Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
How do we discuss serious ideas in the age of 24-hour news? What was rhetoric in the past and what should it be now? And what does Islamic State have in common with Donald Trump?
We’ve never had more information or more opportunity to debate the issues of the day. Yet the relationship between politicians, the media and the public is characterised by suspicion, mistrust and apathy. What has gone wrong?
Enough Said reveals how political, social and technological change has transformed our political landscape – and how we talk about the issues that affect us all. Political rhetoric has become stale and the mistrust of politicians has made voters flock to populists who promise authenticity, honesty and truth instead of spin, evasiveness and lies.
Taken from Penguin
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
In March 1946, scientists began to track thousands of children born in one cold week. No one imagined that this would become the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass five generations of children. Today, they are some of the best-studied people on the planet, and the simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent and die. This is the tale of these studies and the remarkable discoveries that have come from them. Touching almost every person in Britain today, they are one of our best-kept secrets.
Taken from Penguin
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along ‘the Marches’ – the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. Brian, a ninety-year-old former colonial official and intelligence officer, arrives in Newcastle from Scotland dressed in tartan and carrying a draft of his new book You Know More Chinese Than You Think. Rory comes from his home in the Lake District, carrying a Punjabi fighting stick which he used when walking across Afghanistan.
On their six-hundred-mile, thirty-day journey – with Rory on foot, and his father ‘ambushing’ him by car – the pair relive Scottish dances, reflect on Burmese honey-bears, and on the loss of human presence in the British landscape. On mountain ridges and in housing estates they uncover a forgotten country crushed between England and Scotland: the Middleland. They cross upland valleys which once held forgotten peoples and languages – still preserved in sixth-century lullabies and sixteenth-century ballads. The surreal tragedy of Hadrian’s Wall forces them to re-evaluate their own experiences in the Iraq and Vietnam wars. The wild places of the uplands reveal abandoned monasteries, border castles, secret military test sites and newly created wetlands. They discover unsettling modern lives, lodged in an ancient land. Their odyssey develops into a history of nationhood, an anatomy of the landscape, a chronicle of contemporary Britain and an exuberant encounter between a father and a son.
Taken from Penguin
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors, including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave, Tim Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, and offers a gripping, day-by-day account of what really happened behind-the-scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, UKIP and Britain Stronger in Europe.
Shipman gives his readers a ringside seat on how decisions were made, mistakes justified and betrayals perpetrated. Filled with stories, anecdotes and juicy leaks the book does not seek to address the rights and wrongs of Brexit but to explore how and why David Cameron chose to take the biggest political gamble of his life and explain why he lost.
Taken from HarperCollins
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
Eloquent and searingly honest, this is Hibo’s memoir which promises not only to tell her remarkable story but also to shed light on a medieval practice that’s being carried out in the 21stcentury, right on our doorstep. FGM in the UK has gone undocumented for too long and now that’s going to change. Devastating, empowering and informative, this book brings to life a clash of cultures at the heart of contemporary society and shows how female genital mutilation is a very British problem.
Taken from Simon & Schuster
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
The Return is at once a universal and an intensely personal tale. It is an exquisite meditation on how history and politics can bear down on an individual life. And yet Hisham Matar’s memoir isn’t just about the burden of the past, but the consolation of love, literature and art. It is the story of what it is to be human.
Hisham Matar was nineteen when his father was kidnapped and taken to prison in Libya. He would never see him again. Twenty-two years later, the fall of Gaddafi meant he was finally able to return to his homeland. In this moving memoir, the author takes us on an illuminating journey, both physical and psychological; a journey to find his father and rediscover his country.
Taken from Penguin
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, the seven members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s military council met to proclaim an Irish Republic with themselves as the provisional government. After a week of fighting with the British army on the streets of Dublin, the Seven were arrested, court-martialled and executed.
Cutting through the layers of veneration that have seen them regarded unquestioningly as heroes and martyrs by many, Ruth Dudley Edwards provides shrewd yet sensitive portraits of Ireland’s founding fathers. She explores how an incongruous group, which included a communist, visionary Catholic poets and a tobacconist, joined together to initiate an armed rebellion that changed the course of Irish history. Brilliant, thought-provoking and captivatingly told, The Seven challenges us to see past the myths and consider the true character and legacy of the Easter Rising.
Taken from Oneworld Publications
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
In it, award-winning historian and broadcaster David Olusoga offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare’s Othello.
It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain’s global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of the First World War. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.
Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries.
Taken from Pan Macmillan
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
The Tears of the Rajasis a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family. For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own. Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise.
On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India. The Lows are the family of the author’s grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget.
The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers – the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral – but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust. An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.
Taken from and read more at: Simon & Schuster.
