September Non-fiction general

In her global phenomenon The 5 Second Rule, Mel Robbins taught millions of people around the world the five second secret to motivation. Now she's back with another simple, proven tool you can use to take control of your life: The High 5 Habit.Don't let the title fool you. This isn't a book about high fiving everyone else in your life. You're already doing that. Cheering for your favourite teams. Celebrating your friends. Supporting the people you love as they go after what they want in life.Imagine if you gave that same love and encouragement to yourself. Or even better, you made it a daily habit.You'd be unstoppable.In this book, Mel teaches you how to start high fiving the most important person in your life, the one who is staring back at you in the mirror: YOURSELF.If you struggle with self-doubt (and who doesn't?) ...If you're tired of that nagging critic in your head (could somebody evict them already?) ...If you're wildly successful but all you focus on is what's going wrong (you're not alone) ...If you're sick of watching everybody else get ahead while you sit on the couch with your dog (don't bring your dog into this) ......Mel dedicates this book to you.Using her signature science-backed wisdom, deeply personal stories and the real-life results that The High 5 Habit is creating in people's lives around the world (and you'll meet a lot of them throughout this book), Mel will teach you how to make believing in yourself a habit so that you operate with the confidence that your goals and dreams demand.The High 5 Habit is a simple yet profound tool that changes your attitude, your mindset and your behaviour. So be prepared to laugh and learn as you take steps to immediately boost your confidence, happiness and results.It's time to give yourself the high fives, celebration and support you deserve.

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Discover the ground-breaking, must-read history of Africa, the Sunday Times bestseller charting the epic story of the oldest inhabited continent in the world from the perspectives of Africans themselves. Shortlisted for the Nero Book AwardsPicked as a best paperback by the Sunday Times, Guardian and I paperRadio 4 Book of the WeekAs recommended on The Rest is PoliticsEveryone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone. For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism or simply ignored. Now, award-winning journalist and broadcaster Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight. In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history – from the origins of humanity, through ancient civilisations and medieval empires, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence.Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, Badawi weaves together a gripping new history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.

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Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne. Franklin Avenue was also the breaking and then the remaking - and thus the true making - of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters - letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don't read them so much as breathe them - as the key to unlocking Didion.

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Kate Price grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with her sister and parents. Price was destined to leave, and in doing so, to break one of many, unwritten rules when it came to unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse. She started a new life in Boston where she discovered the truth of her dark past through a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a "chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones."Overcome with unexplainable grief, she sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist, to help her understand these flashbacks. Price discovered what that darkness that lay within her was - that her father had abused and trafficked her as a child. And so began a 10-year quest with a journalist from the Boston Globe, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned proof Price had been searching for.Now, in her exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood, to create a life and family on her own terms. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.

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Musicians have often wanted to change the world. From underground innovators to pop icons, many believe in the political power of music. Rulers recognise it too. Music challenges the political order—and props up the status quo. Now updated in a new edition, Sound System is the story of one musician’s journey to discover what makes music so powerful. Dave Randall uses his insider’s knowledge of the industry to shed light on the secrets of celebrity, commodification and culture. This is a book of raves, riots and revolution. From Glastonbury to Gaza, the attention economy to AI, Randall asks: how can we make music serve the interests of the many, rather than the few?

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Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a visionary thinker whose legacy continues to shape conversations on identity, power and resistance. Here, leading Fanon scholar Azzedine Haddour explores themes of gender, revolutionary struggle and decolonisation in the first comprehensive study of Fanon’s lesser-known work, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1959). Drawing on archival material, the author explores the historical developments that determined the colonial consensus and the social transformation prompted by the Algerian liberation struggle. Haddour engages with the biopolitics of French colonialism to support Fanon’s claim that the medical establishment acted in complicity with colonialism. He recounts various assimilationist laws that resulted in the gendering of colonial space and shows how the wars alter the perception of the colonised population through modern Western technologies like the radio. In an era where global struggles for independence and self-determination persist, this book is a fascinating new journey into the mind of a groundbreaking philosopher and icon of revolution.

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Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day and then ages out. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable.Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn't, he has learned that being an artist is not about your specific output; it's about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone's life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities.The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distils the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime's work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments - and lifetimes - of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.

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