A brilliant non fiction book can allow you to walk in someone else’s shoes. It can give you something to talk about down at the pub (now that they’ve opened back up again). They can help you at any table quiz, zoom or not. Mostly though, they can show you the world from a whole new perspective.
We have some amazing non fiction to recommend for you this month! Whether you’re a fan of sports legends or history, we have something for you!
Phil Mickelson is one of the most compelling figures in sports. For more than three decades, he has been among the best golfers in the world. His unmatched longevity was exemplified at the 2021 PGA Championship. Mickelson, on the cusp of turning fifty-one, became the oldest player in history to win a major championship.
In this raw and unauthorised biography, Shipnuck captures a singular life defined by thrilling victories, crushing defeats and countless controversies. Mickelson is a multi-faceted character. All his warring impulses are on display in this book. A smart-ass who built an empire on being the consummate professional. Theloving husband dogged by salacious rumours. Or the high-stakes gambler who knows the house always wins but can’t tear himself away.
Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and Lenin’s single-minded Communist dictatorship. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man’s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts.
Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed international bestseller Stalingrad, assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital.
It’s a very tangible thing you can do everyday that will shift your focus to what you have rather than pining and obsessing over what you don’t have. Away from a state of lack into limitless abundance…’ So what happens when we stop taking things for granted and start putting some grá* into our gratitude?
When we consciously turn our heads and hearts to what we have and focus on the good? In Joy Rider, television presenter and host of the podcast Thanks A Million, Angela Scanlon, presents her guide to tapping into your own natural super resource – joy. This book is an invitation to embrace the kind of gratitude that cuts through the bulls**t of life to its truth, connecting us with the present and grounding us in self.
When there is so much to feel anxious about, Angela shares with readers how focusing our attention on the small, incremental positives in life can completely change it for the better.
This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.
This book explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live – or survive in tiny, precarious numbers – to give us a possible glimpse of what happens when mankind’s impact on nature is forced to stop. From Tanzanian mountains to the volcanic Caribbean, the forbidden areas of France to the mining regions of Scotland, Flyn brings together some of the most desolate, eerie, ravaged and polluted areas in the world – and shows how, against all odds, they offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery.
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? Is it important to have a child as your own life fades away?
Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book. Yet his words live on as a guide to us all.
