I was half way through reading ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari on the tube the other week when a fellow commuter asked me what the book is about. Even though I have been writing reviews regularly for over five years, I still don’t enjoy being put on the spot about books I am still reading and mulling over, particularly at 8:15am on a crowded train. My initial response was to say that it’s about, well, pretty much everything. Even though that statement is fairly accurate, the expression on his face suggested that it was also quite unhelpful, so I added that it’s about how and why the human race has developed in the way that it has. This appeared to be a more satisfactory answer, which is just as well because I still can’t think of a better way to summarise its content.
Tag Archives: History
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
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The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016
Formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction has a new sponsor this year and a longlist of ten books, whittled down last month to a shortlist of just four. Open to authors of any nationality, it covers all areas of non-fiction including current affairs, politics, history, science, sport, travel, biography and autobiography. This year’s shortlisted books are:
- Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich (translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich)
- Negroland by Margo Jefferson
- The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
- East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands
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The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2015 Longlist
The longlist for this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was announced today. The twelve books are:
Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life by Jonathan Bate Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance by Robert Gildea Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper by Bruce Robinson The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World by Laurence Scott Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Tim Snyder This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War by Samanth SubramanianFiled under Books
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards
‘The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story’ by Martin Edwards investigates the mysterious Detection Club of famous crime writers including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Margery Allingham amongst others. While many of the works by these authors have been dismissed by some as “cosy” crime stories compared to the more graphically violent offerings today, Edwards reveals that this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth as he investigates the stories behind the authors, their books and the curious social network that linked them together.
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Rush Hour by Iain Gately
From the perils of crush loading on the Tokyo metro to road rage in the United States, ‘Rush Hour: How 500 million commuters survive the daily journey to work’ by Iain Gately examines the past, present and future of travelling to and from work. Commuting is an activity which takes up a significant part of everyday life for people across the world. This book outlines how it has developed and, in an era of advanced communication methods, why we still do it. Continue reading
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One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
Happy new year to you all! I have been continuing my recent spell of non-fiction reading over the Christmas holidays with Bill Bryson’s latest book ‘One Summer: America, 1927’, whose title is about as self-explanatory as it gets. As you might expect, it is indeed about the people and events which dominated the summer of 1927 in the United States of America. While it isn’t perhaps the most recognisably significant year in modern history in the same way that 1945 and 1989 are etched in the collective memory as turning points in the twentieth century, Bryson shows that this particular summer was a very important one in the social and economic history of the United States.
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A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
After reading two excellent novels in recent months about Soviet spies recruited at Cambridge University – ‘Sweet Tooth‘ by Ian McEwan and ‘Red Joan‘ by Jennie Rooney – I was intrigued by Ben Macintyre’s biography of Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five spies recruited by Arnold Deutsch in the mid-1930s. Philby worked for Britain’s secret intelligence service (SIS or MI6) during the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War before his activities as a double agent for the NKVD and KGB were finally uncovered in 1963.
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