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
When Emma Sky, an intrepid young British woman, volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, she had little idea what she was letting herself in for. It was only supposed to last three months but instead spanned a decade. As the representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk and then the political advisor to US General Odierno, Sky was valued for her outspoken voice and different perspectives that she brought due to her knowledge of the Middle East. Since the invasion in 2003, Sky has been a tireless witness to American efforts to transform a country traumatized by decades of war, sanctions and brutal dictatorship; to insurgencies and civil war; to the planning and implementation of the surge and the subsequent drawdown of US troops; to corrupt political elites who use sectarianism to mobilize support; and to the takeover of a third of the country by the Islamic State.
Called the ‘modern-day Gertrude Bell’ by The Times, Sky provides unique insights into the US military, and the complexities, diversity and evolution of Iraqi society. With sharp detail, tremendous empathy and respect for those who served – The Unravelling is an intimate portrait of how and why the Iraq adventure failed despite the best and often heroic efforts of its young men and women on the ground.
Taken from and read more at Atlantic Books.
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
A vivid, seminal portrait of early 1980s Britain: a period that changed Britain forever The early 1980s in Britain were a time of hope, and of dread: of Cold War tension and imminent conflict, when crowds in the street could mean an ecstatic national celebration or an inner-city riot. Here, Andy Beckett recreates an often misunderstood moment of transition, with all its potential and uncertainty: the first precarious years of Margaret Thatcher’s government. By the end of 1982, the country was changing, leaving the kinder, more sluggish postwar Britain decisively behind, and becoming the country we have lived in ever since: assertive, commercially driven, outward-looking, often harsher than its neighbours. Taken from www.penguin.co.uk
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
We all depend on the finance sector. We need it to store our money, manage our payments, finance housing stock, restore infrastructure, fund retirement and support new business. But these roles comprise only a tiny sliver of the sector’s activity: the vast majority of lending is within the finance sector. So what is it all for? What is the purpose of this activity? And why is it so profitable?
John Kay, a distinguished economist with wide experience of the financial sector, argues that the industry’s perceived profitability is partly illusory, and partly an appropriation of wealth created elsewhere – of other people’s money. The financial sector, he shows, has grown too large, detached itself from ordinary business and everyday life, and has become an industry that mostly trades with itself, talks to itself, and judges itself by reference to standards which it has itself generated. And the outside world has itself adopted those standards, bailing out financial institutions that have failed all of us through greed and mismanagement. We need finance, but today we have far too much of a good thing. In Other People’s Money, John Kay shows, in his inimitable style, what has gone wrong in the dark heart of finance.
Taken from and read more at Profile Books.
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
Ever since civilised society began, we have felt the need to classify, categorise and specialise. It can make things more efficient, and help give the leaders of any organisation a sense of confidence that they have the right people focusing on the right tasks. But it can also be catastrophic, leading to tunnel vision and tribalism. Most importantly it can create a structural fog, with the full picture of where an organisation is heading hidden from view. It is incredibly widespread: the chances are these ‘silos’ are rife in any organisation or profession, whether your business, or your local school or hospital. Across industries and cultures, as this brilliant and penetrating book shows, silos have the power to collapse companies and destabilise financial markets, yet they still dominate the workplace. They blind and confuse us, often making modern institutions act in risky, silly and damaging ways. Gillian Tett has spent years covering financial markets and business, but she’s also a trained anthropologist, having completed a doctorate at Cambridge University and conducted field work in Tibet and Tajikistan. She’s no stranger to questioning the assumptions and practices of a culture. Those in question – financial trading desks, urban police forces, surgical teams within medical clinics, software debuggers and consumer product engineers – have practices and rituals as ordered and intricate as those of any far-flung tribe. In The Silo Effect, she uses an anthropological lens to explore how individuals, teams and whole organisations often work in silos of thought, process and product. With examples drawn from a range of fascinating areas – the New York Fire Department and Facebook to the Bank of England and Sony – these narratives illustrate not just how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos but also how the brightest institutions and individuals can master them. The Silo Effect is a sharp, visionary and inspiring work with the insight, prescriptions and power to remove our organisational blinders and transform the way we think for the better. Take from and read more at https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780748129010
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev launched Perestroika, opened Russia up to the world, ended the Cold War and gave his people freedom. The demise of the Soviet Union offered hope that Russia would become a ‘normal’, ‘civilized’ country, embracing Western values of democracy and the free market. Thirty years later, Russia emerged as a corporate state, overcome by imperial nationalism, fanned by its authoritarian president Vladimir Putin, who smashed the post-Cold War order and ignited a war on the borders of Europe. How did a country that liberated itself from seventy years of Soviet rule end up as one of the biggest threats to the West and, above all, to its own future? Why did the people who rejected Communist ideology come to accept state propaganda? In this bold and important book, Arkady Ostrovsky takes the reader on an enthralling journey from Gorbachev’s freedom to Putin’s war, illuminating the key turning points that often took the world by surprise.
The main characters are not politicians, however, but those who took charge of the media and the message and invented Russia’s dominant narrative. From the suddenly wealthy men who came to command the airwaves to the newspaper editors and TV directors, and from the Russian intelligentsia to the Kremlin spin doctors and ideologists, The Invention of Russia shows just how these figures shaped the country during the tumultuous post-Soviet transformation. As a foreign correspondent in his own country, Ostrovsky has experienced Russia’s modern history first-hand, and through original research and interviews he reveals the ideological conflicts, compromises and temptations that have left Russia on a knife-edge.
