The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge

In the eleventh century, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed this First Crusade, Islam and the West fought for dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a succession of chillingly brutal wars, both firm in the belief that they were at God’s work.

For the first time, this book tells the story of this epic struggle from the perspective of both Christians and Muslims, reconstructing the experiences and attitudes of those on either side of the conflict. Mixing pulsing narrative and piercing insight, it exposes the full horror, passion and barbaric grandeur of the crusading era.
One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Thomas Asbridge offers a vivid and penetrating history of the crusades, setting a new standard for modern scholarship. Drawing upon painstaking original research and an intimate knowledge of the Near East, he uncovers what drove Muslims and Christians alike to embrace the ideals of jihad and crusade, revealing how these holy wars reshaped the medieval world and why they continue to echo in human memory to this day.

Download an exclusive extract

Viva South America! by Oliver Balch

Simon Bolívar once inspired a continent to rise from serfdom and throw off the shackles of Spanish rule. With lance and law book, he and his fellow Liberators set the course for independence, freedom and equality.

¡Viva South America! sets out to discover if that dream lives on. Is it fair to describe a land as ‘independent’ while poverty still enslaves millions, where violence lurks in the shadows and where lawlessness gnaws away at progress? Did the Liberators fail? Or are leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales resurrecting those long-ago ideals?

Armed with a reporter’s notebook and an open mind, the author hits the road in search of answers. Cutting a path along the highways and byways of the continent, this book lifts the lid on the Liberators’ legacies and sniffs behind their modern-day statues.

With the ghost of Bolívar as guide, the quest takes the reader off the tourist trail and into the weird and wonderful worlds of South American culture and society. By stepping into people’s homes and into inmates’ prison cells, by climbing on to dance floors and over road blocks, Oliver Balch unearths untold stories from the front line of South America’s contemporary fight for freedom.

Listen to an interview with the author

When the Lights Went Out, by Andy Beckett

The seventies are probably the most important and fascinating period in modern British political history. They encompass strikes that brought down governments, shock general election results, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Edward Heath, the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week.

But the seventies have also been frequently misunderstood, oversimplified and misrepresented. When the Lights Went Out goes in search of what really happened, what it felt like at the time, and where it was all leading. It includes vivid author interviews with many of the leading participants, many of them now dead, from Heath to Jack Jones to Arthur Scargill, and it travels from the once famous factories where the great industrial confrontations took place to the suburbs where Thatcherism was created and to remote North Sea oil rigs.

The book also unearths the stories of the forgotten political actors away from Westminster who gave the decade so much of its volatility and excitement, from the Gay Liberation Front to the hippie anarchists of the free-festival movement.

Over five years in the making, this book is not an academic history but something for the general reader, written with the vividness of a novel or the best works of American New Journalism. No such treatment of the seventies has been previously attempted. Hopefully the book will bring the decade back to life in its all its drama and complexity.

Read a Q&A with Andy Beckett or listen to a podcast interview

Star, by Peter Biskind

In this compulsively readable and constantly surprising book, Peter Biskind, the author of the film classics Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, writes the most intimate, revealing, and balanced biography ever of Hollywood legend Warren Beatty.

Famously a playboy, Beatty has also been one of the most ambitious and successful stars in Hollywood. Several Beatty films have passed the test of time, from Bonnie and Clyde to Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds (for which he won the best director Oscar), Bugsy, and Bulworth. Few filmgoers realize that along with Orson Welles, Beatty is the only person ever nominated for four Academy Awards for a single film — and unlike Welles, Beatty did it twice. Biskind shows how Beatty used star power, commercial success, savvy, and charm to bend Hollywood moguls to his will.

Beatty’s private life has been the subject of gossip for decades, and Star confirms his status as Hollywood’s leading man in the bedroom, describing his affairs with Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron and Madonna, among many others.

Biskind explains how Beatty exercised unique control, often hiring screenwriters out of his own pocket, producing, directing, and acting in his own films. He was arguably one of the most successful and creative figures in Hollywood during the second half of the twentieth century, and in this fascinating biography, Warren Beatty comes to life — complete with excesses and achievements — as never before.

The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo

The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Newton - and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century, who may have suffered from autism.

Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried only once, when his friend Einstein died.

Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him. Dirac had a traumatic relationship with his family: his brother committed suicide, and he hated his father to the end of his life. His political allegiances were radical. His best friend was the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, and even at the height of the purges Dirac holidayed in the Soviet Union.

Yet Farmelo also reveals a man who, while seemingly lacking in emotion, could manage to love and father a family. He catches Dirac’s absolute belief in the beauty of mathematics with warmth and sympathy. And Farmelo shows that Dirac’s eccentricities may well have stemmed from undiagnosed autism.

