A Matter of Life and Death, by Sue Armstrong

A Matter of Life and Death profiles some of the world’s most eminent and pioneering pathologists. This is a hidden world, yet one we will all inevitably encounter at some time in our lives, for pathology lies at the cornerstone of modern medicine. It is pathologists who are responsible for recognising new diseases such as AIDS, SARS or bird flu, and for diagnosing which cancer a patient is suffering from. And it is pathologists who must explain the cause of death at the autopsy table. A Matter of Life and Death tells fascinating stories of mysterious illnesses and miraculous scientific breakthroughs. But it is also crammed full of extraordinary characters – from the forensic anthropologist with his own Body Farm in Tennessee to the doctor who had a heart-and-lung transplant and ended up using her own lungs for research.

California Schemin’: How Two Lads from Scotland Conned the Music Industry, by Gavin Bain

California Schemin’ is the remarkable real life story of how two rappers from Dundee pretended to be two rappers from California and duped the record industry out of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd – or Silibil N’ Brains, as they became known – were two ordinary Scottish boys who shared an extraordinary dream: to become rap superstars. Creating new identities for themselves, they persuaded the music industry that they were the latest hot young talent from California. Silibil N’ Brains then lived out that lie for more than two years, securing an enormous record deal with Sony and being catapulted into the industry high-life, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Madonna, Eminem and D12.

But, ironically, they could never actually deliver and promote the album that they were paid so much money to put together. As soon as they became famous they would be recognised by anyone who had known them in their former lives in Scotland and the dream would evaporate. As the pressure mounted, there would be disastrous consequences…

California Schemin‘ is a story of incredible highs and terrible lows, of doing whatever it takes to follow your dream.

Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain, by Phillip Blond

Conventional politics is at a crossroads. Amid recession, depression, poverty, increasing violence and rising inequality, our current politics is exhausted and inadequate. In Red Tory, Phillip Blond argues that only a radical new political settlement can tackle the problems we face.

Red Toryism combines economic egalitarianism with social conservatism, calling for an end to the monopolisation of society and the private sphere by the state and the market. Decrying the legacy of both the Labour and Conservative parties, Blond proposes a genuinely progressive Conservatism that will restore social equality and revive British culture. He calls for the strengthening of local communities and economies, ending dispossession, redistribution of the tax burden and restoration the nuclear family.

Red Tory offers a different vision for our future and asks us to question our long-held political assumptions. No political thinker has aroused more passionate debate in recent times. Phillip Blond’s ideas have already been praised or attacked in every major British newspaper and journal. Challenging, stimulating and exhilarating, this is a book for our times.

The Last Game Love, Death and Football, by Jason Cowley

On 26 May 1989, the final day of the season, Arsenal travelled to Anfield to face the mighty Liverpool, needing a two-goal victory to claim a championship that seemed for so many reasons to belong to their opponents. What followed was one of the most remarkable football matches at the end of one of the most dramatic and politically charged seasons in English football history; a season that marked the transition between old and new football and which would come to be seen as a threshold for astonishing changes not just in football but in the wider culture.

Featuring interviews with the main players in this drama, including many of the legendary figures who took part in that famous final game, The Last Game is a probing and resonant work of dramatic reportage that reflects on the stark changes the national sport has undergone in twenty tumultuous years. Journeying from the intense and hostile terraces of the 1980s, where male violence and tribalism coupled with decrepit stadiums led to tragedies like Heysel and Hillsborough, to the new commercialism that has engulfed the modern game, where fans have turned customers and, some say, security has come at the cost of identity, The Last Game tells the story of how a nation was changed by one astonishing game.

The Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love One Another and Made Money Instead, by Sue Gerhardt

Ambitious and wide-ranging, The Selfish Society reveals the vital importance of understanding our early emotional lives, arguing that by focusing on the attention we give to our young children we can create a better society.

Open any newspaper, and what do you find? Violence and crime, child abuse and neglect, expenses scandals, addiction, fraud and corruption, environmental melt-down

Is Britain indeed broken? How did modern society get to this point? Who is to blame? How can we change?

We have come to inhabit a culture of selfish individualism which has confused material well-being with happiness. As society became bigger and more competitive, working life was cut off from child-rearing and the new economics ignored people’s emotional needs. We have lived with this culture so long that it is hard to imagine it being any different. Yet we are now at a turning point where the need for change is becoming urgent. If we are to build a more reflective and collaborative society, Gerhardt argues, we need to support the caring qualities that are learnt in early life and integrate them into our political and economic thinking.

Inspiring and thought-provoking, The Selfish Society sets out a roadmap to a more positive and compassionate future.

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn

Bonnie & Clyde were the first American icons created by modern media. These media-savvy gangsters nurtured a self-image of murderous glamour for Depression-era Americans who hungered for entertainment and larger-than-life characters who defied authority. But the fact is, they were among the most inept criminals in history. Just kids in their early twenties when they started robbing banks and mom-and-pop stores, and killing lawmen, Bonnie and Clyde botched almost every bank robbery they attempted, and sometimes they had to break into gum machines to get meal money. Yet, thanks to the media, Bonnie and Clyde were a great, epic love story and became national icons on a par with cinema gangsters Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.

The Lost Battles, By Jonathan Jones

Michelangelo and Leonardo lived five centuries ago, but their works still obsess our culture, with a popular and universal quality that nothing else matches.

They have been equally revered and famous since their lifetimes, but our admiration for them exists mostly in isolation of each other. But in 1504 they competed with each other directly, to paint the walls of a room in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. It is remarkable enough that the same city had produced two such geniuses in the same century — let alone that they met and exhibited together. But this competition, perhaps the most important event in the history of Renaissance art, the moment at which individual style came to command its own value, has been largely forgotten because the rival works did not survive.
This great artistic clash, Jonathan Jones argues in this riveting account, marks the true beginning of the High Renaissance. Re-creating sixteenth-century Florence with astonishing verve and aplomb, The Lost Battles not only sheds new light on the making of the modern world but, in its portrait of two cultural titans going toe to toe, rewires our understanding of the personalities of the Renaissance’s greatest icons.

Six Months in Sudan, by James Maskalyk

James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007. The newest Médicins Sans Frontières’ doctor in the field, he arrived with only his training, full of desire to understand this most desperate part of the world. He returned home six months later profoundly affected by the experience. Six Months in Sudan is an illuminating and affecting account of saving lives in one of the most harrowing and dangerous places on Earth.

Mandela – A Biography, by Martin Meredith

Nelson Mandela stands out as one of the most admired political figures of the twentieth century. It was his leadership and moral courage above all that helped to deliver a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa after years of racial division and violence and to establish a fledgling democracy there.

Martin Meredith’s vivid portrayal of this towering leader was originally acclaimed as ‘an exemplary work of biography: instructive, illuminating, as well as felicitously written’ (Kirkus Reviews), providing ‘new insights on the man and his time’ (Washington Post). Now Meredith has revisited and significantly updated his biography to incorporate a decade of additional perspective and hindsight on the man and his legacy and to examine how far his hopes for the new South Africa have been realised.

Published as South Africa celebrates 100 years since its founding and hosts the 2010 World Cup, Mandela is the most thorough and up-to-date account available of the life of its most revered hero.

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