.036092 MOR
One night in August 1323 a captive rebel baron, Sir Roger Mortimer, drugged his guards and escaped from the Tower of London. With the king's men-at-arms in pursuit he fled to the south coast, and sailed to France. There he was joined by Isabella, the Queen of England, who threw herself into his arms. A year later, as lovers, they returned with an invading army: King Edward II's forces crumbled before them, and Mortimer took power. He removed Edward II in the first deposition of a monarch in British history. Until now no one has appreciated the full evil genius of the man. This first biography reveals not only the man's career as a feudal lord, a governor of Ireland, a rebel leader and a dictator of England.

Rosemary Ashton
142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London
Vintage, 2008, 942.10810922 ASH
142 Strand was the home of the brilliant, unconventional young publisher John Chapman. The Strand was packed with booksellers, magazine publishers, theatres, clubs, and quack doctors. Just behind lay the brothels of Covent Garden and the disreputable pornographers of Holywell Street, while Westminster and the Houses of Parliament were a short distance away. Chapman's circle touched all these worlds, and the vivid story of these unconventional lives and unorthodox views - marvellously told by Rosemary Ashton - takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, uncovering its surprising energy, its doubts and arguments, and, above all, its passionate reforming spirit.

Julian Barnes
Letters from London
Picador, 2005, 942.10859 BAR
Since 1990 Julian Barnes has written a regular 'Letter from London' for the New Yorker magazine. These already celebrated pieces cover subjects as diverse as the Lloyd's insurance disaster, the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher, the troubles of the Royal Family and the hapless Nigel Short in his battle with Gary Kasparov in the 1993 World Chess Finals. With an incisive assessment of Salman Rushdie's plight and an analysis of the implications of being linked to the Continent via the Channel Tunnel, Letters from London provides a vivid and telling portrait of Britain in the Nineties.

Mark Leonard
What Does China Think?
HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 951.06 LEO
Mark Leonard asks us to forget everything we thought we knew about China and start again. He introduces us to the thinkers that are shaping China's wide open future and opens up a hidden world of intellectual debate that is driving a new Chinese revolution and changing the face of the world.

Nick Broomfield
Battle for Haditha
Contender Home Entertainment, 2008, 956.7 BRO
Documentary-maker Nick Broomfield’s first move into dramatisations tells the aftermath of an insurgent’s roadside bomb for the Marines caught by it, and the local families caught by the Marines, using Iraqi refugees in Jordan and ex-Marines in similar situations to those who involved in the incident, and reconstructed using the report the official enquiry.

Mike Tucker
Gunner Palace
Elephant Video, 2007, 956.7 LON
In this striking documentary shot in 2003, early on in the US-led war on Iraq, a group of American soldiers in Baghdad who have taken over a bombed-out palace that belonged to Uday Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein, offer the camera a view on their world. While they party poolside for most of the day and lead raids on homes of suspected bomb-builders most nights, they also have a lot to say about the war and their situation. Their youth and immaturity is striking, as is the war itself and the nebulous reasons that they are stationed there. While the primary purpose of Gunner Palace is to give the perspective of the soldiers, viewers also get a glimpse of Iraqi civilians and how they react to the US military presence--some are terrified, others are sceptical, still others are compliant and grateful if not totally sure why.

Charles Tripp
A History of Iraq: Third Edition
Cambridge University Press, 2007, 956.704 TRI
Charles Tripp's thesis is that the history of Iraq throughout the twentieth-century has made it what it is today, but also provides alternative futures. Unless this is properly understood, many of the themes explored in this book - patron-client relations, organized violence, sectarian, ethnic and tribal difference - will continue to exert a hold over the future of Iraq as they did over its past.

Charles Ferguson
No End in Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos
PublicAffairs, 2008, 956.70443 FER
The first book of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerrilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, No End in Sight is a shocking story of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Presenting the research behind the award-winning documentary, this book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003. It features verbatim interviews with high ranking officials including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts.

Gareth R. V. Stansfield
Iraq: People, History, Politics
Polity, 2007, 956.70443 STA
This book asks why is it that a state which, on paper, would seem to have immense potential, became a pariah, deemed to be a threat to its own people, or to its neighbours? Can the answers be found in the peculiar psychological make-up of particular political leaders, or are there structural weaknesses inherent within the construct of the state itself? What is the social, political and economic impact on the people of this tortured state of years of war, deprivation and hardship in addition to existing under the oppressive totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein?

Jonathan Steele
Defect: Why they Lost Iraq
I. B. Tauris, 2007, 956.70443 STE
As the dreadful reality of the Coalition's defeat in Iraq begins to sink in, one question dominates Washington and London: why? In this controversial new book, award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele provides a stark and arresting answer: Bush and Blair were defeated from the day they decided to occupy the country. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with ordinary Iraqis, Steele shows for the first time how the staging posts of the conflict so familiar to Western newspaper readers were seen by the Iraqis themselves.

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Blimes
The Three Trillion Dollar War
Allen Lane, 2008, 956.704431 STI
The Three Trillion Dollar War is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and Bilmes will show underestimates the real figure by approximately six times. The authors expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans - for the rest of their lives.Shifting to a global perspective, the authors investigate the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. With chilling precision, they calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building. Stiglitz and Bilmes write in simple language, which makes the details they present, and the sums they add up, all the more disturbing. This book will change forever the way we think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of war generally.

Will Eisner
Last Day in Vietnam
Dark Horse Comics, 2000, 959.7043 EIS
Last Day in Vietnam is Will Eisner’s memoir of stories about soldiers who are engaged not only in the daily hostilities of war but also in larger, more personal combat. During Eisner’s years in the militaryk, and particularly during the many field trips he made for P.S. Magazine, he observed and reported on camp life at close range.

Jacob Weisberg
The Bush Tragedy
Bloomsbury, 2008, 973.931092 WEI
Jacob Weisberg analyses Bush through his response to the failures and accomplishments of his younger self, his idolisation of Ronald Reagan, and his devout Christianity that has led to widely condemned policy decisions that have fundamentally changed the role and position of the United States in the modern world. This original interpretation of Bush also studies seriously the much-mocked language that he uses as a political tool, helping to carve out the vision of himself as a wartime leader. In the run-up to the presidential elections, this is the starting point for a worldwide debate about undoing the damage.

Featured Book - "Here Comes Everybody"

2008-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisation without Organisations
Allen Lane, 2008, 303.4833 SHI

Like Charles Leadbeater’s recently-published We-Think, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is both a manifesto for a networked culture, highlighting the benefits that come from the instantaneous and highly accessible communication the internet offers and, more importantly, is full of anecdotes demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of these networks in action.

The antithesis of arguments such as Andrew Keen’s in his The Cult of the Amateur, Shirky has already engaged his critics. To join in the conversation. you can try the ideas in his book out for yourself at the RSA’s social organisation platform RSA Networks, discuss the book in the comments of the various celebrity blogger reviews the book has already received, see Shirky make his case at the RSA next Tuesday, or borrow a copy of Here Comes Everybody by emailing the RSA Library.

Featured Book - "The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West"

2008-02-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Edward Lucas
The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West
Bloomsbury, 2008, 327.4 LUC

The foreign journalists in Moscow may be finding the run-up to Sunday's election boring, and its true that American pre-election elections get a lot more coverage, but the lack of headlines being generated by national politics hasn’t meant a decline in commentary on Russia and its continuing role in the international arena.