The Strangest Man is a moving human story, and a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.

Listen to an interview with the author

The Ticking is the Bomb, by Nick Flynn

Set just before the birth of Flynn’s first child, a daughter, this impassioned memoir explores the fears and joys of becoming a father, whilst artfully interweaving passages from Flynn’s own childhood.

Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with a fantasist father and a longing to connect with his mother, who committed suicide when he was a child, Flynn explores these painful memories and unsteady relationships to create an unflinching and unforgettable story. The time bomb of the title becomes a vehicle for exploring his impending fatherhood, which brings him face to face with the stark realities of humanity – among them, the terror, torture and political crimes that begin to haunt him.

Here is a dazzling, inventive memoir of profound self-discovery, of painful family memories, and of the compulsion to run from love, but ultimately to embrace it.

The Old Devil, by Donald McRae

In the crammed and dizzying space of two years, from June 1924 to June 1926, America was transfixed by three contrasting courtroom trials. Each was described as a ‘Trial of the Century’ and featured Clarence Darrow, America’s most charismatic but troubled defence lawyer, as he tried to overcome public outrage and his own private struggle to keep faith in the justice system. They also served as his own route to redemption – for Darrow was in the midst of trying to restore his reputation after he had twice been put on trial for attempting to bribe a jury. Although he had been acquitted Darrow, in his late sixties, was desperate to wipe the stain from his name. At the same time, and in one of the book’s dramatic new revelations, Darrow rekindled an old affair with a passionate writer and activist, Mary Field, who was the secret love of his life. More than eighty years later, the public themes which Darrow confronted still resonate powerfully in contemporary society. Sex and murder, celebrity and race, religion and science, politics and justice, the media and the law, love and deception, belief and terror rise up as vividly today as they did in the Roaring Twenties. The world remains just as fractured and uncertain as that which Darrow surveyed in the three final iconic cases of his life.

You Need This Book…to get what you want, by Mark Palmer and Scott Solder

Imagine how much easier your life could be if you could get people on your side instantly. If you had the skills of effortless persuasion that produced the results you wanted and needed, when you needed them.
Like a How to Win Friends and Influence People for the 21st century, You Need This Book is a powerful recipe for getting what you want in life, from a better job to how to get served quickly at a busy restaurant. Mark Palmer and Scott Solder are experts in interpersonal dynamics. Until now, their elite techniques have been available only to high-paying clients, who have seen fantastic results in performance after attending their ‘You Need This’ seminars. Bringing their infectious personalities and clear, accessible style to a wider audience, Palmer and Solder impart their in-depth knowledge of how to influence people – in business and in personal life – with humour and a very British voice.

From getting rid of ‘toxic autopilots’, to learning how to read people’s moods, the book is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to get on in life and get the job, relationship and happiness they deserve.

Read the authors’ exclusive article here on Bookhugger

Drive, by Dan Pink

We’ve been conditioned to think that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is through external rewards like money or fame, or by the fear of punishment – the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in his transformative new book. The key to high performance and satisfaction is intrinsic, internal motivation: the desire to follow your own interests and understand the benefits in them for you. And Pink has discovered thirty years of scientific data that confirm these ideas and show an exciting way forward As he did in his groundbreaking bestseller A Whole New Mind, Pink lays out the hard science for these surprising insights; describes how people and corporations can embrace such insights; offers details about how we can master them; and provides concrete examples on how intrinsic motivation works on the job, at home and in ourselves. This is a book of big ideas that explains how each of us can find the surest pathway to high performance, creativity, and even health and well-being.

The Optimist, by Laurence Shorter

Collapsing stock markets, melting ice caps, floods, tornadoes, terrorism . . . When it comes to bad news, we’ve never had it so good. Perhaps it is time to be a little more optimistic? That’s what Laurence Shorter decided. And that’s why he set himself the challenge of meeting the world’s most cheerful people. Surely with the help of Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson and Bill Clinton, Laurence can find the secret to inner happiness. But first things first – how on Earth is he going to get to meet them?

Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, by Howard Sounes

Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life is the classic biography of Charles Bukowski, the hard-drinking barfly whose semi-autobiographical books about low-life America made him a cult figure across the globe. Extensive original research and unique contributions from friends, family and associates – including Mickey Rourke, Robert Crumb, Sean Penn, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg – as well as personal photographs and drawings by Buk himself make this a must for Bukowski devotees and new readers alike. This updated edition features a new preface by the author, expanded notes and a unique star rating in the bibliography of Bukowski’s own works.

Read an extract

Add your comment