The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

How can one shower beauty on moments of despair, sickness and rage without changing their truth? This is the question at the heart of Thea Khama's breakthrough autobiography, Rough Diamond. Tracing her life from birth through adolescence to her early twenties, and told through soul songs, Khama shares the light and darkness of her journey in discovering her place in the unknown mysteries of the world. With an emphasis on love's universal language of healing, Khama tells her story of endurance and pain, but also of the unspoken connections that link us all together; for every aching memory there is another of hope and kindness. Insightful and heartfelt, Rough Diamond is the story of one woman's discovery of herself and the spiritual world.

An action-packed thriller of family, business and betrayal - perfect for fans of Succession - by global sensation Wilbur Smith. 'A master storyteller' - Sunday Times 'Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared' - The Times 'No one does adventure quite like Smith' - Daily Mirror Some people will never have enough . . . Johnny Lance was taken in by the Van Der Byls when he was an orphaned boy, and his life has been dedicated to making his adoptive father proud. But his efforts have been in vain, his father loathes him and, in his dying breath, makes one final demand of his biological son, the jealous and vengeful Benedict: to destroy his half-brother. When Johnny is tricked by Benedict into losing his entire fortune to the Van Der Byls company, he becomes a laughingstock. Benedict's sister, the smart and beautiful Tracey, loves Johnny and buys him a concession in the diamond rich seabeds of the South-West African Coast. But the obsessive Benedict has been shaped at his father's hand and will do anything to finish what he started. Even if it means destroying everything . . .

Using Texas as a case study for understanding change in the American juvenile justice system over the past century, the author tells the story of three cycles of scandal, reform, and retrenchment, each of which played out in ways that tended to extend the privileges of a protected childhood to white middle- and upper-class youth, while denying those protections to blacks, Latinos, and poor whites. On the forefront of both progressive and "get tough" reform campaigns, Texas has led national policy shifts in the treatment of delinquent youth to a surprising degree. Changes in the legal system have included the development of courts devoted exclusively to young offenders, the expanded legal application of psychological expertise, and the rise of the children's rights movement. At the same time, broader cultural ideas about adolescence have also changed. Yet the author demonstrates that as the notion of the teenager gained currency after World War II, white, middle-class teen criminals were increasingly depicted as suffering from curable emotional disorders even as the rate of incarceration rose sharply for black, Latino, and poor teens. He argues that despite the struggles of reformers, child advocates, parents, and youths themselves to make juvenile justice live up to its ideal of offering young people a second chance, the story of twentieth-century juvenile justice in large part boils down to the exclusion of poor and nonwhite youth from modern categories of childhood and adolescence.

After his breakthrough with Ziggy Stardust and before his U.S. pop hits "Fame" and "Golden Years" David Bowie produced a dark and difficult concept album set in a post-apocalyptic "Hunger City" populated by post-human "mutants." Diamond Dogs includes the great glam anthem "Rebel Rebel" and utterly unique songs that combine lush romantic piano and nearly operatic singing with scratching, grungy guitars, creepy, insidious noises, and dark, pessimistic lyrics that reflect the album's origins in a projected Broadway musical version of Orwell's 1984 and Bowie's formative encounter with William S. Burroughs. In this book Glenn Hendler shows that each song on Diamond Dogs shifts the ground under you as you listen, not just by changing in musical style, but by being sung by a different "I" who directly addresses a different "you." Diamond Dogs is the product of a performer at the peak of his powers but uncomfortable with the rock star role he had constructed. All of the album's influences looked to Bowie like ways of escaping not just the Ziggy role, but also the constraints of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. These are just some of the reasons many Bowie fans rate Diamond Dogs his richest and most important album of the 1970s.