Recent RSA Thursday speaker Edward Lucas’ new book, The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West deals with both, discussing the domestic power structures built up by Vladimir Putin that in the process of being handed over to Dmitry Medvedev, and how these men to international business. Almost a year ago Matthew Bryza, deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, attacked Russia’s state-owned natural gas company Gazprom for pursuing control of European energy infrastructure, but as Timothy Garton Ash reported yesterday, Europe is yet to formulate a coherent policy.

As The Telegraph’s review points out, it’s a misleading title; the conflict in question is being waged with energy sources and against their customers, not with nuclear bombs aimed at military complexes. This book is a valuable explanation of the seemingly inert Russia politics, and why watching nothing happening is interesting right now.

To borrow a copy of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces both Russia and the West, please contact the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - February 2008

2008-02-22T09:29:00.000-08:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of February 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Nicholas Davies
Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
Chatto & Windus, 2008, 070.4 DAV
'Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.' When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed: the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; and the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Oliver James
The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza
Vermilion, 2008, 155.9 JAM
In Affluenza, world-renowned psychologist Oliver James introduced us to a modern-day virus sweeping through the English-speaking world. He met those suffering from it and demonstrated how their obsessive, envious tendencies made them twice as prone to depression, anxiety and addictions than people in other developed nations. Now, The Selfish Capitalist provides more detailed substantiation for those claims. It looks deeper into the origins of the virus and outlines the political, economic and social climate in which it has grown. James points out that, since the seventies, the rich have got much, much richer, yet the average person's wage has not increased at all. He provides a wealth of evidence to show that we have become more miserable and distressed since this time, and suggests that this is a direct consequence of Thatcherite/Blairite 'Selfish Capitalism', whose most significant act has been to rob the poor to give to the rich. A rallying cry to the government to reduce our levels of distress by adopting a form of unselfish capitalism, this hard-hitting and thought-provoking work tells us why our personal well-being must take precedence over the wealth of a tiny minority if we are to cure ourselves of this disease.

Richard Wiseman
The Luck Factor
Arrow, 2004, 158.1 WIS
Why do some people lead happy successful lives whilst others face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? What enables some people to have successful careers whilst apparently similar others find themselves trapped with jobs they detest? And can unlucky people do anything to improve their luck - and lives? Ten years ago, Dr. Richard Wiseman decided to search for the elusive luck factor by investigating the actual beliefs and experiences of lucky and unlucky people...Looking at the results, Wiseman was able to identify four main factors which explained living a lucky and unlucky life. He was then able to show a group of people that considered themselves unlucky, how to think and behave like lucky people. The results were astounding with almost all participants reporting significant life changes: including increased levels of luck, self-esteem, physical well-being, confidence, and success.

200s – Religion

300s – Social Sciences

Robert Peston
Who Runs Britain? How the Super-rich are Changing our Lives
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, 303.30941 PES
Who makes the decisions in this country? Who is the power behind the throne? Who's really in charge? Let the BBC's business correspondent Robert Peston take you through the looking glass on a behind-the-scenes tour of Britain's hidden power brokers and the reasons behind their rise. There's a new elite in town - and it's not who you might think… Who Runs Britain? is essential reading for anyone who wants to know what's really happening in this country, and why.

Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith
Fostering Sustainable Behaviour: An Introduction to Community-Based Marketing
New Society, 2000, 303.484 MCK
Our consumption patterns are threatening to outstrip Earth's ability to support humanity and other species. A sustainable future will require sweeping changes in public behaviour. While conventional marketing can help create public awareness, social marketing identifies and overcomes barriers to long-lasting behaviour change. This ground-breaking book is the primary resource for the emerging new field of community-based social marketing, and an invaluable guide for anyone involved in designing public education programs with the goal of promoting sustainable behaviour, from recycling and energy efficiency, to alternative transportation.

Lois Weis
The Way Class Works: Readings on School, Family and the Economy
Routledge, 2008, 305.5 WEI
Since the 1980s, the relationship between social class and education has been overshadowed by scholarship more generally targeting issues of race, gender, and representation. Today, with the global economy deeply immersed in social inequalities, there is pressing need for serious class-based analysis of schooling, family life and social structure. The Way Class Works is a collection of twenty-four groundbreaking essays on the material conditions of social class and the ways in which class is produced on the ground in educational institutions and families, written by the most visible and important scholars in education and the social sciences, these timely essays explore the production of class in and through the economy, family, and school, while simultaneously interrogating and challenging our understandings of social class as linked to race, gender, and nation.

Dave Gorman
America Unchained
Channel 4 DVD, 2008, 306.0973 GOR
In Dave Gorman In America Unchained, recently screened here at the RSA, the multi award-winning performer sets off on a journey to see if it's still possible to live in America without giving any money to 'The Man'. Travelling coast-to-coast, he's not staying in any chain hotels, eating in any chain restaurants, or filling up at any chain gas stations. On this journey, only independent "Mom & Pop" businesses will do. Of course, travelling unchained in a chained world is tricky--when you’re tired you can't just stop at a Starbucks, and when the tank is running empty you can't just pull up at the next gas station. Staying true to the task was always going to be a struggle, but the people facing the real struggle are those working to keep the unchained businesses of America alive.

Michael F. D. Young
Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education
Routledge, 2008, 306.43 YOU
What is it in the twenty-first century that we want young people, and adults returning to study, to know? What is it about the kind of knowledge that people can acquire at school, college or university that distinguishes it from the knowledge that people acquire in their everyday lives everyday lives, at work, and in their families? Bringing Knowledge Back In draws on recent developments in the sociology of knowledge to propose answers to these key, but often overlooked, educational questions. Michael Young argues for the continuing relevance of the writings of Durkheim and Vygotsky and the unique importance of Basil Bernstein's often under-appreciated work. He illustrates the importance of questions about knowledge by investigating the dilemmas faced by researchers and policy makers in a range of fields, and considers the broader issue of the role of sociologists in relation to educational policy in the context of increasingly interventionist governments. In so doing, the book provides conceptual tools for people to think and debate about knowledge and education in new ways provides clear expositions of difficult ideas at the interface of epistemology and the sociology of knowledge makes explicit links between theoretical issues and practical/policy questions offers a clear focus for the future development of the sociology of education as a key field within educational studies.

Dick Pountain
Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude
Reaktion, 2000, 306.40941 POU
This text introduces the reader to a new cultural category. While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they believe they are the first to attempt a penetrating analysis of Cool's history, psychology and significance. The contemporary cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. This book traces Cool's origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. The authors examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flaneurs of the 18th and 19th centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s.

Christopher B. Leinberger
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
Island Press, 2007, 307.760973 LEI
Americans are voting with their feet to abandon strip malls and suburban sprawl, embracing instead a new type of community where they can live, work, shop, and play within easy walking distance. In The Option of Urbanism, visionary developer and strategist Christopher Leinberger explains why government policies have tilted the playing field toward one form of development over the last sixty years: the drivable suburb. Rooted in the driving forces of the economy - car manufacturing and the oil industry - this type of growth has fostered the decline of community, contributed to urban decay, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to the rise in obesity and asthma. Highlighting both the challenges and the opportunities for this type of development, The Option of Urbanism shows how the American Dream is shifting to include cities as well as suburbs and how the financial and real estate communities need to respond to build communities that are more environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable.

