List #8: HISTORY & POLITICS
We recommend these books as seasonal gifts and for summer reading. Click through to our website to reserve or purchase your copies—we will have them delivered anywhere or aside for collection. Let us know if you would like them gift-wrapped.
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Humankind: A hopeful history by Rutger Bregman $35
From 'the folk hero of Davos', Fox News antagonist and author of the international bestseller Utopia for Realists comes a radical history of our innate capacity for kindness. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, human beings are taught that we are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest. Providing a new historical perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, Humankind makes a new argument — that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. When we think the worst of others, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics too.
"Humankind challenged me and made me see humanity from a fresh perspective." —Yuval Noah Harari
Not in Narrow Seas: The economic history of Aoteroa New Zealand by Brian Easton $60
Both wide in scope and incisive in depth, Easton's magisterial work examines the broad swathe of economic activity in New Zealand, from pre-contact gift-based exchange systems to the current government's struggle with the economic impact of climate change. Easton is always alert to the impact of economic activity on all groups in society and on the environment, and of the contributions of all groups and the environment to the character and range of that economic activity. Is New Zealand a fair country? (and what does that mean?)
Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists by Julia Ebner $33
By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside, but two years ago, she began to feel that she was only seeing half the picture. She needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. So she decided to go undercover in her spare hours - late nights, holidays, weekends - adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum. Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from 'Trad Wives' and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist. In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive, terrifying, illuminating journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.
The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague by Richard Fidler $45
Witnessing the Velvet Revolution in 1989 got Fidler hooked on Prague, and, in this book he presents the history and importance of the city—from the Dark Ages to the present— in an enjoyable and digressive way.
Imagining Decolonisation by Rebecca Kiddle, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas $15
Decolonisation is a term that scares some, and gives hope to others. It is an uncomfortable and bewildering concept for many New Zealanders yet it needs to be addressed if we are going to build a country that is fair and equal for all who live there.
Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What war does to women by Christina Lamb $40
An important and angry book about rape used as a weapon of war, and about history's airbrushing of their plights.
>>"Required reading." —Peter Frankopan, Guardian
When Darkness Stays: Hōhepa Kereopa and a Tūhoe oral history by Paul Moon $30
This book – unsettling, harrowing, and ultimately redemptive – is based on the time the author spent with the Tūhoe tohunga, Hōhepa Kereopa. It plunges into a cultural landscape that has almost vanished, bringing to light insights that are enriching and sometimes shocking. The book includes an oral history that has never appeared in print until now, and which reveals one of the most tragic and distressing events in the country's colonial era.
Common Ground: Garden hsitories of Aotearoa by Matt Morris $45
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty $85
The much-anticipated new book from the author of the incisive and influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which was made into a film), exposing the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. With this in mind, he outlines a pathway to a fairer economic system.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts $38
A fascinating history of Siberia as told through the pianos that have made their ways into houses there over the centuries.
"An elegant and nuanced journey through literature, through history, through music, murder and incarceration and revolution, through snow and ice and remoteness, to discover the human face of Siberia. I loved this book." —Paul Theroux
How to Argue With a Racist: History, science, race and reality by Adam Rutherford $35
Examines the social constructs behind the perceived idea of 'race' and shows the factual and systemic flaws in the thinking behind so-called 'race science'.
>>Read also Superior by Angela Saini.
Paying the Land by Joe Sacco $48
Canada's Northwest Territories are a huge, frozen wasteland populated only by the Dene, the indigenous people who once lived by hunting but are now divided in their response to an invasion of their land by mining companies. Some deplore it, arguing that the government misled their forebears with treaties they did not understand; others think the development was bound to happen anyway. Sacco's first work of comics journalism in over a decade is set against the background of a culture that has suffered the shattering impact of the residential school system which took children from their parents and returned them unable to speak their language and unable to relate to their traditional way of life. As recently as the 1970s the children were brutalised and abused in the government's stated policy to 'remove the Indian from the child'. Beautifully drawn, Sacco's latest work is a story of culture as much as it is a story of oil, money, dependency and conflict.
The Ratline: Love, lies and justice on the trail of a Nazi fugitive by Philippe Sands $38
As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadesführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in May 1945, he was indicted for 'mass murder'. Hunted by the Soviets, the Americans, the Poles and the British, as well as groups of Jews, Wächter went on the run. He spent three years hiding in the Austrian Alps before making his way to Rome and being taken in by a Vatican bishop. He remained there for three months. While preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline' he died unexpectedly, in July 1949, a few days after having lunch with an 'old comrade' whom he suspected of having been recruited by the Americans. Sands, author of the magisterial East West Street unravels the mysteries and implications of the story.
>>Read Ste;;a's review.
Two Hundred and Fifty Ways to Start an Essay about Captain Cook by Alice Te Punga Somerville $15
#29: With a Non-argument that’s Actually an Argument. Captain Cook? It’s all so very complex. I’m going to sit on the fence. (Whose fence? On whose land? Dividing what from what? You only have a fence when you fear something or when you’re trying to keep something in. Or, as a renovation show on TV informed me, when you want to upgrade your street appeal.) Alice Te Punga Somerville employs her deep research and dark humour to channel her response to Cook’s global colonial legacy.
We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and their forgotten battle for post-war Britain by Daniel Sonabend $43
Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain's homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organisations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. Fascinating (and appropriately priced).
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A woman's life in nineteenth century Japan by Amy Stanley $40
The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in 1804 in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a life much like her mother's. But after three divorces — and with a temperament much too strong-willed for her family's approval — she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo (present-day Tokyo). This book intimates life in Edo just before the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet, which would open Japan up to trade and diplomacy with the West for the first time. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai and eventually ends up in the service of a famous city magistrate.
We live in a society where work defines who we are, what we do and who we spend our time with. But this wasn't always the case. For 95% of our history, our ancestors had a radically different view of its importance; hunter gatherers rarely worked more than fifteen hours per week. How did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? What are the social, economic and environmental consequences of a culture of work? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?
Democracy May Not Exist, But we'll miss it when it's gone by Astra Taylor $33
Is democracy a means or an end? A process or a set of desired outcomes? What if the those outcomes, whatever they may be - peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry - can be achieved by non-democratic means? Or if an election leads to a terrible outcome? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? Incisive.
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