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Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist: A “compelling chronicle” of the science, politics, and business of blood (The Wall Street Journal). Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, takes us from ancient practices of bloodletting to the breakthrou...
Eye-opening and compelling, the overlooked world of freight shipping, revealed as the foundation of our civilization On ship-tracking Web sites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy, and so we must ship. Without shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Yet freight shipping is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, it revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system of "flags of convenience." And then there are the pirates. Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains, and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.
'Asylum-seeker'; refugee'. All the major British political parties have brought these words to the top of the political agenda. Some newspapers shout about the swarms' of refugees arriving on our shores; others criticise our government's lack of humanitarian principles. But what do we know about the refugees themselves what it means to leave your home, your family, your past? Rose George has travelled to Liberia and Ivory Coast and also met refugees in Britain to discover what really happens when you are uprooted by war, greed and guns, or - as Liberians put it - when you've been 'running, running, running' for fourteen years non-stop; when you've rebuilt your house five times, and its been looted six times, so you don't bother putting glass in the windows any more; when, like Francis Flade Nemlin, you're a well paid NGO worker one minute, and a refugee in a transit centre with sixteen dependants only two weeks later. 'Anyone can become a refugee, ' he says. 'Why not?' Challenging the preconceptions of both sides of the political establishment, A Life Removed is a searing indictment of our failure to empathize.
Most humans contain between nine and twelve pints of blood. Here Rose George, who probably contains nine pints, tells nine different stories about the liquid that sustains us, discovering what it reveals about who we are. In Nepal, she meets girls challenging the taboos surrounding menstruation; in the Canadian prairies, she visits a controversial plasma clinic; in Wales she gets a tour of the UK's only leech farm to learn about the vital role the creatures still play in modern surgery; and in a London hospital she accompanies a medical team revolutionising the way we treat trauma. Nine Pints reveals the richness and wonder of the potent red fluid that courses around our bodies, unseen but miraculous.
This sweeping, emotionally-resonant fantasy from beloved author Jessica Day George is perfect for fans of Princess Academy and Black Beauty. When orphaned Anthea Cross-Thornley receives a letter from a long-lost uncle, she wonders if she will finally find a true home. But she is shocked to learn that her uncle secretly breeds horses--animals that have been forbidden in her kingdom for centuries. More alarming is Anthea's strange ability to sense the horses' thoughts and feelings, an ancient gift called The Way. Confused and terrified, Anthea is desperate to leave, but when her family and kingdom are put at risk, can she embrace The Way and the exciting future it might bring her? A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year
Roses, pleasure and politics: a fresh take on Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world. 'I loved this book... An exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times' Margaret Atwood 'Expansive and thought-provoking' Independent Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening - George Orwell Inspired by her encounter with the surviving roses that Orwell is said to have planted in his cottage in Hertfordshire, Rebecca Solnit explores how his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power. Following his journey from t...
The Whitbread (and Wolfson and Yorkshire Post) Prize Winning account of the king whose life spanned the centuries. Grandfather of the present Queen, George V bridged the century from the ¿glories¿ of the Victorian and Edwardian eras through the horrors of the Great War. His life is recounted here drawing on letters and diaries of the Royal family as well as intimates and social observers of the time. As his funeral cortege turned into New Palace Yard the Maltese Cross fell from the Crown and landed in the gutter. ¿A most terrible omen¿ wrote Harold Nicolson. And indeed it was.
The devastation of many of the greatest North Atlantic cod stocks, particularly those of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Grand Banks, has become an icon for the unsustainable relation between human exploitation and Nature. Here, George Rose tells the full story of that devastation, in scientific detail, for the first time - from the formation of the North Atlantic marine ecosystems to the massive stock declines in the last half of the 20th century. Politics and the fisheries are inextricably entwined. In Cod, Rose recounts the many political influences on the fisheries over several centuries and describes how neglect from the late 1800s onward led to insufficient scientific knowledge and little protection for the stocks when massive Euro-Russian fleets targeted the Grand Banks after World War II, destroying the most prolific fishery the world has known. Cod is no armchair account, but a controversial one that includes original information on the North Atlantic fisheries.
An eye-opening adventure deep inside the everyday materials that surround us, from concrete and steel to denim and chocolate, packed with surprising stories and fascinating science.
In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.