Paul Collins
The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine
Bloomsbury, 2006, 320.092 COL
The author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, a radical on the run from the law in London, a founding father of the United States of America, a senator of revolutionary France, Thomas Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. He was a walking revolution in human form - the most dangerous man alive. But in death, Paine's story turns truly bizarre - his bones were taken from New York to London and eventually disappeared. In Paris, London and New York, in bars, grocers, shops and national libraries, crossing paths along the way with, among others, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, William Cobbett, Walt Whitman, Charles Darwin and even Lord Bryon, Paul Collins sets himself the challenge of finding out what happened to Paine's bones, and ends up telling one of the most extraordinary stories of modern history.

John Pilger
Freedom Next Time
Black Swan, 2007, 323.49 PIL
John Pilger is one of the world's pre-eminent investigative journalists and documentary film-makers. In Freedom Next Time, he looks at five countries, in each of which a long struggle for freedom has taken place; in each the people, having shed blood and dreams, are still waiting. In Afghanistan, Iraq and South Africa, there has been the promise of hope, and even an 'official' freedom, but the reality of these divided societies is that they are still waiting for real freedom. In Palestine, the cycle of violence continues with no resolution in sight. And the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is a microcosm of the ruthlessness of great powers. The island was sold by the British to the American military in the 1960s. The indigenous population, descended from slaves, were forcibly removed to the slums of Port Louis in Mauritius. They have continued to fight for the return of their homeland ever since - three years ago the High Court granted them the right of return, but this has subsequently been blocked. The island remains the US's third biggest military base; a base from which they are able to launch attacks against the Middle East. Once again, John Pilger gives a voice to the people living through these momentous times and, in gripping detail, shows us the lives behind the headlines.

John Pilger
The War on Democracy
Lionsgate, 2008, 328.346 PIL
In his latest documentary, John Pilger travels to latin America to uncover the consequences of the United States’ greed. Pilger explores how the US has for decades installed presidents in South and Central America who have kept the rich in palaces and the poor in the desperate poverty of the barrios. Through interviews with ex-CIA chiefs, the people of Latin America themselves and a rare interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, John Pilger seeks to prove that you should never believe anything until it’s officially denied.

Gregory Clark
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
Princeton University Press, 2007, 330.9 CLA
Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution - and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it - occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich - and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture - not exploitation, geography, or resources - explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

Muhammad Yunus
Creating a World without Poverty: How Social Business can transform our Lives
Public Affairs, 2008, 338.7 YUN
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize outlines his vision for a new business model that combines the power of free markets with the quest for a more humane world - and tells the inspiring stories of companies that are doing this work today. Over the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick and protecting the planet. Creating a World without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social business, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way - and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Tim Harford
The Logic of Life: The Hidden Economics of Everything
Little, Brown, 2008, 339 HAR
To Tim Harford, Economics Editor of the Financial Times, drug addicts and teenage muggers can be rational. Suburban sprawl and inner city decay are rational. Endless meetings at the office and the injustices of working life? Rational. Economics explains why your boss is overpaid, whether we should build more prisons, and whether a city like New Orleans can recover from disaster. The book starts with the most intimate decisions - to have sex, to take drugs, to lead an honest life - then zooms out to discuss the logic of the family, of neighbourhoods, large corporations, cities themselves. This is the new economics of everything you never thought was economics, and it will help you see the world in a new way.

Rosemary Jay
Data Protection: Law and Practice
Sweet & Maxwell, 2007, 342.410858 JAY
Data protection, and the related areas of privacy, confidentiality, rights of access and powers of surveillance, are now mainstream issues. This fully revised and extended third edition is the essential work for anyone concerned with how this important area of law impaces on their practice. It explains the background to the legislation and gives guidance on how to apporoach interpretation, and provides detailed coverage of the relationship between data protection, the right to private life under the Human Rights Convention and the development of UK case law on privacy rights since October 2000.

Daniel J. Solove
The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age
New York University Press, 2004, 342.730858 SOL
Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day - even as you read this - electronic databases are compiling information about you. Ever since the Internet transformed the way we shop, learn, and communicate, computer databases have collected unprecedented amounts of information about almost every individual in the world. Often these dossiers are used to investigate backgrounds, check credit, market products, and make a wide variety of decisions affecting our lives. This practice has, thus far, gone largely unchecked, and poses a grave threat to our privacy. In this startling revelation of how digital dossiers are created (usually without our knowledge), Daniel J. Solove argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is and what it means in the digital age, and then reform the laws that define and regulate it.

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
Allen Lane, 2008, 306.361 SEN
This book, a philosophically-minded enquiry into practical activity of many different kinds past and present, is about what happens when people try to do a good job. It asks us to think about the true meaning of skill in the 'skills society' and argues that pure competition is a poor way to achieve quality work. Sennett suggests, instead, that there is a craftsman in every human being, which can sometimes be enormously motivating and inspiring - and can also in other circumstances make individuals obsessive and frustrated. The Craftsman shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals' pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions. But the past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working (using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials) which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents.

Tom Traynor and Alan French
A Guide to Major Trusts, 2007-08
Directory of Social Change, 2007, REF 361.763202541 TRA
Grant-making trusts are a key source of funding for charitable activity, and this two-volume guide has built a reputation as the definitive source of information in this area. Volume one concentrates on the 400 largest trusts that give over £300,000 a year, and the second volume examines a further 1,200 mainly smaller trusts, which between them give tens of thousands each year. The content is compiled both through contact with the trusts themselves and through independent research. Each entry includes: clear description of the trust's grant-making policies and practices; a yearly grant total; contact details; and, areas or subjects the trusts will not consider.

David Lyon
Surveillance Studies: An Overview
Polity Press, 2007, 363.232 LYO
The study of surveillance is more relevant than ever before. The fast growth of the field of surveillance studies reflects both the urgency of civil liberties and privacy questions in the war on terror era and the classical social science debates over the power of watching and classification, from Bentham to Foucault and beyond. In this overview, David Lyon, one of the pioneers of surveillance studies, fuses with aplomb classical debates and contemporary examples to provide the most accessible and up-to-date introduction to surveillance available, taking in surveillance studies in all its breadth, from local face-to-face oversight through technical developments in closed-circuit TV, radio frequency identification and biometrics to global trends that integrate surveillance systems internationally. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone wanting to understand surveillance as a phenomenon and the tools for analysing it further, and will be essential reading for students and scholars alike.

Anna Funder
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
Granta Books, 2004, 363.2830943155 FUN
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight, and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their countrymen and women, there are a thousand stories just waiting to get out. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany - she meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III, visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall and gets drunk with the legendary Mik Jegger of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to no longer to exist.

Ricardo Bayon, Amanda Hawn and Katherine Hamilton (eds.)
Voluntary Carbon Markets: An International Business Guide to what they are and how they Work
Earthscan, 2007, 363.738746 BAY
This groundbreaking business book, written in a fast-paced journalistic style, draws together all of the key information on international voluntary carbon markets with commentary from leading practitioners and business people. The book covers all aspects of voluntary carbon markets in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada and Asia: what they are, how they work and, most critically, their business potential to help slow climate change. It is the indispensable guide for anyone seeking to understand voluntary carbon markets and capitalize on the opportunities they present for economic and environmental benefit. If you want to be ahead of the curve for the next big thing, you need this book.

