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non-fiction

Non-Fiction


"The worth of Book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it"
-James Bryce-


1. Proffesor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities
Ian Stewart

Description:
School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie, Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing 'curiosities' of maths over the years - now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet.

There are some hidden gems of logic, geometry and probability - like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think), a pop up dodecahedron, the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero and some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermat's last theorem, the Poincare Conjecture, chaos theory, and the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians.

Pull out the drawers of the Professor's cabinet and who knows what could happen?


  Paperback
CZK 290

2. Operation Mincemeat
Ben Macintyre
Description:
One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course of events that would change the course of the Second World War. Operation Mincemeat was the most successful wartime deception ever attempted, and certainly the strangest. It hoodwinked the Nazi espionage chiefs, sent German troops hurtling in the wrong direction, and saved thousands of lives by deploying a secret agent who was different, in one crucial respect, from any spy before or since: he was dead.

His mission: to convince the Germans that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allied armies planned to invade Greece. The brainchild of an eccentric RAF officer and a brilliant Jewish barrister, the great hoax involved an extraordinary cast of characters including a famous forensic pathologist, a gold-prospector, an inventor, a beautiful secret service secretary, a submarine captain, three novelists, a transvestite English spymaster, an irascible admiral who loved fly-fishing, and a dead Welsh tramp. Using fraud, imagination and seduction, Churchill's team of spies spun a web of deceit so elaborate and so convincing that they began to believe it themselves.

The deception started in a windowless basement beneath Whitehall. It travelled from London to Scotland to Spain to Germany. And it ended up on Hitler's desk.

Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of "Agent Zigzag", weaves together private documents, photographs, memories, letters and diaries, as well as newly released material from the intelligence files of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, to tell for the first time the full story of Operation Mincemeat.

Paperback
CZK 350

3. I am Strange Loop
Douglas Hofstadter


Description:
Douglas R Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Godel, Escher, Bach - an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.Can thought arise out of matter? Can self, a soul, a consciousness, an 'I' arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?"I Am a Strange Loop" argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the 'strange loop' - a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one called 'I'. The 'I' is the nexus in our brain, one of many symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.How can a mysterious abstraction be real - or is our 'I' merely a convenient fiction? Does an 'I' exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the laws of physics?These are the mysteries tackled in "I Am a Strange Loop", Douglas R.

Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have been waiting for.
Trade Paperback
CZK 480

4. I Never Knew There Was Word For It
Adam Jacot de Boind

From 'shotclog' a Yorkshire term for a companion only tolerated because he is paying for the drinks to Albanian having 29 words to describe different kinds of eyebrows, the languages of the world are full of amazing, amusing and illuminating words and expressions that will improve absolutely everybody's quality of life. All they need is this book! This bumper volume gathers all three of Adam Jacot de Boinod's acclaimed books about language - "The Wonder of Whiffling", "The Meaning of Tingo" and "Toujours Tingo" (their fans include everyone from Stephen Fry to Michael Palin) - into one highly entertaining, keenly priced compendium. As Mariella Frostup said 'You'll never be lost for words again'.


  Paperback
CZK 520



5. The Rise and Fall of Communism
Archie Brown

Description:
The inexorable rise of Communism was the most momentous political phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. Its demise in Europe and its decline elsewhere have produced the most profound political changes of the last few decades. In this illuminating book, based on forty years of study and a wealth of new sources, Archie Brown provides a comprehensive history as well as an original and compelling analysis of an ideology that has shaped the world.

Tracing the story of Communism from its nineteenth-century roots, the book shows how the political movement Karl Marx described as a 'spectre haunting Europe' expanded throughout the world during the twentieth century, and how the principles and precepts of this revolutionary system became a living reality for many millions of ordinary people. Even today, although Communism has been widely discredited in the West, a quarter of humanity - in Asia and Latin America - still lives under its rule. Archie Brown explores the appeal of Communism to its adherents, its resounding successes and its catastrophic failures.

