Showing titles in Professionals & Academics

The past three decades have seen a remarkable rise of Afrikaners in business. With Koos Bekker at its helm, media group Naspers began dominating the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and was turned into a global consumer internet group. Johann Rupert strongly extended Richemont’s share internationally in the upper-end market of luxury goods, while Christo Wiese and Whitey Basson at Pepkor and Shoprite became Africa’s largest clothing and food retailers.

In the 1970s, against the backdrop of the explosive Watergate scandal, Charles Colson revealed the story of his own search for meaning during the tumultuous investigations that led to the collapse of the Nixon administration. A convicted former special counsel to the president, Colson paradoxically found new life - not with success and power, but while in national disgrace and serving a prison sentence.

In Plato and the Tyrant, acclaimed historian and classicist James Romm draws on personal letters of Plato to show how a philosopher helped topple the leading Greek power of the era: the opulent city of Syracuse. There, Plato encountered two authoritarian rulers, a father and son both named Dionysius, and tried to steer them toward philosophy. At the same time, he worked on his masterpiece, Republic, in which he conceived a ruler who unites perfect wisdom with absolute power.

The Greek word sumposion means a drinking party (a fact shamefully ignored by the organizers of modern symposia), and the party described in Plato's Symposium is one supposedly given in the year 416 BC by the playwright Agathon to celebrate his victory in the dramatic festival of the Lenaea. He has already given one party, the previous evening; this second party is for a select group of friends, and host and guests alike are feeling a little frail.

Sydney Kentridge carved out a reputation as South Africa's most prominent anti-apartheid advocate—his story is entwined with the country's emergence from racial injustice and oppression. He is the only lawyer to have acted for three winners of the Nobel Peace Prize—Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Chief Albert Lutuli. Already world-famous for his landmark cases, he then became England's premier advocate.

David L. Mearns has discovered some of the world's most fascinating and elusive shipwrecks. The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles his most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and mid-ocean stamina and courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind each of these oceanic tragedies. Combining the adventuring derring-do of Indiana Jones with the precision of a scientist, The Shipwreck Hunter opens an illuminating porthole into the shadowy depths of the ocean.

What is it really like to be a firefighter? How does it feel to respond to an emergency call, to know that someone's life hangs in the balance and every second is critical? What is it like to fight a fire, to battle through the heat and the smoke, to put your own life in danger to save others? How does it feel to rescue survivors, and what is it like to recover the bodies of those who you didn’t reach in time?

Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably. Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing.

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten...

Renowned investigative journalist Richard Behar delivers the definitive account of history’s largest—and longest-running—financial fraud, “the scale of the deception…beggars belief” (New York Post). Some $68 billion evaporated during Bernie Madoff’s epic confidence game. Two people...

A Life in Trauma is a frank, remarkable account of a career spent helping others, offering a positive outlook on the potential of Ireland’s healthcare system in the future. Concern. Compassion. Doubt. Despair. Anger. Hope. Imagine juggling these feelings every day in a situation where your work could mean the difference between someone's life or death.

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Includes an audiobook-exclusive conversation with video game journalist Geoff Keighley! Read by the author. LESSONS FROM A BOSS-LEVEL DISRUPTOR AND GAMING LEGEND Reggie Fils-Aimé, retired President and Chief Operating Officer of Nintendo of America Inc., shares...

BBC Breakfast's Dr Rosemary Leonard shares more incredible stories from her career as a GP. 'I'm in the wrong job,' I said to our practice nurse, 'I should definitely have been a detective.' For Dr Rosemary Leonard, a day in her GP's surgery is full of unexplained ailments and mysteries to be solved. From questions of paternity to apparently drug-resistant symptoms, these mysteries can sometimes take a while to get to the bottom of, especially when they are of a more intimate nature.

Veteran journalists Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman follow the remarkable life of heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub from his formative years in Egypt, through spectacular success at Cairo University, to his long and distinguished career in Britain. Although at times he clashed with the medical establishment in London, Yacoub pioneered great advances in heart surgery. He was knighted in 1992, and in 2014, he was awarded the highest honor in the gift of the Queen, the Order of Merit.

Brought to you by Penguin. Our laws and justice system are vast and ancient: they might touch our lives when we have an accident, a wrong is done to us, or we have a family difficulty. And they cover everything from the personal to the regulation of our government. But to most of us they are a...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A deeply powerful memoir about bipolar illness that has both transformed and saved lives—with a new preface by the author. Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she...

The Hiltons is a sweeping saga of the success-and excess-of an iconic American family. Demanding and enigmatic, patriarch Conrad Hilton's visionary ideas and unyielding will established the model for the modern luxury hotel industry. But outside the boardroom, Conrad struggled with emotional...

'A TRULY IMPORTANT BOOK’ JOHN HUMPHRYS 'FASCINATING… SHOCKING' SPECTATOR What is paranoia? What makes us mistrustful? How can this be overcome? Daniel Freeman, Professor of Psychology at Oxford, has spent thirty years at the vanguard of paranoia research and treatment. This remarkable and...

Superbly narrated by Mike Fraser, F. J. Sheed’s remarkable translation of this classic spiritual autobiography is finally in audio format, with an introduction by noted historian of late antiquity Peter Brown. Incorporated in this edition are a wealth of notes on literary, philosophical, biblical, historical, and liturgical topics by Michael P. Foley, an Editor’s Preface, and a timeline.

Described as the "ultimate engineer" during his career at NASA, George M. Low was a visionary architect and leader from the agency's inception in 1958 to his retirement in 1976. As chief of manned spaceflight at NASA, Low was instrumental in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Low's pioneering work paved the way for President Kennedy's decision to make a lunar landing NASA's primary goal in the 1960s.