David King and Gabrielle Walker
The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On
Bloomsbury, 2008, 363.738746 KIN
The Hot Topic is a collaborative work by one of the most respected scientists and one of the most dynamic writers in the field of climate change. Sir David King, world-renowned scientist and the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, is widely credited with persuading Tony Blair to act on climate change and with getting key international figures around the negotiating table, and Gabrielle Walker is a respected author, journalist and radio presenter, and a regular contributor to New Scientist, whose 8-part series Planet Earth Under Threat was a major success last year for BBC Radio 4. The Hot Topic goes beyond a statement of the problem to address in detail what can be done to answer the challenge on a personal, social, national and international level. A clear, short and engaging book that approaches the whole issue - the present problem and the future solutions - in a straightforward way, it is bound to receive massive attention from industry, the media and government alike.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Gang Leader for a Day: A Young Sociologist Crosses the Line
Allen Lane, 2008, 364.1066092 VEN
Sudhir Venkatesh is the young sociologist who became famous in Freakonomics, Gang Leader for a Day is a gripping journey of discovery about life on the wrong side of the tracks. When naive sociology student Sudhir Venakatesh went to find out more about urban poverty in Chicago, the last thing he expected was to be held hostage by a gang. And he never guessed that, after being released, he'd want to return to find out more about them, befriend them, and ultimately live amongst them for ten years.

Darius M. Rejali
Torture and Democracy
Princeton University Press, 2007, 364.67 REJ
This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research - conducted in multiple languages and on several continents - begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib.

Robert Hill
Achieving More Together: Adding Value through Partnership
Association of School and College Leaders, 2008, 379.152 HIL
This book is the result of a year-long ASCL research project to find evidence of the concrete benefits – both in terms of innovation and improvement – to be gained from school and college collaboration and to understand the implications for education policy. It makes the educational and practical case for partnership working, and analyse the research evidence on the extent to which partnership working adds value, examines the current scope and form of such collaborative activity among schools and colleges and discusses the barriers to partnership and what can be done to lessen or remove them.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Iain Stewart
Earth: The Power of the Planet
BBC DVD, 2008, 508 STE
In this landmark BBC series, Dr Iain Stewart tells the story of how our planet works and how, over the course of 4.6 billion years, it came to be the remarkable planet it is today. Examining the great forces that shape the earth - volcanoes, the ocean, the atmosphere and ice - the programme explores their central roles in our planet's story. How do these forces affect the earth's landscape, its climate, and its history? This is a series that shows the earth in new and surprising ways. Extensive use of satellite imagery reveals new views of our planet, while time-lapse filmed over many months brings the planet to life.

Peter A. Corning
Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind
Cambridge University Press, 2003, 576.8 COR
Nature's Magic presents a bold new vision of the evolutionary process from the Big Bang to the 21st century. Synergy of various kinds is not only a ubiquitous aspect of the natural world but it has also been a wellspring of creativity and the 'driver' of the broad evolutionary trend toward increased complexity, in nature and human societies alike. But in contrast with the many theories of emergence or complexity that rely on some underlying force or 'law', the 'Synergism Hypothesis', as Peter Corning calls it, is in essence an economic theory of biological complexity; it is fully consistent with mainstream evolutionary biology. Among the many important insights that are provided by this new paradigm, Corning presents a scenario in which the human species invented itself; synergistic, behavioural and technological innovations were the 'pacemakers' of our biological evolution.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

Ronald Cohen
The Second Bounce of the Ball: Turning Risk into Opportunity
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, 658.155 COH
In business, everyone can see the first bounce of the ball. It is the second bounce that is uncertain. Ronald Cohen, one of the world's leading private-equity investors, argues that the entrepreneur's aim is to take advantage of that uncertainty: it is only in situations of uncertainty that significant gains can be made. The Second Bounce of the Ball is the distillation of Cohen's 33-year career building Apax Partners into a firm employing more than 300 people, with offices in eight countries and billions under management, and is essential reading for entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs and all those who want to apply entrepreneurial approaches in all walks of life.It provides relevant background on the development of entrepreneurship and of the venture-capital and private-equity industry through the prism of Cohen's experience at Apax.

Sarah Lewis
Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management: Using AI to Facilitate Organizational Development
Kogan Page, 2007, 658.406 LEW
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is one of the most exciting and increasingly recognized concepts in facilitating organizational change. This book studies AI in depth, illustrating the method of asking particular questions and envisioning the future, encouraging staff to consider both the positive and negative systems in place and to recognize the need to implement change. Case studies from organizations that have already integrated conversational methods into their change management practice show you why the processes are valuable, why they are effective and how to promote, create and generate such conversations yourself. Written in jargon-free language, this is an excellent resource for you to discover the benefits that conversational techniques can have on your organization and its performance.

Gerard Hastings
Social Marketing: Why Should the Devil Have all the Best Tunes?
Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007, 658.8 HAS
This book explains the principles of social marketing and examines the implications of using techniques devised on Wall Street to further social and health goals. Naomi Kein, Joel Bakan and George Monbiot have each done a great job of telling us what is wrong with corporate capitalism, and this book begins to provide some solutions. It shows how we can borrow the techniques they use to promote consumption, to encourage more socially desirable behaviours, and use rigorous research to enable regulators to constrain the worst excesses of Wall Street. Modern marketing techniques now pervade every aspect of our lives: the government, charities, advocacy groups use it to encourage us to live more healthily, support good causes or be more ecologically sensitive. This book asks whether this works and what does it tell us about the relationship between business and civil society? Highly accessible with clear learning objectives, exercises and worked examples, this is also a text that stretches our understanding of the discipline and raises questions about future directions.

A.S.K. Hollis 2008: The Directory of UK Associations - the Definitive Directory of Associations and Organisations Representing a Membership, a Message and a Mission
Hollis Publishing, 2008, REF 659.202
Over 6,000 associations, pressure groups, unions, institutes, societies and more are profiled, representing every interest area from abrasives through to zoos, from industrial, professional and business sectors to government, charities and the consumer.

700s – The Arts

Alison Chernik
Matthew Barney - No Restraint
Soda Pictures, 2007, 700.92 BAR/CHE
A documentary portrait of artist Matthew Barney, following him through the process of making Drawing Restraint No. 9, his 2005 film, using clips from the film, behind-the-scenes interviews, and home-movie footage of Barney playing high-school football, as well as interviews with gallery owner Barbara Gladstone, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, and Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, which presented a major exhibition on the Drawing Restraint series, including a screening of the film, in the summer of 2005.

Stefan Lubomirski de Vaux
Urban Nature and the Urban Beach
Lubomirski, 2006, 770 LUB
An eclectic collection of 50 original photographs in colour and black & white, on a theme of nature in an urban setting including the use of parks and river banks as urban beaches. Nature tamed and left free, outdoors and indoors and as an inspiration for art.

Alex James
Bit of a Blur
Little, Brown, 2007, 782.42166092 JAM
For Alex James, music had always been a door to a more exciting life: a way to travel, meet new people and, hopefully, pick up girls. But as bass player of Blur - one of the most successful British bands of all time - his journey was more exciting and extreme than he could ever have predicted. Success catapulted him from a slug-infested squat in Camberwell to a world of private jets and world-class restaurants. Pleasingly unrepentant but nonetheless a reformed man, Alex James is the perfect chronicler of his generation - witty, observant, frank and brimming with joie de vivre.

800s – Literature

900s – Geography & History

Daniel Lord Smail
On Deep History and the Brain
University of California Press, 2007, 901 SMA
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.

