James Ciment, in his enthralling history Another America, shows that the settlers struggled to balance their high ideals with their prejudices. On the steamy shores of West Africa, they re-created the only social order they knew, that of an antebellum Dixie, with themselves as the master caste, ruling over a native population that outnumbered them twenty to one. They built plantations, held elegant dances, & worked to protect their fragile independence from the predations of foreign powers. Meanwhile, they fought, abused, & even helped to enslave the native Liberians. The persecuted became the persecutors
- until a lowly native sergeant murdered their president in 1980, ending 133 years of Americo-Liberian rule & inaugurating a quarter century of civil war. Riven by caste, committed to commerce, practicing democratic & Christian ideals haphazardly, the Americo-Liberians created a history that is, to a surprising degree, the mirror image of our own.
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Another America is the first book to present rare & seldom-seen maps made by Native Americans. These maps, which lay little known & little studied for the last three hundred years, open a window on the North American continent as it was understood & experienced by its original inhabitants. With meticulous research, this book brings to life the people, the places, & events of this Native American history. Each map is the focal point for a narrative on the traditions & experiences of the people involved with its creation. The historical & cultural context of the maps is used to illuminate the web of human, animal, natural, & spiritual relationships that shaped the Native American world. The maps record the efficiency of their oral traditions & the fullness with which the land was named, understood, & inhabited. They add a new depth of time to the North American landscape, & are a testament to human endurance & survival. ...

They used to be inseparable. They used to be young, brave & brilliant
- amazingly beautiful & terrifyingly alone. August, Sylvia,
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Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race & liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem & France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott & the friends who search for an understanding of his life & death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way. ...

Saturday, November 23rd, 2013. It was just another day in America; an unremarkable Saturday on which ten children & teens were killed by gunfire. The youngest was nine; the oldest was nineteen. White, Black & Latino, they fell in suburbs, hamlets & ghettos. None made the national news. There was no outrage about their passing. It was just another day in the death of America, where on a daily average
- seven children & teens are killed by guns. Younge picked this day at random, searched for their families & tells their stories. The nine-year-old opened the door & was shot in the head by his mother`s ex-boyfriend. The eleven-year-old was killed by his friend at a sleep over in rural Michigan. The eighteen-year-old gang member, on Chicago`s South Side, was shot in a stairwell just days after being released from prison. Through ten moving chapters
- one for each child
- Younge explores the way these children lived & lost their short lives. He finds out who they were, who they wanted to be, the environments they inhabited, & what this might tell us about society at large. What emerges is a searing portrait of childhood & youth in contemporary America.


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It`s 1975 & in Luanda, the capital of Angola, an apocalyptic atmosphere prevails as the Portuguese residents hurriedly desert the city. Determined to cover events as four hundred years of colonial rule come to an end, Kapuscinski hitched a lift on one of the last Portuguese military aircraft flying to Angola. There he discovered the terrifying spectacle of a civil war whithin the war for national independence: a murderous, messy struggle in which many of the participants can scarcely tell one another apart. Shot through with wit & irony, Kapuscinsky`s superb account vividly conveys the heat, confusion, fear & unrelenting tension of a country tragically divided by its new freedom. & he demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to describe & to explain the individual meaning of grand political abstractions. ...

Lacking even the most basic mechanical knowhow, Tim Moore sets out to cross Trumpland USA in an original Model T Ford. Armed only with a fan belt made from cotton, wooden wheels & a trunkload of ‘wise-ass Limey liberal gumption’, his route takes him exclusively through Donald-voting counties, meeting the everyday folks who voted red along the way. He meets a people defined by extraordinary generosity, willing to shift heaven & earth to keep him on the road. & yet, this is clearly a nation in conflict with itself: citizens ‘tooling up’ in reaction to ever-increasing security fears; a healthcare system creaking to support sugar-loaded soda lovers; a disintegrating rust belt all but forgotten by the warring media & political classes. With his trademark blend of slapstick humour, affable insight & butt-clenching peril, Tim Moore invites us on an unforgettable road trip through Trump’s America. Buckle up! ...

Another Day at Sea by Geoff Dyer is the first title from Writers in Residence; a collectable set of books that bring together some of the greatest writers & photographers on the planet to reveal the normally faceless organizations that shape the modern world. The arresting, full-colour photography, depicting a subculture that is by turns surprising, hilarious, beautiful & insane, is by Chris Steele-Perkins, an award-winning Magnum photographer. Writers in Residence finds a third way between books & magazines, with every book in the set designed by Jeremy Leslie of mag Culture. ? Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots & the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable. Underlying Dyer`s efforts to overcome the disadvantages of being the oldest, tallest (actually, second tallest), & most self-conscious person on the boat is an intense fascination with the military world. In recording daily life on board the ship, Dyer illuminates a society where discipline & conformity, dedication & optimism, become a form of self-expression. ? ...

In November 2011, Geoff Dyer fulfilled a childhood dream of spending time on an aircraft carrier. Dyer`s stay on the USS George Bush, on active service in the Arabian Gulf, proved even more intense, memorable, & frequently hilarious, than he could ever have hoped. In Dyer`s hands, the warship becomes a microcosm for a stocktaking of modern Western life: religion, drugs, chauvinism, farting, gyms, steaks, prayer, parental death, relationships & how to have a beach party with 5000 people on a giant floating hunk of steel. Piercingly perceptive & gloriously funny, this is a unique book about work, war & entering other worlds. ...

Usman is visiting post-war London from Pakistan when he meets a young aspiring artist called Lydia who has, like himself, come out of an unhappy marriage. Just as the lonely strangers` friendship begins to blossom into something deeper Usman has to return to Karachi, leaving Lydia behind. Two years later, Lydia impulsively abandons her life in London & boards a ship to Karachi, where the two are married. But as the years flit by Usman feels distanced from his life & realises that he hasn`t noticed the buds of the gulmohar tree unfurl. A beautiful account of a marriage that is in turns wry & unashamedly romantic. ...