'David Bodanis is an enthralling storyteller. Prepare to be taken on a surprising, wide-ranging and ultimately inspiring journey to explore what makes us human' Tim HarfordCan you succeed without being a terrible person? We often think not: recognising that, as the old saying has it, 'nice guys finish last'. But does that mean you have to go to the other extreme, and be a bully or Machiavellian to get anything done?In THE ART OF FAIRNESS, David Bodanis uses thrilling historical case studies to show there's a better path, leading neatly in between. He reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year - and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter. In ten vivid profiles - featuring pilots, presidents, and even the producer of Game of Thrones - we see that the path to greatness doesn't require crushing displays of power or tyrannical ego. Simple fair decency can prevail.With surprising insights from across history - including the downfall of the very man who popularised the phrase 'nice guys finish last' - THE ART OF FAIRNESS charts a refreshing and sustainable new approach to cultivating integrity and influence.

The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean

Biographies & Memoirs

BODANIS, DAVID

Historical

The Bridge Street Press

Why has the flow of big, world-changing ideas slowed down? A provocative look at what happens next at the frontiers of human knowledge.\nThe history of humanity is the history of big ideas that expand our frontiers--from the wheel to space flight, cave painting to the massively multiplayer game, monotheistic religion to quantum theory. And yet for the past few decades, apart from a rush of new gadgets and the explosion of digital technology, world-changing ideas have been harder to come by. Since the 1970s, big ideas have happened incrementally--recycled, focused in narrow bands of innovation. In this provocative book, Michael Bhaskar looks at why the flow of big, world-changing ideas has slowed, and what this means for the future.\nBhaskar argues that the challenge at the frontiers of knowledge has arisen not because we are unimaginative and bad at realizing big ideas but because we have already pushed so far. If we compare the world of our great-great-great-grandparents to ours today, we can see how a series of transformative ideas revolutionized almost everything in just a century and a half. But recently, because of short-termism, risk aversion, and fractious decision making, we have built a cautious, unimaginative world. Bhaskar shows how we can start to expand the frontier again by thinking big--embarking on the next Universal Declaration of Human Rightsor Apollo mission--and embracing change.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas

Michael Bhaskar

COVID-19

MacKenzie, Debora

'Excellent . . . analyses clearly and authoritatively how the coronavirus pandemic played out, what governments should have done, and what we need to do when it happens again - as it undoubtedly will' Financial Times\n'You could not hope for a better guide to the pandemic world order than Debora MacKenzie, who's been on this story from the start. This is an authoritative yet readable explanation of how this catastrophe happened - and more important, how it will happen again if we don't change' 
Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist, Adapt and Messy\n'This definitely deserves a read - the first of the post mortems by a writer who knows what she's talking about' 
Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World\nIn a gripping, accessible narrative, a veteran science journalist lays out the shocking story of how the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic happened and how to make sure this never happens again\nOver the last 30 years of epidemics and pandemics, we learned every lesson needed to stop this coronavirus outbreak in its tracks. We heeded almost none of them. The result is a pandemic on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. In this captivating, authoritative, and eye-opening book, science journalist Debora MacKenzie lays out the full story of how and why it happened: the previous viruses that should have prepared us, the shocking public health failures that paved the way, the failure to contain the outbreak, and most importantly, what we must do to prevent future pandemics.\nDebora MacKenzie has been reporting on emerging diseases for more than three decades, and she draws on that experience to explain how COVID-19 went from a potentially manageable outbreak to a global pandemic. Offering a compelling history of the most significant recent outbreaks, including SARS, MERS, H1N1, Zika, and Ebola, she gives a crash course in Epidemiology 101--how viruses spread and how pandemics end--and outlines the lessons we failed to learn from each past crisis. In vivid detail, she takes us through the arrival and spread of COVID-19, making clear the steps that governments knew they could have taken to prevent or at least prepare for this. Looking forward, MacKenzie makes a bold, optimistic argument: this pandemic might finally galvanize the world to take viruses seriously. Fighting this pandemic and preventing the next one will take political action of all kinds, globally, from governments, the scientific community, and individuals--but it is possible.\nNo one has yet brought together our knowledge of COVID-19 in a comprehensive, informative, and accessible way. But that story can already be told, and Debora MacKenzie's urgent telling is required reading for these times and beyond. It is too early to say where the COVID-19 pandemic will go, but it is past time to talk about what went wrong and how we can do better.

Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

Professionals & Academics

'Highly instructive . . . provides thoughtful analysis' Financial Times\n'Exactly what any prospective-or sitting-board member needs' Arianna Huffington\n'A must read . . . highly engaging . . . an indispensable guide to how boards function, malfunction, and, most importantly, should operate better' Mohamed A. El-Erian\nCorporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like GE, Theranos and WeWork have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. Boards face ever-louder demands to weigh in on questions of climate change, racial and gender equity, data privacy, and other social issues that range far beyond their traditional mandate: choosing the CEO and endorsing corporate strategy.\nIn HOW BOARDS WORK, prizewinning economist, veteran board director, and bestselling author Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Drawing on her decade of experience serving on corporate boards, Moyo lays out what it is that boards actually do, and she outlines how they must adapt to survive the challenges of coming years. Corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead.\nHOW BOARDS WORK is an urgent road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

