Minds Eye, The

The Minds Eye

by Oliver Sacks, ISBN:9780330513999, R195.00

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Due November 2010

Review

“An absorbing attempt to unravel the complexities of the human mind.” –Kirkus --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

The bestselling author of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" describes how we experience the visual world. In "Musicophilia", Oliver Sacks explored music and the brain; now, in "The Mind's Eye", he writes about the myriad ways in which we experience the visual world: how we see in three dimensions; how we recognize individual faces or places; how we use language to communicate verbally; how we translate marks on paper into words and paragraphs, even how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed. Alongside remarkable stories of people who have lost these abilities but adapted with courage, resilience and ingenuity, there is an added, personal element: one day in late 2005, Sacks became aware of a dazzling, flashing light in one part of his visual field; it was not the familiar migraine aura he had experienced since childhood, and just two days later a malignant tumor in one eye was diagnosed. In subsequent journal entries - some of which are included in "The Mind's Eye" - he chronicled the experience of living with cancer, recording both the effects of the tumor itself, and radiation therapy. In turning himself into a case history, Sacks has given us perhaps his most intimate, impressive and insightful (no pun intended) book yet.

Fear, The

The Fear - the last days of Robert Mugabe

by Peter Godwin, ISBN:9780330513951, R195.00

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Due October 2010

In mid-2008, after thirty years of increasingly tyrannical rule, Robert Mugabe, the 84-year-old ruler of Zimbabwe, met with his politburo. He had just lost an election. But instead of conceding power, Mugabe was persuaded to launch a brutal campaign of terror to cower Zimbabwe’s citizens. Journalist and author Peter Godwin was one of a few observers to slip into the country and bear witness to the terrifying period that Zimbabweans call simply, The Fear.
Following on from his compelling and moving memoirs Mukiwa. Told with Godwin’s brilliant eye for character and natural story-telling gifts, this dark story of Africa’s corruption and violence is populated by extraordinary characters whose lives have been shaped by The Fear.

Fall of giants

Fall of Giants

by Ken Follett, ISBN:9780230710078, R275.00

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Due 28 September 2010

This is a huge novel that follows five families through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for votes for women. It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian brothers, whose plans to emigrate to America fall foul of war, conscription and revolution. In a plot of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty.

Conversations with Myself

Conversations with Myself

by Nelson Mandela, ISBN:9780230749016, R290.00

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Due 12 October 2010

Nelson Mandela is one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has opened his personal archive, which offers an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life. Conversations With Myself gives readers access to the private man behind the public figure: from letters written in the darkest hours of Mandela's twenty-seven years of imprisonment to the draft of an unfinished sequel to Long Walk to Freedom. Here he is making notes and even doodling during meetings, or recording troubled dreams on the desk calendar of his cell on Robben Island; and, writing journals while on the run during the anti-apartheid struggles in the early 1960s, or conversing with friends in almost seventy hours of recorded conversations. In these pages he is neither an icon nor a saint; here he is like you and me. An intimate journey from the first stirrings of his political conscience to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations With Myself is a rare chance to spend time with Nelson Mandela the man, in his own voice: direct, clear, private.

Art of happiness

Art of Happiness in a troubled world

by His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Howard C Cutler, ISBN:9780340794401, R120.00

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Of the many Dalai Lama titles on sale, THE ART OF HAPPINESS -- written with western psychiatrist Howard Cutler -- is by far the biggest bestseller of them all. A huge international success, it has sold over 2 million copies worldwide, with over 300,000 of these sales in the UK alone. Now, this inspirational new book brings the successful East-meets-West pairing together again to provide a practical application of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual values to the fast-paced, unpredictable, stressful and demanding world we all live in today.In this wise, insightful and practical book, the Dalai Lama shows us how to follow the path that will lead us to fulfilment, purpose and happiness, even in our troubled modern times.

Shanghai Girls

Shanghai Girls

by Lisa See, ISBN:9781408801123, R110.00

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Two sisters, a world at war and one life-changing secret.

Shanghai, 1937. Pearl and May are two sisters from a bourgeois family. Though their personalities are very different - Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid - they are inseparable best friends. Both are beautiful, modern and living a carefree life until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away the family's wealth, and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to two 'Gold Mountain' men: Americans. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, the two sisters set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of southern China, in and out of the clutches of brutal soldiers, and even across the ocean, through the humiliation of an anti-Chinese detention centre to a new, married life in Los Angeles' Chinatown. Here they begin a fresh chapter, despite the racial discrimination and anti-Communist paranoia, because now they have something to strive for: a young, American-born daughter, Joy. Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are - Shanghai girls.

Testing Times

Testing Times - In pursuit of the ashes

by Andrew Strauss, ISBN:9780340840702, R135.00

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TESTING TIMES is the 2009 Ashes-winning captain's personal account of a remarkable two-year period in world cricket. When Strauss went out for his second innings in the Napier Test of March 2008, everyone thought -- including the man himself -- he was one false stroke from the end of his England career. With extracts from his diary Strauss gives a unique insight into the torment which many Test cricketers go through. Taking the reader behind the scenes, Strauss describes his momentous experiences, such as Kevin Pietersen's captaincy, the dramatic events of the Stanford Twenty20 series, the shocking terrorist attack in Mumbai, his feat of becoming the first England batsman to hit two centuries in a Test in Asia, his sudden appointment as England captain, and his team being dismissed for 51 in his first Test. Both revealing and forthright, TESTING TIMES captures all the excitement of the 2009 Ashes triumph in which his magnificent batting and calm leadership played such a role: the agonising last day at Cardiff, England's first Ashes victory at Lord's for 75 years, the horrors of Headingley, and finally the joy at the Oval of regaining the Ashes.