Michelle P. Brown
Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age
University of Toronto Press, 2007, 941 BRO
The Anglo-Saxons first appeared on the historical scene as Germanic pagan pirates and mercenaries, moving into the declining Roman Empire in the 5th Century AD and forging a series of kingdoms which became ‘England.’ By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, Anglo-Saxon England was one of the most sophisticated states in the medieval West, renowned for its ecclesiastical and cultural achievements. The written word was of tremendous importance in this transformation. Within a century of the introduction of Christianity and literacy, the book had become a central element of Anglo-Saxon society, and a rich vehicle for cultural and artistic expression. This new book by a leading export on this period, Michelle P. Brown, provides an authoritative introduction to the art of book production in the Anglo-Saxon period and an historical overview of the period by means of its book culture. It illustrates in colour over 140 examples of the finest Anglo-Saxon books, from the British Library and other major collections.

Edward James
Britain in the First Millennium
Arnold, 2000, 941.01 JAM
The first millennium in British history, a period framed by two invasions and conquests from across the Channel, is given a fresh portrayal in this innovative new account. It is the first time that Britain has been studied over the entire first millennium - or what might be called the 'long' first millennium, from the middle of the first century BC until the end of the eleventh century AD. It was a fundamental period for the historical and cultural development of Britain. The incomplete nature of the Roman Conquest lies behind the separate development of Ireland and northern Scotland, and perhaps Wales. The events of the fifth and sixth centuries, the so-called Migration Period, led to the re-making of the linguistic map. The arrival of Christianity was a major unifying event of the period in cultural terms. The arrival of the Vikings ultimately brought about the unification of the English kingdom, and aided in the unification of the kingdom of Scotland, the two most significant political developments of the latter part of the period, while the Norman Conquest inextricably tied subsequent medieval English monarchs into the politics of France.

Ian Mortimer
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
Pimlico, 2007, 942.037092 MOR
He ordered his uncle to be beheaded; he usurped his father's throne; he taxed his people more than any other previous king, and he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years. Yet for centuries Edward III (1327-77) was celebrated as the most brilliant of all English monarchs. In this first full study of his character and life, Ian Mortimer shows how under Edward the feudal kingdom of England became a highly organised nation, capable of raising large revenues and deploying a new type of projectile-based warfare, culminating in the crushing victory over the French at Crecy. Yet under his rule England also experienced its longest period of domestic peace in the Middle Ages, giving rise to a massive increase of the nation's wealth through the wool trade, with huge consequences for society, art and architecture. It is to Edward that England owes its system of parliamentary representation, its local justice system, its national flag and the recognition of English as the language of the nation. Nineteenth century historians saw in Edward the opportunity to decry a warmonger, and painted him as a self-seeking, rapacious, tax-gathering conqueror. Yet as this book shows, beneath the strong warrior king was a compassionate, conscientious and often merciful man - resolute yet devoted to his wife, friends and family. He emerges as a strikingly modern figure, to whom many will be able to relate - the father of both the English people and the English nation.

Timothy Carton Ash
The File: A Personal History
Vintage Books, 1998, 943.1 ASH
In an account of Cold War espionage and treachery, the author describes his discovery that the East German secret police had compiled a secret file on his activities and of his efforts to track down the truth about that file.

Joe Sacco
The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo
Jonathan Cape, 2004, 949.74203 SAC
In his remarkable new book Joe Sacco returns to Bosnia, the setting for his first masterpiece, Safe Area Goražde. In 2001 he went back to Sarajevo to meet up with his old 'fixer', an army veteran called Neven who, for the right price, could arrange anything for the visiting journalist. Sacco gradually realized that Neven's own story - a microcosm of the Balkan conflict itself - might be the most compelling of all. Through Neven, Sacco tells the story of the warlords and gangsters who ran the country during the war, but all the time he - and the reader - never know whether Neven is telling the truth.

Benny Morris (ed.)
Making Israel
University of Michigan Press, 2008, 956.04 MOR
Benny Morris is the founding father of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have challenged received wisdom about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their research rigorously documented crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli armed forces, including rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. In Making Israel, Morris now offers the first collection of translated articles on the New History by leading Zionist and revisionist Israeli historians, providing Americans with a firsthand view of this important debate, and enabling a better understanding of how the New Historians have influenced Israelis' awareness of their own past. The book includes contributions from eminent partisans and moderates on both sides (including Mordecai Bar-On, Uri Ram, Avi Shlaim, Anita Shapira, and Morris himself), and is well-adapted for use in courses on politics, history, and Middle Eastern and Jewish studies.

James Miller and Sarah Shah
Death in Gaza
Warner Home Video, 2006, 956.94 MIL
Directed and filmed by James Miller and written and reported by Sarah Shah, in spring 2003, they set out to Gaza to "understand how people learn to hate so deeply they’re prepared to die in order to kill". Their focus is the next generation, "the children who will make either peace or war" told through the tainted eyes of three Palestinian children indoctrinated into Jihad. Death in Gaza culminates with Miller’s own; filming the sustained attack of Israeli tanks on suspected militant residences Miller and Shah are trapped inside a house, and wait until the fighting ceases to make their move. Attempting to leave the area by waving a white flag through the darkness, Miller assumes that the Israeli soldiers will recognise him as a journalist and let his team pass. Instead, shots ring out, killing Miller instantly, the tragedy being captured by a local film crew.

Phil Grabsky
Escape from Luanda
Seventh Art Productions, 2008, 967.3 GRA
This film spans a year in the life of the only music school in Luanda, the capital of Angola, and follows these three students, each striving to make it through their course. Following a 27-year civil war, Angola is still one of the world s poorest and most dangerous places and the students often have to go hungry and face difficult opposition so that they can follow their musical ambition. Escape from Luanda is a moving, funny and enlightening story, showing above all that where there is music, there is life...

Featured Book - "The Option of Urbanism"

2008-02-15T09:29:00.000-08:00

Christopher B. Leinberger
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
Island Press, 2008, 307.760973 LEI

Property developer Christopher B. Leinberger has spent his career merging profitable and progressive urban development, and brings this mix of pragmatism and idealism to his new book, where he maps out the past 60 years of urban growth, and predicts the paths consumer choice will lead it down in the years to come.

Complementing the usual arguments against personal car use, from peak oil to carbon emissions, Leinberger demonstrates that American property-buyers are already choosing to abandon the predominant form of property development, the “drivable suburb,” in favour of a more compact urban environment that places work, rest and play within walking distance.

Demonstrating the effects of lobbying from car manufactures and the oil industry in driving these developments, Leinberger argues instead for a genuinely market-driven reform of the built environment that would lead to improvements in both public health and the environment.

If you would like to borrow a copy of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream, please contact the RSA Library.

Featured Book - "Flat Earth News"

2008-02-08T09:03:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Davies
Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media
Chatto & Windus, 2008, 070.4 DAV

Nick Davies’ literally-titled new book is an insider’s attack on the current standards of reporting in the national daily newspapers, drawing on research he commissioned from Cardiff University into the number of stories researched or verified by journalists. The results? Shockingly few.

From headline-generating sensationalist spins on unchecked press releases to planting misinformation for the CIA, Davies exposes the low quality behind the high quantity of "news" in the nation’s quality dailies.

The book’s received positive, if paradoxical, coverage in the media from The Spectator to The Guaridan, and Davies will be discussing it’s argument with broadcast journalist Adrian Monck and former editor of the New Statesman Peter Wilby here at the RSA on 14 February 2008.

To book your place at the talk, click here, and to borrow a copy of Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media, please contact the RSA Library.

Featured book - Robert Peston, “Who Really Runs Britain?”

