This controversial book addresses how sex and drugs have turned the global epidemic of HIV into a billion-dollar-a-year industry. Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani takes a no-holdsbarred approach to finding out exactly why 40 million people are living with HIV and 28 million have already died of AIDS when we have the knowledge, the money, and the means to wipe out the disease in 90 percent of the world.

Wisdom of Whores

Politics & Social Sciences

ELIZABETH PISANI

Politics & Government

Granta Bks.

Egyptian culture is divided from us by several millennia, a lost people, and a dead language. We can discover much about this fascinating civilization from its physical remains, but perhaps the greatest insights into the Egyptian mind come from Egyptian hieroglyphs. They reveal the priorities, concerns and beliefs of the Egyptians - a whole worldview. Unlike the western alphabet, which is an arbitrary set of symbols not anchored in reality, each Egyptian hieroglyph visually denotes a concept central to Egyptian thinking. The language and its written form is intimately bound up with the imaginative world of the Egyptians. Here Barry Kemp presents 100 of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to provide access to this unique culture. Kemp takes us on a journey through the Egyptian mind, revealing not only aspects of day to day life in Ancient Egypt, but gradually building a picture of the historical and mythological references that were the cornerstones of Egyptian thought. This fascinating book helps us get inside a long-vanished world.

100 Hieroglyphs : Think Like an Egyptian

History

Barry Kemp

Ancient Civilizations

Winifred Wagner's story is a remarkable one. The Welsh-born orphan became Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, one of Adolf Hitler's closest personal friends. Brigitte Hamann presents the first major, unbiased biography of the First Lady of Hitler's Bayreuth. Born Winifred Williams in 1897, she was adopted, aged nine, by distant English relatives and in 1915 the eighteen-year-old Winifred married into the Wagner family when they needed an heir to secure the Wagner heritage and the festival site at Bayreuth. In 1923, shortly before the Munich Putsch, Hitler made a pilgrimage to Wagner's grave in Bayreuth. And so began a close, lifelong friendship between 'Winnie' and 'Wolf'. She became a founder member of the Nazi party and from 1933 the town of Bayreuth at festival time was the centre of the German political world. Described as 'the last Nazi in Germany', she remained loyal to the memory of 'Wolf' till her death in 1980. Drawing on previously untapped sources, this book presents a portrait of an extraordinary woman, as well as revealing glimpses of the 'private Hitler', offering the best insight yet into his relationship with Bayreuth and its central place in twentieth-century German history.

Winifred Wagner : A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth

Biographies & Memoirs

Brigitte Hamann

Community & Culture

September 1932. Gerasimovka, Western Siberia. Two children are found dead in the forest outside a remote village. Both have been repeatedly stabbed and their bloody bodies are covered in sticky, crimson cranberry juice. Who committed these horrific murders has never been satisfactorily proved, but the elder boy, 13-year-old Pavlik Morozov, was quickly to become the most famous boy in Soviet history - statues of him were erected, biographies published, and children across the country exhorted to emulate him. This book sets out to explore why he rose to fame, and later fell from grace. This is the first book in English on the extraordinary legend of Pavlik. To write it, Catriona Kelly, who has long been fascinated by the case, has visit Pavlik's village, the Siberian forest where he was murdered, and previously inaccessible local archives. Her aim is not to find out who really killed the boys, but rather to explore how Stalin's regime turned Pavlik into a hero designed to produce good Soviet citizens. Pavlik's story is intriguing and multi-layered: did he denounce his own father to the authorities? Was he murdered by members of his own family? Did he ever belong to the Pioneers, the Communist youth organization who claimed him as member No. 001? But the book also depicts the background against which the dramatic events unfolded- around the country roamed fugitive Kulaks (wealthy peasants), marauding bandits, and escaped prisoners, any one of whom could have been responsible for Pavlik's death.

