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Sheila: Courted by princes, adored by Fleet Street by Robert Wainwright (Paperback)
R80,00This splendid biography evokes the glamour of a vanished age.
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Putin – His Life And Times (Paperback) Philip Short
R290,00The monumental biography of the most influential leader on the world stage in the last twenty years.
Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with.
Philip Short’s magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin’s Russia. Since becoming President in 2000, his obsession has been to restore Russia’s status as a great power, unbound by western rules. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War?
To explain is not to justify. Putin’s regime is dark. He pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.
This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia’s ruler. It also makes us revise long-held assumptions about the course of global politics since the end of the Cold War.
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Man Without A Face – The Autobiography Of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster by Markus Wolf with Ann McElvoy (Paperback)
R300,00For decades, Markus Wolf was known to Western intelligence officers only as “the man without a face.” Now the legendary spymaster has emerged from the shadows to reveal his remarkable life of secrets, lies, and betrayals as head of the world’s most formidable and effective foreign service ever. Wolf was undoubtedly the greatest spymaster of our century. A shadowy Cold War legend who kept his own past locked up as tightly as the state secrets with which he was entrusted, Wolf finally broke his silence in 1997. Man Without a Face is the result. It details all of Wolf’s major successes and failures and illuminates the reality of espionage operations as few nonfiction works before it.
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‘Boy’ and ‘Going Solo’ by Roald Dahl (Paperback)
R80,00Boy and Going Solo is the whole of Roald Dahl’s extraordinary autobiography in one volume. Reissued in the exciting new Roald Dahl branding. Boy is the story of Roald Dahl’s very own boyhood, including tales of sweet-shops and chocolate, mean old ladies and a Great Mouse Plot – the inspiration for some of his most marvellous storybooks in the years to come. Going Solo tells of how, when he grew up, Roald Dahl left England for Africa and later went flying with the Royal Air Force, before he became the world’s number-one storyteller.
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The Road to NAB END An Extraordinary Northern Childhood by William Woodruff (Hardback)
R70,00William Woodruff had the sort of childhood satirised in the famous Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch. The son of a weaver, he was born on a pallet of straw at the back of the mill and two days later his mother was back at work. Life was extrememly tough for the family in 1920’s Blackburn — a treat was sheep’s head or cow heel soup — and got worse when his father lost his job when the cotton industry started its terminal decline. Woodruff had to find his childhood fun in the little free time he had available between his delivery job and school, but he never writes self-pityingly, leaving the reader to shed the tears on his behalf.
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Jackson Unveiled: The Complete Story of the King of Pop by James Fletcher and Jan (Paperback)
R300,00Haynes Publishing has teamed up with the Daily Mirror to be one of the first to market with the definitive story on the life of Michael Jackson. As the world devoured every detail of the King of Pop’s sudden death Haynes and the Daily Mirror are determined to present the story of his life.
Colour illustrations.
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Hopscotch & Handbags: The Truth about Being a Girl by Lucy Mangan (Paperback)
R40,00Just what does it mean to be a girl? Why is it not like being a boy? And why is that a good thing? Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan lifts the lid on the truth about being female. From your place within the family (‘It’s a girl! What a pity!’) through the intricacies of what not to wear and who not to talk to, everything you need to know about losing your virginity, how to get along with your mother and get ahead in the workplace, this is a full and frank account of how it really is different for girls.
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DRAWN FROM MEMORY by Ernest H. Shepherd (Paperback)
R35,00An evocative childhood memoir by the much-loved illustrator of “Winnie the Pooh” and “The Wind in the Willows”. In this autobiography, E.H. Shepard describes a classic Victorian childhood. Shepard grew up in the 1880s in Saint John’s Wood with his brother and sister. He was surrounded by domestic servants and maiden aunts, in a an age when horse-drawn buses and hansom cabs crowded the streets. Recalling this time with charm and humour, Shepard illustrates these scenes in his own distinctive style.
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Hound Dog by Richard Blandford (paperback)
R50,00Elvis is the premier Elvis impersonator in the whole of the Cambridgeshire region. He’s fat and bald and old; partial to cocaine, he sells skunk to the local teenagers; he masturbates five or six times a day, and he hates Elvis Presley. Elvis has been married three times, but, as he says, never for very long. He finds being Elvis a useful way into the beds of Cambridgeshire’s bored housewives.
