Friday 21 July 2017


NEW RELEASES
These books arrived this week and are already feeling their way towards your shelves. 

Tough Guys (Have Feelings Too) by Keith Negley          $28
It's not easy being a tough guy. Sometimes things just don't work out. Sometimes tough guys can be frustrated and disappointed. But it's OK to show your feelings, even for tough guys. 
CCCP Cook Book: True stories of Soviet cuisine by Olga and Pavel Syutkin         $45
Features 60 recipes, each with fascinating background text explaining the relationship between edible culture and its political, social economic and ethnic corollaries. The illustrations and the food are at once ugly and beautiful, attractive and repellent. A beautifully produced book that will possibly give you deeper insight into Soviet life than most histories. 
Animals of a Bygone Era: An illustrated compendium by Maja Säfström         $30
Animals that no longer exist are just as fascinating as animals that still do. This beautifully illustrated book introduces us to some you'll know and some you won't, and describes many of their surprising quirks. 
A companion volume to Amazing Animal Facts



Word by Word: The secret life of dictionaries by Kory Stamper           $50
The process of compiling a dictionary is as fraught and dynamic as language itself. Stamper reveals the rich and complex world of lexicography and shows how problematic even the most simple words and their actions can be. 
"As a writer, Kory Stamper can do anything with words: define them, split them, lump them, agglute them, and make them work for her every bit as ferociously and precisely as she works for them in her day job as a far from mild-mannered lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. You will never take a dictionary entry for granted again." -  Mary Norris, bestselling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a comma queen
Fashion Victims: The dangers of dress, past and present by Alison Matthews David         $39
Clothing has caused illness, injury, madness and death ever since it was adopted, but in some eras more than others. This well-illustrated volume explores the hazards, both of substance and of design and ponders the social forces that have exposed humans to intimate hazards, both known and unknown. 
 Soviet Space Dogs by Olesya Turkina         $50
In the lead-up to Yuri Gagarin's first space flight, small robust stray dogs were plucked from the streets of Moscow and trained to endure gravitational pressure, low oxygen levels, a constipating diet, ungainly outfits and celebrity status before being launched into orbits from which some actually returned alive. This interesting book traces their history and also records the vast array of paraphernalia, from postcards to nightlights, designed to celebrate these remarkable dogs.  
>> Can you tolerate this? 
>> Was Ivan Ivanovich the model master? 
>> Chernushka today
Letters from Klara by Tove Jansson       $23
Another set of very fine short stories for adults, telling of discomfiting encounters, unlooked-for connections and moments of isolation that span generations and decades.
"Each new translation proves a revelation of Jansson's literary astuteness." - Ali Smith


Things Look Different in the Light, And other stories by Medardo Fraile        $23
"Masterfully muted, their insights impactful but delayed. Fraile's stories, tightly controlled and peopled with scrupulously-rendered characters, offer a fine deviation from the giddy desperation of much contemporary literature. English readers are lucky to finally have the opportunity to read the Spanish master's crystalline work." - Iowa Review 
"So little is said and so much is conveyed." - Ali Smith


Is That Kafka? 99 finds by Reiner Stach       $30
Franz Kafka was an exceptional writer, not just in quality but in his qualities. He was also an exception to much of what has been thought of him since, or, rather, both as a writer and a person, he is compounded from exceptions, both to his literary and social milieu and to his own psychology. Kafka never lied but he did cheat in an exam, he liked to drink beer, he followed a fitness regime, he made presents for children, he devised, with his friend Max Brod, a series of on-the-cheap travel guides, he loved slapstick and he liked to be called Frank. Stach also provides a couple of plausible Kafka sightings in contemporary crowd photographs. Is that Kafka? Quite possibly, yes. Now in paperback.
Frank Lloyd Wright Paper Models: 14 kirigami models to cut and fold by Marc Hagan-Guirey    $40
You will like these.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison         $35
Recovering from a plague that kills 90% of the world's female population and makes childbirth fatal for both infant and mother, an unnamed midwife sets out, disguised as a man, to find a place where she can live without fear. 
Death on Earth: Adventures in evolution and mortality by Jules Howard     $25
All life forms on the planet move, faster or more slowly, towards death. How has life evolved to orient itself around its own demise? How can death be an evolutionary advantage? Could immortality ever arise through natural selection? 
The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce           $40
"Western liberal democracy is not yet dead but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe. It is facing its gravest challenge since the Second World War. This time, we have conjured up the enemy from within. At home and abroad, America's best liberal traditions are under assault from its own president. We have put arsonists in charge of the fire brigade."
Seeing Trump and Le Pen as symptoms rather than causes of current malaise, Luce traces the rise of populism to its economic and political roots." 
"Insightful and harrowing." - The New York Times 
Nanotecture: Tiny built things by Rebecca Roke         $37
"The most wide-ranging, comprehensive and inclusive book on small-scale architecture ever published." Over 300 exemplars.