Taken from and read more at Atlantic Books.
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
When Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article,”Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”first appeared, it immediately went viral, sparking a firestorm of debate across countries and continents. Within four days, it had become the most-read article in the history of the magazine. In the following months, Slaughter became a leading voice in the discussion on work-life balance and on women’s changing role in the workplace. Now, Slaughter is here with her eagerly anticipated take on the problems we still face, and how we can finally get past them. In her pragmatic, down-to-earth style, Slaughter bursts the bubble on all the”half-truths”we tell young women about”having it all”, and explains what is really necessary to get true gender equality, both in the workplace and at home. Deeply researched, and filled with all the warm, wise and funny anecdotes that first made her the most trusted and admired voice on the issue, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s book is sure to change minds, ignite debate and be the topic of conversation. Taken from and read more at https://www.oneworld-publications.com/books/anne-marie-slaughter/unfinished-business#.Vt18_vmLRD8
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
Sudhir Hazareesingh’s How the French Think is a warm yet incisive exploration of the French intellectual tradition, and its exceptional place in a nation’s identity and lifestyle. The French: orderly and anarchic, rational and mystical, arrogant and anxious, charming and exasperating, serious and frivolous, pessimistic, pleasure-loving – and, perhaps more than any other people, intellectual. In this original and entertaining approach to France and the French, Sudhir Hazareesingh describes how the French ways of thought and life connect to make them such a distinctive nation. One of the purposes of How The French Think is to convey the ideas of some of the most influential French thinkers of the past 400 years – Voltaire and Rousseau, Hugo and Michelet, Camus and Sartre, Lévi-Strauss and Foucault. Sudhir Hazareesingh is able to show how bold, imaginative and sweeping French thought is, how greatly it values high culture (in contrast to the English) and how it has given an almost sacred role to the writer – hence the prominent role of intellectuals in French collective life, and the intensity with which ideas are debated. The book explores the French commitment to rationalism and ideology, their belief in the State, their cult of heroes and their contempt for materialism. It describes their stylistic fetishes, their fondness for general notions, their love of paradoxes, their current fixations with the nation and collective memory, their messianic instincts and their devotion to universalism. ‘France’, claimed the historian Ernest Lavisse without a trace of irony, ‘is charged with representing the cause of humanity’. How The French Think ranges from Descartes to Derrida, and from big moral and philosophical issues to the symbolic significance of Astérix and the survival of the French language in a globalized world. Drawing on a colourful range of sources, and written with warmth and humour, it will appeal to all lovers of France and of French culture. Taken from and read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/184683/how-the-french-think/#c3QayDq6CW5RiSLZ.99
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
Government, business, the lives we lead, the food we eat, the way our children are brought up, the way we relate to the natural world around us – it’s all become too big and distant and industrialised. Inhuman. It’s time to do something about it. It’s time to put people first. It’s time to make the world more human. Steve Hilton, visiting professor at Stanford University and former senior adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron, believes that the frustrations people have with government, politics, their economic circumstances and their daily lives are caused by deep structural problems in the systems that dominate our modern world – systems that are broken because they’ve grown too far from the human scale. He shows us how change is possible, offering the latest research, compelling stories and case studies from all over the world across industry, politics, education, design and social action to show us what can happen when we make our world more human. This book is a manifesto and call to action for a more local, more accountable and more human way of living that will make us more productive, more fulfilled and ultimately happier. Taken from and read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1108855/more-human/#HGC9eWtIL6FmkFzR.99
Posted on March 7, 2016 by The Orwell Prize -
In January 2011, as the crowds gathered to protest Mubarak’s three decades of rule in Egypt, Wendell Steavenson went to Cairo to cover the story. But the revolution defied historical precedent, and it defied the templates of storytelling. There was no single villain, no lone hero, no neat conclusion that wouldn’t be overturned the next day. Tahrir Square changed its moods like the weather; fickle, violent, hopeful, carnival.
As she walks among the tents and the tanks, falling into conversation, sharing cigarettes and cold soda, Steavenson tells the story of a seismic historical moment as it is experienced by ordinary citizens. Here, we meet a young man from the slums with his homemade pistol; a seasoned observer who gives up on analysis; a leader who doesn’t want to lead thrust uncomfortably into the spotlight; a Muslim Brotherhood politician trying to smooth over a restless parliament; and a military intelligence officer convinced that only the army can save Egypt.
Steavenson captures the cacophony of dizzying events as protests and elections ebbed and flowed around the revolution, tipping it towards democracy and then back into the military’s hands. Mixing reportage and travelogue, Circling the Square shows how the particular and the personal can illuminate more universal questions: what does democracy mean? What happens when a revolution throws everything up in the air?
Taken from and read more at Granta.