Elvis’s life starts to go wrong when his backing singers, Gay Elvis and Fat Elvis, mutiny. They love Elvis Presley and want to sing the songs in historical sequence. He replaces them with Buddy Holly, a postman with bladder problems, but the new arrangement is not without its difficulties. Then Eddie calls to offer the biggest gig yet of Elvis’s career. Eddie, a gay gangster who ‘looked after’ Elvis on one of his stints in prison, wants him to perform at the birthday party of Johnny Brooks, another gangster, even more vicious, who just happens to be married to Elvis’s third ex-wife.
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Fire in my Bones by Dick Anderson (paperback)
R50,00Dick Anderson’s story makes astonishing reading. He and his wife, Joan, were pioneering missionaries in Turkana, Kenya, spending many years in the front line of world evangelisation. Their ground-breaking experiences were used by Africa Inland Mission (AIM) to evaluate the possibility of mission the length and breadth of Africa. But this is not just another story of of missionary success, Dick critically analyses his work at the mission in Turkana, and evaluates how the mission has progressed since they started it in the late fifties.
Going on to become AIM’s International General Secretary wasn’t without its problems wither. As AIM’s missions developed and evolved leadership wasn’t easy and Dick doesn’t gloss over the difficulties. Rather he identifies potential solutions that many of us can apply to our own situations.
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Darkness Visible: Inside the World of Philip Pullman by Nicholas Tucker (paperback)
R40,00Philip Pullman is one of the world’s most popular and original authors, read by children and adults alike. Containing an astonishing cast of characters, from scholarly Oxford dons to armoured bears, witches, angels, murderous Spectres and hideous harpies drawn straight from Greek mythology, Pullman’s fiction can be read at many different levels.
Darkness Visible looks at the world of Philip Pullman, from the flamboyant Sally Lockhart series and the award-winning Clockwork and I Was a Rat!, to the epic His Dark Materials trilogy. It shows the diverse influences – from Milton and Blake to comic books and radio drama – that have shaped his writing and uncovers the part played by Pullman’s unconventional childhood.
Written by acclaimed critic Nicholas Tucker, and packed with never-before-seen family photos, illustration from Pullman’s beloved graphic novels and fresh material from recent interviews, this is both a celebration of Philip Pullman and a useful guide to the rich world of his fiction.
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Mandela: The Authorised Biography by Anthony Sampson (hardback)
R160,00(hardback: dust jacket included)
The life of Nelson Mandela, from the personal and the global perspective, is one of the epic stories of the twentieth century. It is also one of the most inspiring. Twenty years ago, Mandela was an almost forgotten figure languishing in jail on Robben Island; today, as he leaves office as President of South Africa, he is one of the most widely admired leaders on earth.
By giving Anthony Sampson unprecedented access to 27 years’ worth of unpublished correspondence from prison, as well as to other unpublished writings including his original, suppressed, autobiography, Mandela has enabled the author to write the most comprehensive account of his life to date. Sampson, who has known Mandela from the early 1950s, has also conducted hundreds of interviews with colleagues, family and friends as well as prison warders and Afrikaner ex-cabinet ministers, and he is the first person to have exclaimed prison archives in South Africa and diplomatic papers in Great Britain, the United States and South Africa.
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Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary by Stephen Clingman (hardback)
R150,00(hardback: dust jacket included)
Covering more than one hundred years of South African history, the book ranges from the stories of Fisher and his wife, Molly, to the courtroom drama of South Africa’s great political trials, to the political intrigue of the 1960s and beyond. It is a remarkable story, remarkably told. Weaving the personal and public, Stephen Clingman’s biography is an account of tragedy and transcendence, showing how the miracle of South Africa’s transition to democracy was deeply connected to the legacy of Bram Fischer.
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East End Tales by Gilda O’Neill (paperback)
R30,00Gilda O’Neill was born in London’s East End. Her nan had a pie and mash shop and her grandfather was a tug skipper.
You might think Gilda’s childhood was one of pub knees-ups and legendary criminals – but that is just half the story.
Inside Easy End Tales, Gilda reveals what the true East End was like – not the place of myth and legend. Stories of hardship and upheaval rub soldiers with those of kindness, pride, courage and humour.