Business & Money

Moyo, Dambisa

Business Culture

Have you ever sat and watched a plant? The very idea itself might seem strange. We like to watch things that move, that do something. But in fact, plants are doing a great deal too - plants behave, as animals do - they are just doing it on a very different timescale. They cannot move about freely like animals do, so they grow into space instead and make new chemicals to interact with the species around them. Not only that, but what causes them to do these things, what drives this behaviour, is far more similar than we humans, with our speedy, animal-centric perceptions, have always assumed. If we learn to look differently, we might be amazed at what we find.\nWe are dismantling the traditional hierarchies of nature: we are becoming increasingly aware of the interior lives of other species and how much we share with them. We are also coming to understand that there are many more ways to be intelligent than we have previously believed. We can't see ourselves as the only, privileged intelligent life on Earth any more. And if we are to save the global biome, we must not. PLANTA SAPIENS opens up the plant kingdom like never before and will transform how you view other forms of life, to see plants as allies in tackling global problems rather than as mere resources; as teachers from whom we can learn about our own minds.

Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence

Natalie Lawrence

Paco Calvo

Barbed, witty, revealing and entertaining, Too Famous could be an instant classic.Bestselling author of Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide and chronicler of the Trump White House Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media moguls and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his evisceration of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerising portrait of the hubris, overreach and periodic self-destruction of some of the most famous faces of the last twenty years.This collection draws on new and unpublished work - recent reporting about Jared Kushner, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein - and decades of coverage of the most notable figures of the time - among them Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Rusbridger, Arianna Huffington, Piers Morgan, Boris Johnson and Rupert Murdoch - to create a lasting statement on the corrosive influence of being in the public eye.Ultimately, Too Famous is an examination of how the quest for fame and power became the driving force of culture and politics and the drug that alters all public personalities. And how the need, the desperation, the ruthlessness demanded to fulfil that quest became the toxic grease that keeps the world spinning. You know the people here by name and reputation, but it's guaranteed that after this book you will never see them the same way again. Or fail to recognise the scorched earth the famous leave behind them.

Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Damned, The Notorious – Twenty Years of Columns, Essays and Reporting

WOLFF, MICHAEL

Leaders & Notable People

BAD DATA

‘Essential reading … An incisive and urgently needed book’ Tim Harford\n‘[An] entertaining introduction to the uses (and misuses) of data … a penetrating analysis of why statistical literacy matters to our politics and our daily lives’ Professor Jonathan Portes\nOur politicians make vital decisions and declarations every day that rely on official data. But should all statistics be trusted?\nIn BAD DATA, House of Commons Library statistician Georgina Sturge draws back the curtain on how governments of the past and present have been led astray by figures littered with inconsistency, guesswork and uncertainty.\nDiscover how a Hungarian businessman’s bright idea caused half a million people to go missing from UK migration statistics. Find out why it’s possible for two politicians to disagree over whether poverty has gone up or down, using the same official numbers, and for both to be right at the same time. And hear about how policies like ID cards, super-casinos and stopping ex-convicts from reoffending failed to live up to their promise because they were based on shaky data.\nWith stories that range from the troubling to the empowering to the downright absurd, BAD DATA reveals secrets from the usually closed-off world of policy-making. It also suggests how – once we understand the human story behind the numbers – we can make more informed choices about who to trust, and when.

Bad Data

Georgina Sturge

Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers

A compulsive true crime thriller about modern-day international drugs trafficking, terrorism and the mafia following an investigation driven by one DEA agent, Jack Kelly. LONGLISTED FOR THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION 2024 ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR BEST NEW AUTHOR AT THE 2024 TRUE CRIME AWARDS JUDGES' CITATION: 'A cleverly constructed account of three different characters representing different aspects of the ruthless and fierce drugs trade. Never a dull moment. A real page turner... This book is gripping and immerses you in the very real world of the characters.' 'Read this powerful book by Miles Johnson right now.' - Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah 'McMafia for the new age' Catherine Belton, author of Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then took on the West 'Compelling, visceral and highly readable' Oliver Bullough, bestselling author of Moneyland 'As breathless, complex and on-the-edge suspenseful as the finest thriller fiction - but it's all real, which makes it truly extraordinary' Lee Child 'This astonishing and cinematic rollercoaster of a debut will bring Miles Johnson's talent into the brilliant light. Delivered with trademark verve and precision, it achieves that rare and precious thing that is the goal of all great reporting: it reveals the world to itself' Alex Perry, author of The Good Mothers 'Miles has used his extensive Italian contacts to get a fully-fleshed out story in the Mafia section; likewise with the Hezbollah characters. He has interviewed over 100 people for the book, including many hours with Jack Kelly, the DEA investigator and hero of the book, which gives us an intimate look at a man dedicated to catching bad guys at the expense of his personal life' Dan McCrum, author of Money Men Mafia capo Salvatore Pititto is in trouble. His wife is angry. His mistress is angry. And he is sweating in Calabria on the biggest cocaine deal of his career. Meanwhile in the US, veteran DEA agent Jack Kelly is on the trail of the dirty money funding dangerously powerful figures. One of them, Mustafa Badreddine, is a shadowy master bomb maker dispatched to Syria's civil war for his final mission. Each man has devoted his whole life to an institution that will eventually turn on him. Based on hundreds of interviews and wiretap evidence from five different countries, Chasing Shadows is a compulsive true-crime thriller that draws us into a secret world of greed, ambition and betrayal - exposing the dark side of globalisation.

Chasing Shadows: A true story of drugs, war and the secret world of international crime

Johnson, Miles

True Crime

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