January Non-fiction General

A radiant new memoir from beloved artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award Winner Just Kids.God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper, writes Patti Smith in this indelible account of her life as an artist. A post-Second World War childhood unfolds in a condemned housing complex described in Dickensian detail: consumptive children, vanishing neighbours, an infested rat house, and a beguiling book of Irish fairytales. We enter the child’s world of the imagination where Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises and searches for sacred silver pennies.The most intimate of Smith’s memoirs, Bread of Angels takes us through her teenage years where the first glimmers of art and romance take hold. Arthur Rimbaud and Bob Dylan emerge as creative heroes and role models as Patti starts to write poetry, then lyrics, merging both into the iconic songs and recordings such as Horses and Easter, ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Because the Night’.She leaves it all behind to marry her one true love, Fred Sonic Smith, with whom she creates a life of devotion and adventure on a canal in St. Clair Shores, Michigan with ancient willows and fulsome pear trees. She builds a room of her own, furnished with a pillow of Moroccan silk, a Persian cup, inkwell and fountain pen. The couple spend nights in their landlocked Chris-Craft studying nautical maps and charting new adventures as they start their family.As Smith suffers profound losses, grief and gratitude are braided through years of caring for her children, rebuilding her life and, finally, writing again — the one constant in a life driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane into the beautiful, the commonplace into the magical, and pain into hope. In the final pages, we meet Patti on the road again, the vagabond who travels to commune with herself, who lives to write and writes to live.

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Honest and credible about both the successes and the failings of liberation leaders.’ - Mavuso Msimang Deputy President of ANC Veterans and former ANC Underground. Why are liberation and independence movements often betrayed when their leaders get into government? This question has haunted Peter Hain for decades. A lifelong activist and politician, Hain has over 50 years’ experience of battling corruption, from his early days as a freedom fighter against apartheid to his time as a UK Labour MP, cabinet minister, and sitting member of the House of Lords. He offers a gripping exploration of why movements born from the ideals of justice and freedom often succumb to bad governance and corruption once in power. Combining rigorous analysis with well-sourced evidence, this book examines global examples ranging from Africa to Latin America, Russia, the Caribbean, China and India. With the unique perspective of having navigated both the streets of protest and the corridors of power, Hain reflects on the challenges of staying true to the values of liberation struggles while confronting their disappointing outcomes. Thought-provoking and accessible, this book is an essential read for anyone engaged in the fight for a better world.

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Businessman, author, professor, and podcaster Scott Galloway offers a path forward for men and parents of boys.The lack of attention to the growing masculinity crisis has created a void which is now being dangerously filled by the Manosphere and misogyny. Male suicide rates are sky high; employment rates are low and mental health and relationship issues are impossible to ignore. This is not just a male issue: it is affecting society as a whole.Scott Galloway has been sounding the alarm on this issue for years. In Notes on Being a Man, Galloway explores what it means to be a man today, and provides a roadmap for healthy masculinity and mental strength. He shares his own story from boyhood to manhood. In exploring issues like childhood, depression, anger, pressure, money and relationships, he shares the sometimes funny, often painful, lessons he learned along the way.With unflinching honesty, Scott Galloway maps out an enriching, inspiring operator’s manual for being a man today.BOYS AND MEN ARE IN CRISIS. SCOTT GALLOWAY HAS A PATH FORWARD.NOTES FOR BEING A MAN:Being a good dad means being good to women.Action absorbs anxiety.Find what you’re good at and follow your talent.Get out of the house.Take risk and be willing to feel like an imposter. This is a key to professional success, and masculinity.Acknowledge your blessings, and create opportunities for others.Be of surplus value.Be kind. 

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A new collection of simple yet powerful words and wisdom from Warren Buffett about today’s economy and how investing has changed in the past two decades – from crypto to climate change – compiled and commented upon by bestselling authors Mary Buffett and David Clark. Warren Buffett’s investment achievements are unparalleled. He owes his success to hard work, integrity, and the most elusive commodity of all, common sense. In The New Tao of Warren Buffett, Mary Buffett – coauthor of the bestselling Buffettology series – joins David Clark to bring readers more of Warren Buffett’s smartest, funniest, and most memorable sayings that reveal the life philosophy and the investment strategies that have made Warren Buffett, and the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, so enormously wealthy. Collected from a variety of fresh sources, including personal conversations, corporate reports, profiles, and interviews, the new quotations here reflect Warren’s practical strategies and provide useful tips for every investor, large or small. Including short explanations for each quote and examples from Buffett’s own business transactions, these ruminations on everything from AI to inflation illustrate his words at work. Inspiring, thought-provoking and invaluable, this irresistibly browsable book offers priceless investment savvy that anyone can take to the bank – and is destined to become a new classic.  

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Frank Sayi grew up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the 1970s. His childhood straddled two very significant periods in his country's history, both of which heavily influenced his memoir. The first was the war of liberation (1975-1979), closely followed by the post-independence internecine war (1981-1987).Crucially, Frank was raised in a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's racist and illegal regime. Native reserves were places of repression, and containment-replete of hope.Frank and his two older sisters, Thoko and Gift, lived with their grandmother, a stern, wise, mercurial matriarch, capable of intimidating severity, and her son Uncle Sami. Frank's mother, the main breadwinner, lived in the city. Frank and his siblings didn't see much of her; in his mind she was just another sister.The memoir is intricately woven around the lives of the members of Frank's immediate family, whom he uses to foreground the tragic lives of a people caught within the web of war.Their lives were extremely hard. During the war a dusk-to-dawn curfew was declared, schools were closed, and food supply chains and clothing contaminated with poison. Thousands of refugees fled the warring factions. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, various law enforcement agencies, and the guerrillas fighting for freedom: they were all men of violence, who terrorised the civilian population.However, by June 1979 there was a brief hiatus in fighting. And after protracted negotiations, Blacks gained their independence from white rule in April 1980. The country had a new name: Zimbabwe; Blacks welcomed a new national anthem-Nkosi sikelel'Africa! - God Bless Africa - but after an extra-ordinarily convenient discovery of an arms cache was made on a farm in Matabeleland, the stronghold of the opposition, Robert Mugabe declared total war on Matabeleland. He unleashed Gukurundi, his North Korean-trained partisan army on the Ndebele people who hadn't voted for him. Simply put, this was a war of retribution.By 1982 Frank had joined his father's family in N'kayi, one of the areas to experience the most intense violence and massacres by Gukurahundi soldiers. By using scorched-earth tactics, they brought famine, disease, murder, rape, and terror.Within their first week of deployment, they'd ruthlessly dispensed with more than 2000 lives.And as a silhouette of war, Frank's memoir showcases human capacity for extra-ordinary violence, but also, compassion, endurance, survival and the triumph of the human spirit. It binds together the narratives from two wars and acts as lens through which the implications of political violence in Zimbabwe can be understood. Frank goes beyond and beneath standard historical narratives of war and examines the psychological impact of war on ordinary people.But more importantly, Frank's memoir tells of a childhood conditioned in the shadow of the mayhem brought about by the structure

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