On a September day in 1863, Abdul Hamid entered the Central Asian city of Yarkand. Disguised as a merchant, Hamid was in fact an employee of the Survey of India, carrying concealed instruments to enable him to map the geography of the area. Hamid did not live to provide a first-hand account of his travels. But he was the advance guard of an elite group of Indian trans-Himalayan explorers—recruited, trained, and directed by the officers of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India—who were to traverse much of Tibet and Central Asia during the next thirty years.
Derek Waller presents the history of these intrepid explorers—Nain, Mani, Kalian and Kishen Singh, Mirza Shuja, Hyder Shah, Ata Mahomed, Abdul Subhan, Mukhtar Shah, Hari Ram, Rinzing Namgyal, Ugyen Gyatso, Nem Singh, Lala and Kintup—who came to be called ‘native explorers’ or ‘pundits’ in the public documents of the Survey of India. In the closed files of the government of British India, however, they were given their true designation as spies. As they moved northward within the Indian subcontinent, the British demanded precise frontiers and sought orderly political and economic relationships with their neighbours. They were also becoming increasingly aware of and concerned with their ignorance of the geographical, political, and military complexion of the territories beyond the mountain frontiers of the Indian empire. This was particularly true of Tibet.
Though use of pundits was phased out in the 1890s in favour of purely British expeditions, they gathered an immense amount of information on the topography of the region, the customs of its inhabitants, and the nature of its government and military resources. They were able to travel to places where virtually no European could venture, and did so under conditions of extreme deprivation and great danger. They are responsible for documenting an area of over one million square miles, most of it completely unknown territory to the West. One of the first books to be written about them, The Pundits is a work of exceptional scholarship.
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On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in the cotton country of rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them a deeper horror: all eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War.
Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery, that it placed before a public self-satisfied that involuntary servitude had ended at Appomattox more than fifty years before.
By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political exposé, Hell Put to Shame also reintroduces readers to three Americans who spearheaded the prosecution of John S. Williams, the wealthy plantation owner behind the murders, at a time when white people rarely faced punishment for violence against their Black neighbors. The remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson, newly appointed the first Black leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, marshaled the organization into a full-on war against peonage. Johnson’s lieutenant, Walter F. White, a light-skinned, fair-haired, blue-eyed Black man, conducted undercover work at the scene of lynchings and other Jim Crow atrocities, helping to throw a light on such violence and to hasten its end. And Georgia governor Hugh M. Dorsey won the statehouse as a hero of white supremacists—then redeemed himself in spectacular fashion with the “Murder Farm” affair.
The result is a story that remains fresh and relevant a century later, as the nation continues to wrestle with seemingly intractable challenges in matters of race and justice. And the 1921 case at its heart argues that the forces that so roil society today have been with us for generations..
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On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fuelled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter – a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were ‘so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them’.
At the heart of this suspense-filled narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander and a former slave owner sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a vain and bloodthirsty radical who stirs secessionist ardour at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter, conflicted over both marriage and slavery and seeing parallels between both. In the middle of it all is the overwhelmed Lincoln, battling with his duplicitous Secretary of State, William Seward, as he tries desperately to avert a war that he fears is inevitable – one that will eventually kill 750,000 Americans.
Drawing on diaries, secret communiques, slave ledgers, and plantation records, Larson gives us a political horror story that captures the forces that led America to the brink – a dark reminder that we often don’t see a cataclysm coming until it’s too late.
Triumphs and disasters in the deep sea
This is a journey through time and water, to the bottom of the ocean and the future of our planet.
We do not see the ocean when we look at the water that blankets more than two thirds of our planet. We only see the entrance to it. Beyond that entrance is a world hostile to humans, yet critical to our survival. The first divers to enter that world held their breath and splashed beneath the surface, often clutching rocks to pull them down. Over centuries, they invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer. But each advance was fraught with danger, as the intruders had to survive the crushing weight of water, or the deadly physiological effects of breathing compressed air. The vertical odyssey continued when explorers squeezed into heavy steel balls dangling on cables, or slung beneath floats filled with flammable gasoline. Plunging into the narrow trenches between the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust, they eventually reached the bottom of the ocean in the same decade that men first walked on the moon.
Today, as nations scramble to exploit the resources of the ocean floor, The Frontier Below recalls a story of human endeavour that took 2,000 years to travel seven miles, then investigates how we will explore the ocean in the future.
Meticulously researched and drawing extensively on unpublished sources and personal interviews, The Frontier Below is the untold story of the pioneers who had the right stuff, but were forgotten because they went in the wrong direction.
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From bestselling historian Saul David, a riveting new history of the British airborne experience across the Second World War.
The legendary ‘Red Devils’ were among the finest combat troops of the Second World War. Created at Churchill’s instigation in June 1940, they began as a single parachute battalion of 500 men and grew into three 10,000-strong airborne divisions: the 1st, 6th and 44th Indian, each composed of parachutists and glider-borne troops.
Wearing their distinctive maroon berets, steel helmets and Dennison smocks, they served with distinction in every major theatre of the conflict – including North Africa, Sicily, mainland Europe and the Far East. They played a starring role in some most iconic airborne operations in history: the Bruneval Raid of February 1942; the capture of the Primasole, Pegasus and Arnhem Bridges in July 1943, June 1944 and September 1944 respectively; and Operation Varsity, the biggest parachute drop in history, near Wesel in Germany in March 1945.
Sky Warriors is an accomplished act of storytelling; authoritative, far-reaching and deeply moving. Building the narrative from the ground-up, Saul David draws on multiple archives, published memoirs, unpublished diaries and letters, and interviews with participants. The end result is a dramatic narrative of the airborne forces’ recruitment, training and wartime exploits.
This is the first time the complete wartime story of the British airborne forces has been told.
