Showing results by publisher "Picador" in History

In ‘Humans Are Doomed To Go Extinct’, an article in Scientific American published in November 2021, veteran Nature editor Dr Henry Gee predicted that Homo sapiens is on a rapid one-way ride to extinction. The article provoked media coverage and comment around the world. In The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Gee expands the themes of his much-discussed article to book length, charting both the rise as well as the fall of humans. Gee paints a picture of extinction within the next 10,000 years – and suggests ways that our exceptional species might avoid its fate.

Revolt is an eloquent and provocative challenge to the prevailing wisdom about the rise of nationalism and populism. With a vibrant and informed voice, Nadav Eyal illustrates how modern globalization is not sustainable. He contends that the collapse of the current world order is not so much about the imbalance between technological achievement and social progress or the breakdown of liberal democracy as it is about a passion to upend and destroy power structures that have become hollow, corrupt or simply unresponsive to urgent needs.

Since the COVID pandemic forced a great many of us to work from home – whilst not affording that luxury to very many others - there has been an increasing debate about work, what we do, how we do it and what value we assign to it. Is This Working? An Oral History of Work attempts to answer those questions and to shed light on how Britons today view work and its place in their lives.

In 2012 the rebel suburb of Daraya in Damascus was brutally besieged by Syrian government forces. Four years of suffering ensued, punctuated by shelling, barrel bombs and chemical gas attacks. People’s homes were destroyed and their food supplies cut off; disease was rife. Yet in this man-made hell, 40 young Syrian revolutionaries embarked on an extraordinary project, rescuing all the books they could find in the bombed-out ruins of their home town. They used them to create a secret library, in a safe place, deep underground.

How to Be a Refugee is Simon May’s gripping account of how three sisters – his mother and his two aunts – grappled with what they felt to be a lethal heritage. Their very different trajectories included conversion to Catholicism, marriage into the German aristocracy, securing ‘Aryan’ status with high-ranking help from inside Hitler’s regime and engagement to a card-carrying Nazi.

In 1921, after six years of unrelenting war and revolution, Russia was in ruins. The economy had collapsed, the country was ravaged by disease and starvation claimed the lives of millions. People were so desperate for food that there were reports of cannibalism, reports that were revealed to be horribly accurate. Remarkably, it was a young American aid worker who uncovered the truth, and, even more remarkably, it was the US-backed charity that had sent him to Russia that would save Lenin’s fledgling government by feeding his people.

In April 1929, the body of British artist Olive Branson was found submerged in a water tank outside her farmhouse in a picturesque Provence village. Dressed only in a pink shirt and stockings, she had a bullet hole between her eyes and a revolver by her side. Was it suicide – or murder? The initial investigation concluded suicide, but under pressure from Olive’s family to conduct a murder enquiry, city detective Alexandre Guibbal was brought in to reopen the case.

Thirty years ago, almost nobody talked about the white working class: in the House of Commons and the House of Lords the term had been used just three times in the previous two decades. Brexit helped to turn the group into a towering social and political force. But, in the aftermath, one-third of the population has been reduced to a cartoon. Veteran Economist journalist Joel Budd has spent years travelling around Britain, from Teesside to the Isle of Wight, south Wales to Lincolnshire. In Underdogs he offers a sharp corrective to the familiar stereotype of the white working class.

Tiffany Jenkins’s groundbreaking book traces the emergence of private sanctuaries from authority and public opinion to show that private life is a very recent – and hard-won – achievement. Strangers and Intimates is animated by dramatic human confrontations: from the political struggles in the seventeenth century that led to Edmund Coke’s rallying cry that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’; to the first modern privacy panic in 1844, when the British government opened private letters sent to the exiled Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini; and more.