In the 1950s and '60s, as tensions mounted within Eastern Europe, internal struggles came to dominate party politics, and fresh challenges from the West exerted increasing pressure on the Communist states to reform. The book considers why so many of these apparently invincible regimes collapsed when they did, often extremely suddenly, changing the lives of so many overnight. A groundbreaking work from an internationally renowned specialist, "The Rise and Fall of Communism" is the definitive study of the most remarkable political and human story of our times.

 

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Paperback
CZK 400

6. A History of Christianity
Diarmaid MacCulloch

Description:
Christianity, one of the world's great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organisation and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society. Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth.

He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observes that at the end of the first eight centuries of Christian history, Baghdad might have seemed a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome.


Trade Paperback
CZK 600

7.
 

  The Arabs: A History

Eugene Rogan
Description:
Eugene Rogan has written an authoritative new history of the Arabs in the modern world. Starting with the Ottoman conquests in the sixteenth century, this landmark book follows the story of the Arabs through the era of European imperialism and the Superpower rivalries of the Cold War, to the present age of unipolar American power. Drawing on the writings and eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the tumultuous years of Arab history, "The Arabs" balances different voices - politicians, intellectuals, students, men and women, poets and novelists, famous, infamous and the completely unknown - to give a rich, complex sense of life over nearly five centuries.

Rogan's book is remarkable for its geographical sweep, covering the Arab world from North Africa through the Arabian Peninsula, and for the depth in which it explores every facet of modern Arab history. Charting the evolution of Arab identity from Ottomanism to Arabism to Islamism, it covers themes including the conflict between national independence and foreign domination, the Arab-Israeli struggle and the peace process, Abdel Nasser and the rise of Arab Nationalism, the political and economic power of oil and the conflict between secular and Islamic values. This multilayered, fascinating and definitive work is the essential guide to understanding the history of the modern Arab world - and its future.



Hardback
CZK 1000

8. The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India's Great Emperors
Abraham Eraly

In December 1525 Babur, the great grandson of the Mongol conqueror Tamberlaine, crossed the Indus river into the Punjab with a modest army and some cannon. At the battle of Panipat five months later he routed the mammoth army of the Afghan ruler of Hindustan. Mughal rule in India had begun. It was to continue for over three centuries, shaping India for all time. Full of dramatic episodes and colourful detail, THE MUGHAL EMPIRE tells the story of one of the world's great empires. 'The story of Mughal India is intensely dramatic and colourful and Eraly's lively text does justice to its subject...exciting reading' Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph



Trade Paperback
CZK 700

9. Superclass: How the Rich Ruined Our World
David J. Rothkopf

The Superclass - politicians, military leaders, finance gurus, energy barons, media moguls and thought leaders - is the small group that currently plays the greatest role in shaping the progress of globalization and perhaps the group most changed by that phenomenon, so much so that they have more in common with one another than they do with their own countrymen. And because this group frequently operates outside all national and international regulation, they are often in conflict with the elite in their own countries. Rothkopf offers a provocative and trenchant examination of the overlapping international power clusters.

He reveals who is a member of this global Superclass and who is likely to be joining it and transforming it in the years ahead. And he will explore how the aggressive pursuit of self-interest by some in this class helped to create a world in which inequity is greater than ever - something that may well threaten international stability in our lifetimes.

  Trade Paperback
CZK 400



10. When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World

Martin Jacques

For well over two hundred years we have lived in a western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern is inextricably bound up with being western. The twenty-first century will be different. The rise of China, India and the Asian tigers means that, for the first time, modernity will no longer be exclusively western. The west will be confronted with the fact that its systems, institutions and values are no longer the only ones on offer. The key idea of Martin Jacques' ground-breaking new book is that we are moving into an era of contested modernity. The central player in this new world will be China. Continental in size and mentality, China is a 'civilization-state' whose characteristics, attitudes and values long predate its existence as a nation-state. Although clearly influenced by the west, its extraordinary size and history mean that it will remain highly distinct, and as it exercises its rapidly growing power it will change much more than the world's geo-politics. The nation-state as we understand it will no longer be globally dominant, and the Westphalian state-system will be transformed; ideas of race will be redrawn. This profound and far-sighted book explains for the first time the deeper meaning of the rise of China.

Hardback
CZK 650