Caves: Exploring New Zealand's subterranean wilderness by Marcus Thomas and Neil Silverwood      $80
A beautifully presented intimation of the exploration of the world beneath the surface of New Zealand, an exploration still in its infancy. 
Caravan: Dining all day by Chris Ammerman, Laura Harper-Hinton and Miles Kirby       $55
Three New Zealanders moved to London and ended up opening a string of restaurants and teaching the English to be more relaxed about what they ate when. You can try this at home. 
The Park Bench by Christophe Chabouté                $33
A touching graphic novel about a park bench and all the people who spend time upon it. 
Lisbon: Recipes from the heart of Portugal by Rebecca Seal      $45
Distill's Lisbon's culture and history into 80 authentic and achievable recipes for food and drink of all kinds. Nicely presented. 
The House of the Dead: Siberian exile under the Tsars by Daniel Beer       $35
The tsars looked on Siberia as creating the ultimate political quarantine from the contagions of revolution. Generations of rebels - republicans, nationalists and socialists - were condemned to oblivion thousands of kilometres from European Russia. Over the nineteenth century, however, these political exiles transformed Siberia's mines, prisons and remote settlements into an enormous laboratory of revolution.



Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw       $30
In his 97 years, Steven Runciman managed not just to be a great historian of the Crusades and Byzantium, but Grand Orator of the Orthodox Church, a member of the Order of Whirling Dervishes, Greek Astronomer Royal and Laird of Eigg. His friendships, curiosities and plottings entangled him in a huge array of different artistic movements, civil wars, Cold War betrayals and, above all, the rediscovery of the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. He was as happy living in a remote part of the Inner Hebrides as in the heart of Istanbul. He was obsessed with historical truth, but also with tarot, second sight, ghosts and the uncanny. 
"Very interesting person." - Orlando
The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam by Christopher Goscha         $30
"This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the republic’s political future." - Guardian

The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J.M.W. Turner by Franny Moyle         $30
"Fresh and lively. Turner's life is given a vivid colour and depth as Moyle deftly interweaves his professional career with his private life. Moyle writes with sensitivity about individual pictures and series, and is good at explaining the context." - Jenny Uglow
>> The artist paints
Mind Club: Who thinks, what feels, and why it matters by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray         $37
What is it to think of not only of ourselves having a mind but postulating the mind of another? Why do we make the assumptions we do about minds and the entities we attribute them to? Who and what has feelings and who and what does not? 
Mischka's War: A European odyssey of the 1940s by Sheila Fitzpatrick         $40
Fitzpatrick tells her late husband's story: how he chanced upon a pit full of murdered Jews in the Latvian woods, avoided conscription into the Waffen-SS by going on a student exchange to Germany, survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, crossed into Denmark, became a member of the Heidelberg school of physics, moving to the US in the 1950s (which is where he met Fitzpatrick).


Big Pig, Little Pig: A tale of two pigs in France by Jacqueline Yallop        $40
The author moved to rural France and acquired two pigs to rear for slaughter. Of course, she fell in love with them and began to grow reluctant to eat her friends. 
Mozaa by Renske Solkesz      $33
An enjoyable and challenging strategic game. Maximise the size of your colour field while minimising those of your opponents. 









No comments:

Post a Comment