Scruffy soldiers with guns pointed in all directions were scattered around my yard when I returned from teaching. "What's up?" I asked in a shaky voice that was supposed to come out calm. Liberian soldiers were scary. "Your dog ate one of the Superintendent's guinea fowl," the sergeant growled. The Superintendent, the governor of Bong County, was apparently quite fond of his fowl birds. But Boy, the perpetrator of the crime, didn't belong to me, and he regarded my cat Rasputin as dinner. "Why don't you arrest him," I suggested helpfully, pointing at Boy. "Not him. You " the sergeant roared. "You are coming with us." The interview wasn't going as planned. "I am not going anywhere with you. He is not my dog," I responded as I disappeared quickly into my house. Yanking a Peace Corps Volunteer out of his home for a dead, want-to-be chicken would have serious repercussions. Or at least I hoped that's what the sergeant would think. He eventually left. At 4:00 a.m., he was back, pounding on my door with the butt of his rifle. "Your dog ate another one of the Superintendent's guinea fowl," Sarge announced with glee at the thought of dragging me off into the dark night. I was beginning to seriously question my decision to join the Peace Corps. Nonetheless, joining was one of the best decisions in my life. The way I was raised and educated, even my DNA, had pointed me in the direction of becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer. But there was more. I grew up in the 60s and was a student at UC Berkeley during the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and the student revolution dramatically affected how I viewed the world. The Bush Devil Ate Sam is story of my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Liberia, West Africa. When I arrived, descendants of freed slaves from America ruled the country with an iron grip while the tribal people were caught in a struggle between modern culture and ancient Africa. Out in the jungle, the Lightning Man was said to make lightning strike people, and the Sassywood Man determined guilt with a red-hot machete. I quickly discovered that being a Peace Corps Volunteer was anything but dull. Army ants invaded our house. Students strolled into class with cans of squirming termites for breakfast. The young man who worked for me calmly announced that the scars running down his chest were the teeth marks of the Poro Bush Devil. There were enough challenges in my teaching job to fill a lifetime, but there were also rewards. For example: my high school seniors took top national honors in social studies, but the Liberian government determined that a student government I created to teach democracy was a threat to Liberia's one party state. My students were to be arrested. I was told to pack my bags. These are just a few of the stories you will find in The Bush Devil Ate Sam. I conclude the book with a short epilogue that traces the history of Liberia from the 60s up to the present and a postscript on the recent Ebola crisis. Half of the profits from this book will be donated to Friends of Liberia, a nonprofit organization that has been in existence since 1980 and is made up of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, people who have served on missions in Liberia, experts on international development, and Liberians. The goal of the organization is "to positively affect Liberia by supporting education, social, economic and humanitarian programs." For more information visit my blog at: wandering-through-time-and-space.me.

A satirical tale of the fall of a fabled empire.

America's leading expert on democracy delivers the first insider's account of the U.S. occupation of Iraq-a sobering and critical assessment of America's effort to implant democracy In the fall of 2003, Stanford professor Larry Diamond received a call from Condoleezza Rice, asking if he would spend several months in Baghdad as an adviser to the American occupation authorities. Diamond had not been a supporter of the war in Iraq, but he felt that the task of building a viable democracy was a worthy goal now that Saddam Hussein's regime had been overthrown. He also thought he could do some good by putting his academic expertise to work in the real world. So in January 2004 he went to Iraq, and the next three months proved to be more of an education than he bargained for. Diamond found himself part of one of the most audacious undertakings of our time. In Squandered Victory he shows how the American effort to establish democracy in Iraq was hampered not only by insurgents and terrorists but also by a long chain of miscalculations, missed opportunities, and acts of ideological blindness that helped assure that the transition to independence would be neither peaceful nor entirely democratic. He brings us inside the Green Zone, into a world where ideals were often trumped by power politics and where U.S. officials routinely issued edicts that later had to be squared (at great cost) with Iraqi realities. His provocative and vivid account makes clear that Iraq-and by extension, the United States-will spend many years climbing its way out of the hole that was dug during the fourteen months of the American occupation.

Is love “blind” when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa M. Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked one hundred women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender,” say some respondents.Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of the central importance of love.