Comrade Pavlik : The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero

Catriona Kelly

Julian Baggini presents 100 of the most interesting thought experiments: short scenarios which pose a problem in a vivid and concrete way, and invites the reader to think about possible answers for him/herself. Experiments cover identity, religion, art, ethics, language, knowledge and many more. In every case, Baggini sets the problem up for the reader, and then offers some ways of approaching it. There are rarely 'right' or 'wrong' answers (though some answers are better than others), but the real point is in the exploration of the question. From Zeno's paradox to Groundhog Day (how do you make sense of a life of eternal recurrence?), via the pig that wants to be eaten (so should you eat him?), Plato's cave, Minority Report (is it right to punish people for what they are going to do, but haven't yet done?), and an American Werewolf in London (how can we tell whether we are awake or dreaming?), this book makes philosophy not only mind-stretching but also entertaining.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten : And Ninety Nine Other Thought Experiments

julian-baggini

Philosophy

A powerful collection of pieces by writers on adoption, from all three sides of the issue: writers who are adopted, those who have given up children for adoption, and those who have adopted. AM Homes writes about finding her birth father, Bernard Cornwell about being adopted by members of a strange religious sect; Tama Janowitz describes meeting her Chinese daughter for the first time, and Martin Rowson reflects on meeting his long-lost siblings; Daniel Menaker explores what adopting his children has taught him about life, and Sandra Newman and Robert Dessaix, both adopted, explore what difference blood ties make to a family; Jonathan Rendall finds and then falls out with his birth mother; and Paula Fox writes about the joy of being reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption decades before. There are very modern stories of international adoption: from China, Chile, Thailand, Russia and Mali. And also stories about the outdated morality of 1950s and 1960s, when many young women were forced to give up their children. There is humour and heartbreak, profundity and slapstick. Honest and deeply felt and thought, Family Wanted sheds a fascinating and surprising light on identity, family, love and belonging.

Family Wanted : Adoption Stories

sara-holloway

Health, Fitness & Dieting

'What binds us pushes time away' wrote David Oppenheim to his future wife, Amalie Pollak, on March 24, 1905. Oppenheim, classical scholar, collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, lived through the heights and depths of Vienna's twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. He perished in obscurity at a Nazi concentration camp in 1943 leaving his grandson, the philosopher Peter Singer, without a chance to know him. Almost fifty years later Peter Singer set out to explore the life of his grandfather, and drawing on personal letters and documents, makes startling discoveries. Combining touching family biography with thoughtful reflection questions we face today, Singer gives us a vivid portrait of Vienna when it was the centre of European culture and new ideas, a culture that was both intensely Jewish and distinctly secular. He is finally forced to confront one of the foundations of his own thought: How much can we rely on universal values and human reason?

Pushing Time Away : My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna

Peter Singer

Professionals & Academics

John F. Kennedy was the first American president to go bareheaded and he ruined the hat business. Or so it is popularly believed. In Hatless Jack, Neil Steinberg examines why Kennedy was so reluctant to wear a hat in public - was it really because Khrushchev always did? He charts the attempts of the hat-makers of America to persuade their new, charismatic leader to save their declining industry. Along the way, he uncovers the now nearly-forgotten rituals of hat-wearing, with hat-check girls, straw-hat riots and ways of stopping the wind from blowing your hat off. Hats were tipped, raised, checked, waved and eaten (metaphorically, at least) and then they disappeared for ever. Hatless Jack is a fascinating and funny explanation of why hats went and what we all lost when they did.

Hatless Jack : The President, the Fedora and the Death of the Hat

Arts & Photography

Neil Steinberg

Decorative Arts & Design

Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as 'a wonderful idea' by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first time some of the greatest works of the genre. In December 1981, the inhabitants of a small Salvadoran hamlet were systematically exterminated by the Atacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained counter insurgency force. The Reagan administration, determined to preserve U.S. support for El Salvador's war against leftist guerrillas, downplayed reports of this massacre dismissing them as propaganda, and the American-funded war in El Salvador continued. But Mark Danner's subsequent reconstruction is a masterpiece of scrupulous investigative journalism and a testament to the forgotten victims of one of the worst massacres in Latin American history.

The Massacre at El Mozote (Classics of Reportage)

Mark Danner

Americas

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