Current Affairs

Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Greeks? The answer: inequality. This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show: how almost everything - from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy - is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is; that societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - includ... read more

What if everything around you was black and white except for the red letters on propaganda signs? Where spies like Orwell's Thought Police studied your facial expressions during political rallies to make sure you were sincere in your expressions and your thoughts? If you couldn't turn the dials of your radio away from the government station? In fact, there is such a place: North Korea, the only country not connected to the Internet by choice. Ruled over by a dictator, visible only in carefully controlled images, it's a mysterious,... read more

We have less time for the needed global transformation than many had hoped or expected. Resource scarcity is already upon us in the form of soaring oil and food prices and a cascade of climate shocks. The soaring prices are not merely cyclical or the result of financial speculation - these remarkable price hikes, considered together with the climate shocks that helped to cause them, are actually the leading edge of the ecological crises that will sink us unless we act more rapidly and decisively. It's high time - indeed in the ... read more

"Seeds of Terror" will reshape the way you think about the West's enemies, revealing them less as ideologues and more as criminals who earn billions of pounds every year off the opium trade. With the breakneck pace of a thriller, author Gretchen Peters traces their illicit activities from the vast poppy fields of southern Afghanistan to heroin labs run by Taliban commanders, from drug convoys armed with Stinger missiles to the money launderers of Karachi and Dubai. Based on hundreds of interviews with Taliban fighters, smugglers, a... read more

Ten years later, where are we looking? How do we see things differently? From Ground Zero to Kampala to London to Mumbai, the echoes are still heard, the impact is still felt. The way we interact, the way we travel, our relationship to media and technology, and the very way we regard the world we live in have all been irrevocably changed. Granta 116 will examine the consequences of the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, from a global perspective. Rather than recounting where we were when it happened and what we saw, thi... read more

'No Logo' was a book that defined a generation when it was first published in 1999. For it's 10th anniversay Naomi Klein has updated this iconic book. By the time you're twenty-one, you'll have seen or heard a million advertisements. But you won't be happier for it. This is a book about that much-maligned, much-misunderstood generation coming up behind the slackers, who are being intelligent and active about the world in which they find themselves. It is a world in which all that is 'alternative' is sold, where any innovation or ... read more

There is currently an epidemic of 'affluenza' throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. Over a nine-month period, bestselling author Oliver James travelled around the world to try and find out why. He discovered how, despite very different cultures and levels of wealth, affluenza is spreading. Cities he visited include Sydney, Singapore, Moscow, Copenhagen, New York and Shanghai, and in each place he interviewed several g... read more

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such "processing," and can be repeatedly "consumed."Kara first encountered the horrors ... read more

The Best American Magazine Writing 2010 is the strongest evidence yet that the narrative and purpose of print journalism is as vital as ever, providing entertainment, connection, perspective, and unprecedented revelation in increasingly imaginative and engaging ways. This year's selections, chosen from among the finalists of the National Magazine Awards, include David Grann's much-discussed article on the legal execution of a possibly innocent man in the New Yorker; Shari Fink's report on alleged euthanization of patients during H... read more

Every day we make choices. Coke or Pepsi? Save or spend? Stay or go? Whether mundane or life-altering, these choices define us and shape our lives. Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose? Her award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological ... read more

Full of astonishing personal stories, this is an essential and incisive discussion on China today - a country on an environmental precipice that will affect the entire world - and a compelling look at the lives of its people. With foul air, filthy water, rising temperatures and encroaching deserts, China is already suffering an environmental disaster. Now it faces a stark choice: either accept catastrophe or make radical changes. Traveling the vast country to witness this environmental challenge, Jonathan Watts moves from moun... read more

When environmentalists Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie decided to tell the story of pollution in our modern world by using their own bodies as laboratories, they could not have known what they were about to discover. They ingested and inhaled a host of things that surround us all the time, from mercury-laden tuna to flame-retardant chemicals in clothes and furniture, to toxins in plastics, toys, shampoos and deoderants. The results of these experiments are both alarming and unexpected. Slow Death by Rubber Duck exposes the extent to wh... read more

As a foriegn correspondent for ABC television, Eric Campbell has seen a lot. This, his first book, documents the highs and lows of being a reporter in some of the strangest, most dysfunctional places on Earth, while juggling life, love, friendship and fatherhood.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In What's Wrong with America?, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what needs to be done now to rediscover America's power and prowess. They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the nation to the need to address these issues seriously.... read more

Booker focuses his attention on the mother of all environmental scares: global warming. This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history. Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing... read more

'How many are they?' The reply came in the finest traditions of accurate situation reporting, 'f***ing hundreds of them!'
Marbat, South Oman, 19 July 1972 is one of the least-known yet most crucial battles of modern times. Operation Storm is the inside story - told by those who took part - of the greatest secret war in SAS history. The tipping point was Marbat, a secret battle which defines the world we all live in today. If the SAS had been defeated at Marbat, the Russian and Chinese plan for a communist foothold in the Mi... read more

In the tradition of the now-classic Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, world-renowned economist and political adviser Jacques Attali predicts how our world will look in the coming decades and a century from now.

When the US Navy send their elite, they send the SEALs. When the SEALs send their elite, they send SEAL team six. SEAL team six is one of only two Special Missions Units within the United States special operations force. Focusing on counterterrorism, hostage rescue and counterinsurgency, it operates outside the parameters of normal military protocol, receiving mission approval direct from the president. And its most recent mission was the kill or capture of the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. In this dramatic, behind-the-... read more

Pope Benedict XVI is coming to the UK on a state visit in September. David Yallop, author of "In God's Name", looks at the current news stories concerning widespread child abuse by priests and shows how the Vatican is not telling the full story. Praise for "In God's Name": 'A thriller without an ending...Yallop has surely proved there is a case to answer' - "Guardian". 'An astonishing book...a story of corruption, lies and disinformation' - "Daily Mail". 'Excellently done ...An engrossing and disturbing book' - "Economist".

The first book to explore the Occupy movement in depth, with reportage and analysis.