English Culture

Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right, she will need the help of the Culture....

We live in a world obsessed with drinking. We drink at baby showers and work events, brunch and book club, graduations and funerals. Yet no one ever questions alcohol’s ubiquity—in fact, the only thing ever questioned is why someone doesn’t drink. It is a qualifier for belonging and if you don’t imbibe, you are considered an anomaly. As a society, we are obsessed with health and wellness, yet we uphold alcohol as some kind of magic elixir, though it is anything but.

All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot is a funny, provocative retrospective on the last thirty years of Western beauty standards. From the Pussycat Dolls to Victoria’s Secret, The Girls of the Playboy Mansion to Lara Bingle, the media of the 2000s was littered with high profile examples of hotness as the highest form of social currency. Is it any wonder a girl growing up in that era might believe “good looks” were as integral to womanhood as having a pulse?

Iqbal, a 13-year-old boy, fights for children's liberation. Bravely, he speaks out against children working long hours in carpet factories in Pakistan.

In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one man it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever.

You're not just imagining it: People are getting more and more rude - from cutting in line, gabbing on their phones and clipping their nails on public transportation, to hurling epithets on Twitter and in real life (including a certain President who does both). And the worst part is that it's contagious, leading reasonably courteous people to stoop to new lows in order to respond to the ever-coarsening encounters we face every day.

The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action. The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought. The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people.

In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff sets out with her three-year-old daughter in tow to learn and practice parenting strategies from families in three of the world’s most venerable communities: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She sees that these cultures don’t have the same problems with children that Western parents do.

Frank Sinatra. Dean Martin. Sammy Davis, Jr. Peter Lawford. Joey Bishop. They call themselves The Clan. But to an awed world, they are known as The Rat Pack. They had it all. Fame. Gorgeous women. A fabulous playground of a city and all the money in the world. The backing of fearsome crime lords and the blessing of the President of the United States. But the dark side - over the thin line between pleasure and debauchery, between swinging self-confidence and brutal arrogance - took its toll. In four years, their great ride was over, and showbiz was never the same.

As we all know, and as many of our well-established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history, Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called "Hitler's Pope", the Dark Ages were a stunting of the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment, and the religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long-held beliefs were all wrong?

Want to know how AT&T's Bell Labs developed semiconductor technology - and how its leading scientists almost came to blows in the process? Want to understand how radio and television work - and why RCA drove their inventors to financial ruin and early graves? Conquering the Electron offers these stories and more, presenting each revolutionary technological advance right alongside blow-by-blow personal battles that all too often took place.

Carol Dweck’s multi-million-copy bestseller Mindset transformed our view of individual potential, coining the terms “fixed” and “growth” mindset: in a “fixed” mindset, talent and intelligence are viewed as predetermined traits, while in a “growth” mindset, talent and intelligence can be nurtured. In Cultures of Growth, Dweck’s protégé, Mary Murphy, a social psychologist at both Stanford and Indiana University, shows that mindset transcends individuals.

How much do you know about farts? Did you know it would take just nine farts from every person on earth to power an atomic bomb? That fish farts nearly triggered a war against Russia? That women's farts smell worse than men's? Pfwoort! It's all in this book. Did you know that inhaling farts is healthy, yet people fart after death? That you can get a job as a professional fart smeller? That farting is illegal in Africa but polite in South America? Heard any ancient Babylonian fart jokes lately? Blorrrk! It's all in this book.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.

A different kind of politics for a new kind of society - beyond work, scarcity, and capitalism.

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence.

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.

While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, 12-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become queen of Egypt some day.

Unlock the key moments and movements that shaped our present-day world with this all-encompassing audiobook. Inside, you’ll find six detailed manuscripts, each offering a captivating guide to the modern history of different regions—Europe, America, Latin America, Africa, China, and Japan. Whether you're a history enthusiast or just looking to expand your knowledge, this audiobook provides an accessible and engaging way to understand the forces that have molded our world.