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Do you often feel exhausted and negative? Do you spend your days feeling tired and wired? Your nights unable to fall asleep easily, or without a drink? Do you wake up anxious and stressed and in need a coffee to get going? Do you forget what you were doing, forget people’s names and where you put things? Is your mental acuity and memory slipping? Are you concerned about your memory or mental wellbeing?
Something depressing is happen to humanity, and possibly even you. Our brains are degenerating and – in parallel – we’re seeing a worrying increase in mental illness across the world. Rates of anxiety, depression, dementia, ADHD and autism are all increasing at an alarming rate across the globe. According to the World Health Organisation, our declining brain health is the greatest threat we face – more than cancer, diabetes or obesity.
Individually and collectively,though, we can optimise our brain health and cognitive function – to improve mood, memory, stress resilience, sleep and ability to focus. How? By understanding the powerful effects that nutrition and other holistic lifestyle factors can have on our brains. In Upgrade Your Brain, bestselling author Patrick Holford will draw on his 40 years’ of expertise – as well as countless experts from around the world – to teach us all how to reverse the tide.
Take an enthralling and richly illustrated trip through the official real-world story of the Barbie™ doll—from groundbreaking toy to beacon of female empowerment.
Created in partnership with Mattel to celebrate Barbie doll’s 65th anniversary and featuring rare images from their archives, Barbie: Her Inspiration, History, and Legacy is a stunning tribute to the beloved pop culture icon that has echoed the taste, style, and events of every decade she has experienced.
Recall the joy of opening a brand-new Barbie box with this sumptuously designed book chronicling every step in the beloved doll’s journey, from entrepreneurial pioneer Ruth Handler’s creation of Barbie in 1959 to the record-breaking film in 2023, and beyond, including:
1. The Birth of Barbie – Learn how Ruth Handler came up with the idea of a doll that allowed little girls to play at being women, then overcame a parade of 2. challenges—including disbelief from her male colleagues that mothers would buy their daughters an adult doll with full-grown breasts—and persevered to create the wildly successful Barbie doll and prove her doubters wrong.
3. Breaking Boundaries – Follow the path that Barbie took from teenage fashion model to over 200 different careers, including trailblazing roles like astronaut in 1965, beating the first American woman, Sally Ride, into space by nearly 20 years, to surgeon in 1973, at a time when the total number of women physicians in the US was around 5 percent, to other male-dominated roles like Marine Corps sergeant, a business executive, and President of the United States.
4. Reflecting Diversity – See how a doll that started with a choice of either blonde or brunette hair now boasts 35 skin tones, 97 hair styles, and 9 body types, with those numbers growing each year.
5. Barbie in Fashion and Art – Explore how the fashion and art worlds have influenced and been influenced by Barbie, from limited edition Barbie fashions from premiere designers like Christian Dior and Michael Kors to a portrait of Barbie by Andy Warhol.
6. Barbie in Pop Culture – Discover all the ways that Barbie has influenced pop culture, from Barbie bloggers and collectors to how her movie smashed 7. records as the highest-grossing domestic release in history, granting its female director, Greta Gerwig, the prize for the highest-grossing film directed by a woman.
Barbie: Her Inspiration, History, and Legacy reveals how Barbie is more than a toy—she is an ideal that lives forever, encouraging girls to persist through to become whatever they dream to be.
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In 1936, Dr B.R. Ambedkar imagined a future for India without caste. He not only condemned the caste system but called for the annihilation of the very idea. For this, he said, the Hindus must discard their Vedas and Shastras that do not teach them reason or morality. The Arya Samaj group that invited him to their annual conference found his views ‘unbearable’ and disinvited him. The undelivered speech, Annihilation of Caste, is a modern classic.
This elegant, affordable, accessible edition offers the best for less.
In sheer magnitude, the Partition was the most cataclysmic event in the history of Delhi. It witnessed the arrival of half a million Hindu and Sikh refugees in the city and the flight of 350,000 Muslims from it. It was thus a period not only of displacement but also of resettlement, one that requires closer analysis if we are to understand the current challenges that face India’s capital.
Rotem Geva sees decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950s, and looks carefully at the structural changes that impacted the politics of both the Muslim League and the Congress. Why is it, she asks, that the demand for Pakistan took root in Delhi when its strongest advocates would ultimately find themselves outside its borders? Why did a relatively peaceful city in previous decades, a centre of Muslim life, erupt in violence in 1947, and that too on such a massive scale? How did the ethnic cleansing that happened reshape the city? And what does the official response to the law-and-order crisis reveal about the architects of independent India and their visions for the new nation?
Delhi Reborn chronicles how a nebulous concept—Pakistan—became concrete in the imagination and practice of the city’s residents in the 1930s and 40s. It also describes the struggle, after Independence, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule. A significant contribution to the discourse on India’s horrific partition, this book is also a brilliant examination of the kind of city, and nation, it left behind.
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The clash between the British Fourteenth Army and the Japanese Fifteenth Army at Imphal in Manipur and at Kohima in the then-Naga Hills of Assam in 1944 was the turning point in the Burma Campaign of the Second World War. It was at these twin battles that the Japanese invasion of India was stopped, with the Allies subsequently driving them out of Burma in 1945. The Japanese lost some 30,000 men, with another 23,000 injured, in what is considered one of their greatest ever defeats on land.
In April 2013, Imphal-Kohima was named ‘Britain’s Greatest Battle’ by the UK’s National Army Museum. Indians fought on both sides–as part of the British Army and alongside the Japanese as soldiers of the Indian National Army (INA). This book is the first battlefield guide for Imphal and Kohima and makes extensive use of maps and present-day photographs of the sites to tell the thrilling, tragic story of the historic battle of Imphal-Kohima, 1944.