2008-02-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

Robert Peston
Who Really Runs Britain? The Super-rich and how they’re Changing our Lives
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, 303.30941 PES

The BBC’s Business editor and breaker of Northern Rock’s bad news Robert Peston will be speaking at the RSA on 7 February to mark the publication of his new book, Who Really Runs Britain? The Super-rich and how they’re Changing our Lives.

Both the book and the lecture will outline the lessons Peston has learnt from his time as a business journalist during a time when, as John Lanchester has noted, successive governments have sought to avoid infringing on the money-earning capacity of City bankers since Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 windfall tax on profits.

As Preston outlines in these extracts from the book, favourable tax regimes and lax regulatory frameworks have created an environment where an elite of wealthy individuals and hedge funds are able to earn extraordinary amounts of money and take extraordinary risks, sowing the seeds for the cheap credit regime, the collapse of Northern Rock and the ensuing economic downturn.

To borrow a copy of Who Really Runs Britain? The Super-rich and how they’re Changing our Lives, please contact the RSA Library.

RSA Library Update - January 2008

2008-01-25T08:35:00.000-08:00

What follows is a complete list of RSA library acquisitions for the month of January 2008. Fellows are welcome to e-mail library@rsa.org.uk if they wish to borrow any of these items, or search the library catalogue for thousands of other titles....

000s – Generalities

Judy Edwards
Idealism not Ostentation, the Society of Arts in the Adelphi
2006, REF RSA 062 EDW
Written as the dissertation to her MA in Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors, 1660-1830 from Birkbeck College, Idealism not Ostentation, the Society of Arts in the Adelphi discusses the design and architecture of the RSA's home at 8 John Adam Street in the context of its use as a functional building by the Society, and the wider Adelphi development. This copy has been kindly donated to the Library by Judy Edwards, a Fellow of the RSA.

100s – Philosophy & Psychology

Claire Colebrook
Gilles Deleuze
Routledge, 2001, 194 COL
Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on creation, the future and the enhancement of life, along with his crusade against 'common sense', Deleuze offers some of the most liberating, exhilarating ideas in twentieth-century thought. This book offers a way in to Deleuzean thought through such topics as: 'becoming'; time and the flow of life; the ethics of thinking; 'major' and 'minor' literature; difference and repetition; and desire, the image and ideology.

Gilles Deleuze
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
Continuum, 2006, 194 DEL
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In The Fold, Deleuze proposes a new and radical way of understanding philosophy and art. Leibniz drew on the art of the baroque period in his invention of the concept of the fold; Deleuze develops the concept further to present a new way of practising philosophy based upon the fold as the relationship of difference with itself.

200s – Religion

Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall and Sahib Mustaqim Bleher (trans.)
The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an
Islamic Dawah Centre International, 2005, 297.122
The first translation of the Qur’an by a Englishman and practising Muslim, Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s 1930 text The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an remains the standard English rendering. This new edition preserves the flow of Pickthall’s original work, while featuring extensive adaptations and alterations by Sahib Mustaqim Bleher to present it in a modern English form. This edition ash kindly been donated to the Library by Abdul Latif, a Fellow of the RSA.

300s – Social Sciences

Mark J. Penn
Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes
Allen Lane, 2007, 303.4 PEN
In Microtrends, respected and sought-after analyst Mark Penn in the world articulates a new way of understanding how we live. He reveals the real trends wielding large influence on society today and tomorrow. In every case these are small patterns of behaviour involving as little as one percent of the population, yet they can transform a business, tip an election, or spark a movement. Relying on some of the best data available, Penn identifies more than 70 microtrends in religion, leisure, politics, and family life that are changing our lives. Microtrends is an invaluable tool in the quest to better understand our world and a remarkable portrait of the 21st century, where the most important trends are the smallest ones.

J. Michael Adams and Angelo Carfagna
Coming of Age in a Globalized World: The Next Generation
Kumarian Press, 2006, 303.482 ADA
The world is rapidly changing. It is growing more interdependent and more complex, with new connections and with problems that transcend national and cultural boundaries. To survive and succeed in this environment, individuals must understand the driving forces of globalization and the trends that are likely to shape our future. Employing an easily understood connect-the-dots metaphor, Coming of Age in a Globalized World: The Next Generation navigates the threads that surround and link humanity. Exploring the notion of an interrelated world, J. Michael Adams and Angelo Carfagna stress the importance of world citizenship as they seek to reconcile the contrast between national bonds and global interests, providing a comprehensive landscape of current issues and conflicts in global politics as they challenge the next generation to shape viable answers to the impending global issues. Shedding light on the realities and myths of globalization, this book is geared toward students, educators, and all concerned for the future.

Alan Weisman
The World Without Us
Virgin, 2007, 304.2 WEI
'On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the earth. They all go.' Alan Weisman looks to the future to discover what the world might be like, and how it would change, if humans disappeared right now, for good. In the current age of anxiety over our impact on the earth's climate and environment, this timely book offers an intriguing glimpse of what the real legacy of our time on the planet may be. How would the natural world respond if it were suddenly relieved of the burden of humanity? Would the climate return to where it was before we fired up our engines? Could nature ever obliterate all traces of human civilization? This groundbreaking book examines areas of the world that have been abandoned or never occupied by humans to see how they have fared without us and looks beyond to discover whether, and for how long, our largest cities, biggest achievements and most devastating mistakes will last after we are gone. In doing so it wrestles with some of the key concerns of our time and reveals a picture of the future that is both illuminating and terrifying.

Rageh Omaar
Only Half of Me
Penguin, 2007, 305.697092 OMA
A Muslim boy goes to a madrassa in Mogadishu to learn the Koran. His parents take him on two pilgrimages to Mecca. He arrives in Britain as a child just as Somalia collapses into a state of civil war that will continue throughout his childhood and prevent him from going home. To the media, government and general public, this is the classic background story of the most feared figure of our times: the young, male, black, British Muslim. It is also the story of Rageh Omaar's childhood. Rageh Omaar's unique and profoundly moving book is the story of his childhood in Somalia, his family's attitude to religion, his double life as a British Muslim and that of other British Muslims. Full of humanity and rage, empathy and insight, Only Half of Me takes us into lives that are widely misunderstood, and tries to make sense of our own fractured world.

Stacy Schiff
Benjamin Franklin and the Birth of America: Franklin’s French Adventure, 1776-85
Bloomsbury, 2006, 327.7304409033 SCH
Six months after America declared her independence, Congress dispatched Benjamin Franklin to France to solicit aid and arms for the upcoming fight. He was seventy years old, possessed of the most rudimentary French and had no diplomatic training. But this most remarkable of envoys was also among the most famous men in the world. During his eight years in Paris he charmed the French, outwitted the British spies and stirred a passion for a republic in those who lived under an absolute monarchy. Stacy Schiff tells a tale of international intrigue and from it emerges an intimate portrait of a brilliant man, as well as a sense of the fragility and improvisation of his country's bid for independence.

Worldwatch Institute
State of the World 2008: Toward a Sustainable Global Economy
Earthscan, 2007, 333.72 WOR
In this 25th edition of State of the World - long established as the most authoritative and accessible annual guide to our progress towards a sustainable future - the studies pay particular attention to the many innovations in economic policy and business practices that lead us towards a more sustainable global economy. Published annually in 28 languages, State of the World is relied upon by national governments, UN agencies, development workers and lawmakers for its authoritative and up-to-the-minute analysis and information. It is essential for anyone concerned with building a positive, global future.

Dollan Cannell
638 Ways to Kill Castro
Freemantle, 2007, 335.4 CAN
638 Ways to Kill Castro is a political documentary exploring the relationship between the US and Cuba through the numerous, and increasingly bizarre, attempts to kill him. The plots are recounted by the people on both sides who were there: those who tried to kill Castro and those who thwarted their efforts.

Michael Moore
Sicko
Optimum, 2008, 353.68 MOO
Michael Moore’s latest documentary tries to find out why it is that the American health care system is ranked lowest among developed nations, while costing more per person than any other.

Alan B. Krueger
What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism
Princeton University Press, 2007, 363.32511 KRU
Many popular ideas about terrorists and why they seek to harm us are fuelled by falsehoods and misinformation: leading politicians and scholars have argued that poverty and lack of education breed terrorism, despite the wealth of evidence showing that most terrorists come from middle-class, and often college-educated, backgrounds. In What Makes a Terrorist , Alan Krueger argues that if we are to correctly assess the root causes of terrorism and successfully address the threat, we must think more like economists do. Krueger is an influential economist who has applied rigorous statistical analysis to a range of tough issues, from the minimum wage and education to the occurrence of hate crimes, and in this book he examines the factors that motivate individuals to participate in terrorism, drawing inferences from terrorists' own backgrounds and the economic, social, and political conditions in the societies from which they come. What Makes a Terrorist brings needed clarity to one of the greatest challenges of our time.

Rob Allen, Mike Hough and Una Padel (eds.)
Reshaping Probation: The New Offender Management Framework
Policy, 2006, 364.6 ALL
The Government has embarked on a programme of radical reform for the probation and prison services with the setting up of a National Offender Management Service (NOMS), with the aim of making the two services work more effectively together, and to promote private sector involvement in 'corrections' work. This groundbreaking volume takes a critical look at the different aspects of the NOMS proposals, at a time when the Government is still working out the detail of its reforms. No other academic publication has scrutinised the NOMS proposals so closely. Through six contributions from leading experts on probation and criminal justice the report: identifies the risks attached to NOMS; assesses the prospects of success; provides ideas for reshaping government plans; and presents an authoritative critique of a set of proposals that could go badly wrong.

400s – Language

500s – Natural Sciences & Mathematics

Deborah E. Harkness
The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution
Yale University Press, 2007, 509.42109031 HAR
This book explores the streets, shops, back alleys, and gardens of Elizabethan London where a boisterous and diverse group of men and women shared a keen interest in the study of nature. These assorted merchants, gardeners, barber-surgeons, midwives, instrument makers, mathematics teachers, engineers, alchemists, and other experimenters formed a patchwork scientific community whose practices set the stage for the Scientific Revolution. While Francis Bacon has been widely regarded as the father of modern science, scores of his London contemporaries also deserve a share in this distinction. It was their collaborative, yet often contentious, ethos that helped to develop the ideals of modern scientific research.

Joseph F. DiMento and Pamela Doughman (eds.)
Climate Change: What it means for us, our Children and our Grandchildren
MIT, 2007, 577.22 DIM
Most of us are familiar with the terms climate change and global warming, but not too many of us understand the science behind them. We don't really understand how climate change will affect us, and for that reason we might not consider it as pressing a concern as, say, housing prices or the quality of local education. This book explains the scientific knowledge about global climate change clearly and concisely in engaging, nontechnical language, describes how it will affect all of us, and suggests how government, business, and citizens can take action against it. Climate Change explains the nuts and bolts of climate and the greenhouse effect and describes their interaction. It discusses the nature of consensus in science, and the consensus on climate change in particular. It describes both public- and private-sector responses, considers how to improve the way scientific findings are communicated, and evaluates the real risks both to vulnerable developing countries and to particular areas of the United States. We can better tackle climate change, this book shows us, if we understand it.

600s – Technology (Applied Sciences)

David Hillson and Ruth Murray-Webster
Understanding Risk and Managing Risk Attitude, Second Edition
Gower, 2007, 658.155 HIL
Despite many years of development, risk management remains problematic for the majority of organizations. One common challenge is the human dimension, in other words, the way people perceive risk and risk management. Risk management processes and techniques are operated by people, each of whom is a complex individual, influenced by many different factors, and the problem is compounded by the fact that most risk management involves people working in groups, introducing further layers of complexity through relationships and group dynamics. David Hillson's and Ruth Murray-Webster's Understanding and Managing Risk Attitude will help you understand the human aspects of risk management and to manage proactively the influence of human behaviour on the risk process. This second edition is updated to strengthen the understanding of individual risk attitudes and reinforce what individuals can do to manage those risk attitudes that are leading them away from their objectives. For people who want to embrace this subject, the book highlights ways forward that work in practice.

Jo Whiterod
Running Pension Trustee (and Other) Meetings: A Practical Guide to Arranging and Minuting Business Meetings
Troubador Publishing, 2008, F 658.456 WHI
This unique book offers a wealth of simply suggestions and ideas for effective meetings administration, presented in a succinct, accessible style, with an invaluable range of relevant hints and tips from other professionals. Although the principal focus is on pension trustee meetings, much of the material has a far more general application. The book is aimed primarily at anyone who has to organise, prepare for, or run any sort of formal or informal meeting and who feels that they need help to ensure that matters progress as smoothly as possibly. It will also be of value to those who attend meetings and would like reassurance that the meetings are being run properly and well. This item was kindly donated to the Library by the author, Jo Whiterod, a Fellow of the RSA.

700s – The Arts

Nigel Spivey
Who Art Made the World
2 Entertain Video, 2005, 700.103 SPI
Embark on a thrilling journey through time and five continents to the heart of creativity. Fusing social history, politics, science, nature, archaeology and religion, this international landmark series unravels a universal mystery - why the world around us looks like it does. Modern-day mysteries are answered by journeying back to the beginning of civilisation via some of the most amazing man-made creations in the world. A strong narrative thread drives through each film as exciting scientific demonstrations reveal how our minds, and those of our ancient ancestors, relate to art. Beautiful, surprising, compelling and above all, relevant, with a visual ambition worthy of its epic subject-matter, this awe-inspiring adventure will appeal not only to art lovers, but to anyone who has ever wondered about humanity's place in the world.

Tim Marlow
Great Artists, Parts One and Two
Seventh Art, 2007, 701.18 MAR
What was it like to be an artist in centuries past? What makes a painting or an artist 'great'? Tim Marlow presents this fascinating introduction to the works of the Old Masters as displayed in over fifty museums, churches, and palaces throughout Europe and the United States. These two DVDs contain all 26 episodes from both seasons of Tim Marlow’s acclaimed Channel 5 documentary.

Simon Schama
Power of Art
BBC, 2006, 701.18 SCH
Focusing on eight iconic works of art, this series reveals the history of visual imagination through the ages. A combination of dramatic reconstruction, spectacular photography and Simon Schama’s unique, personal style of storytelling transport the viewer back to the intense moments when great works were conceived and born.

Robert Gordon McHarg III
Art-Tube01
Smash, 2001, 709.04074 MCH
Art-Tube01 collects the works of the 42 artists featured in London’s first rolling art exhibition; the use of the advertising hoardings of a Piccadilly line tube train to display two works by each contributor. This catalogue has been kindly donated to the Library by its curator, Robert Gordon McHarg III, a Fellow of the RSA.

Christopher Swann
Daniel Libeskind: The Making of an Architect
2006, 720.92 SWA
A feature-length documentary on the life and work of the architect Daniel Libeskind, the Master Planner of Ground Zero in New York, whose work includes the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester and new buildings for the Denver Art Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. This documentary was written and directed by Christopher Swann, a Fellow of the RSA, who kindly donated a copy of this documentary that is not commercially available.

Eyal Weizman
Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
Verso, 2007, 725.656953 WEI
Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which natural features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualisation of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape itself into a tool of total domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

Christopher Swann
The House that George Built: The Rebuilding of Glyndebourne Opera House
725.822 SWA
A documentary filmed over three years that tells the story of the rebuilding of the Glyndebourne Opera House under architect Michael Hopkins, up to its opening to the public in 1996. This documentary was directed and produced by Christopher Swann, a Fellow of the RSA, who kindly donated a copy of this documentary that is not commercially available.

Tom Walford and Hilary Young (eds.)
British Ceramic Design 1600-2002
English Ceramic Circle, 2003, 738.09410903 WAL
A collection of papers presented at a Colloquium held at Victoria & Albert Museum on 21st September 2002, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the English Ceramic Circle, the oldest society dedicated to the study of British ceramics and enamels.
This book was kindly donated to the Library by John Mallet, a Fellow of the RSA who wrote an essay collected in this volume.

Robert Gordon McHarg III
HIM Book: 101 HIMs
Trolley, 2007, 779.23 MCH
Underground artist Robert Gordon McHarg III presents 101 portraits of HIM, his life-size sculpture of Charles Saatchi, dressed in a variety of absurd costumes, allowing the artist to collect the ultimate collector. This book was kindly donated to the Library by McHarg, a Fellow of the RSA.

Benjamin Turner and Gabe Tuner
In the Hands of the Gods
Lionsgate, 2008, 796.3382 TUR
In the Hands of the Gods is the story of five young British freestyle footballers’ journey across the Americas to Argentina in the hope of meeting their hero, Diego Maradona, the Godfather of freestyle football.

George Lowe
The Conquest of Everest: The Amazing Story of the 1953 Expedition
Optimum Classics, 2007, 796.522 LOW
The Conquest of Everest tells the awe-inspiring story of the first successful attempt on the peak of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The team included John Hunt, Edmund Hillary, Tensing Norgey and Tom Stobart, their film technician. The documentary details the history, preparation and description of the route, as well as fascinating footage of previous attempts and the social context of the achievement.

800s – Literature

900s – Geography & History

Robert Macfarlane
The Wild Places
Granta, 2007, 914.10486 MAC
The Wild Places is both an intellectual and a physical journey, and Macfarlane travels in time as well as space. Guided by monks, questers, scientists, philosophers, poets and artists, both living and dead, he explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath, to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the saltmarshes and estuaries of Essex, and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history, The Wild Places is written in a style and a form as unusual as the places with which it is concerned. It also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

Guy Delisle
Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
Jonathan Cape, 2006, 915.127 DEL
Guy Delisle's work for a French animation studio requires him to oversee production at various Asian studios on the grim frontiers of free trade. His employer puts him up for months at a time in 'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual deprivations of a man very far from home. After Pyongyang, his book about his time in North Korea, Delisle turned his attention to his posting in Shenzhen, the cold, urban city in Southern China that is sealed off with electric fences and armed guards from the rest of the country.

The BBC
The Great War
BBC, 2002, 940.3 BBC
The Great War is one of the most ambitious and prestigious series ever produced by the BBC. Drawing on over one million feet of film, hundreds of exclusive interviews and contemporary diaries and letters, this documentary masterpiece is by far the most comprehensive film history of World War One ever made.

Robin Frame
The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400
Clarendon Press, 1995, 941.03 FRA
All too often British history means English history and the histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland are left to scholars of the 'Celtic Fringe'. In this clear and authoritative introduction to the medieval history of the British Isles, the four countries are viewed together, revealing the similarities and contrasts between the different regions. During the period 1100-1400 the British Isles formed a political sphere of great complexity, and were closely integrated with continental Europe. The most dynamic power was that represented by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, church and monarchy, and their successor, the Plantagenet state. Robin Frame traces the expansion of this power, which by 1300 had embraced the whole of Wales and much of Ireland. He examines how the Scottish kings alone sustained and extended rival orbit, and how the prolonged clash between the two monarchies eventually loosened the control of each other over its Gaelic fringes.

Frank Barlow
The Feudal Kingdom of England, 1042-1216
Longman, 1999, 942.02 BAR
Now in its fifth edition, this hugely successful text remains as vivid and readable as ever. Frank Barlow illuminates every aspect of the Anglo-Norman world, but the central appeal of the book continues to be its firm narrative structure. Here is a fascinating story compellingly told. At the beginning of the period he shows us an England that is still, politically and culturally, on the fringe of the classical world. By the end of John's reign, the new world that has emerged was in outlook, structure and character, recognisable as part of the modern age. Incorporating the findings of the most recent scholarship in the field - much of it Barlow's own - the fifth edition includes new material on the role of women in Anglo-Norman England.

Rees Davies
The First English Empire; Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093-1343
Oxford University Press, 2002, 942.03 DAV
The future of the United Kingdom is an increasingly vexed question. This book traces the roots of the issue to the Middle Ages, when English power and control came to extend to most of the British Isles. By 1300 it looked as if Edward I was in control of virtually the whole of the British Isles. Ireland, Scotland, and Wales had, to different degrees, been subjugated to his authority; contemporaries were even comparing him with King Arthur. This was the culmination of a remarkable English advance into the outer zones of the British Isles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What remained to be seen was how stable (especially in Scotland and Ireland) was this English 'empire'; how far the northern and western parts of the British Isles could be absorbed into an English-centred polity and society; and to what extent did the early and self-confident development of English identity determine the relationships between England and the rest of the British Isles. The answers to those questions would be shaped by the past of the country that was England; the answers would also cast their shadow over the future of the British Isles for centuries to come.

Guy Delisle
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
Jonathan Cape, 2006, 951.93043 DEL
When North Korea recently opened the door a crack to foreign investment, cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in its capital Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company, becoming one of the few Westerners to witness current conditions in the surreal showcase city. Armed with a smuggled radio and a copy of 1984, Delisle could only explore Pyongyang and its countryside while chaperoned by his translator and a guide. But among the statues, portraits and propaganda of leaders Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il - the world's only Communist dynasty - Delisle was able to observe more than was intended of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered.

Joe Sacco
Palestine
Fantagraphics, 2007, 956.9 SAC
Based on years of research and extended visits to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (Sacco conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine is the first major comics work of political nonfiction by Sacco, who has often been called the first comic book journalist and single-handedly pioneered the medium to universal acclaim. This new edition of Palestine also features a lengthy introduction by the outspoken political essayist and historian Edward Said (Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine), one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern Conflict.

Asger Leth
Ghosts of Cité Soleil
Revolver Entertainment, 2008, 972.94 LET
This documentary takes viewers inside a Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, where poverty and violence are an everyday part of life. While presenting one family's story, a love triangle, and a war, the filmmaker examines gang life from the inside out.

Jean-Philippe Stassen
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda
First Second, 2006, 967.571 STA
This is the story of a boy caught up in an unthinkable horror; a major achievement of storytelling and artistry. This is the harrowing tale of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, as seen through the eyes of a boy named Deogratias. He is an ordinary teenager, in love with a girl named Benigne, but Degratias is a Hutu and Benigne is a Tutsi who dies in the genocide, and Deogratias himself plays a part in her death. Stassen's interweaving of the aftermath of the genocide and the events leading up to it heightens the impact of the horror, giving powerful expression to the unspeakable, indescribable experience of ordinary Hutus caught up in the violence.