3 days ago
Global nonfiction: Six new books about our perilous past and precarious future
All information sourced from publishers.
We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, Michael Grunwald
Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, and the greatest challenge facing our species will be to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. Even if we quit fossil fuels, we'll keep hurtling towards climate chaos if we don't solve our food and land problems.
In this rollicking, shocking narrative, Grunwald shows how the world, after decades of ignoring the climate problem at the centre of our plates, has pivoted to making it worse, embracing solutions that sound sustainable but could make it even harder to grow more food with less land. But he also tells the stories of the dynamic scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing real solutions, from a jungle-tough miracle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death. It's an often infuriating saga of lobbyists, politicians, and even the scientific establishment making terrible choices for humanity, but it's also a hopeful account of the people figuring out what needs to be done – and trying to do it.
The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port, Toby Green
In 1665, Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today's Guinea-Bissau?
In Cacheu, Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in 17th-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness.
Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of the empire.
Now, through the surviving documents recording Peres's case, we can see what this world was really like.
Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival, Chris Horton
Despite sitting at the heart of the tense relationship between China and the US, Taiwan's history and its people have long been overlooked and misunderstood. In Ghost Nation, Taiwan-based journalist Chris Horton tells their stories and explores why this diplomatically isolated country has become such an important player on the world stage.
As China's military preparations continue apace, the stakes have never been higher. Perched precariously on the fault lines of global power, the fate of this vibrant democracy and tech colossus will shape Asia's future – either containing or facilitating China's expansionist goals.
Drawing from over a decade of living and reporting in Taiwan, and informed by interviews with everyday citizens, presidents and other key figures, Horton provides a panoramic view of this fascinating country. Ghost Nation will leave readers with a profound appreciation for Taiwan's struggle for self-determination – and its pivotal role in our shared future.
Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine, Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey
Celebrity romances have always captured the public's imagination, playing out like soap operas seized upon by fans and tabloids alike. By the same token, high-profile trials can take over the mainstream media cycle, with both news pundits and the public picking over every detail to predict outcomes and cast their own judgments. Enter the union, dissolution, and hostile legal battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard – where these dual obsessions collided, creating a chaotic moment of true cultural fixation.
Hollywood Vampires offers an inside account of one of the most controversial and consequential celebrity scandals of the internet era. Fueled by viral clips, reaction videos, and endless online debates, the trial became more than a legal battle. It became a public spectacle, dividing audiences worldwide.
Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey were journalists on the ground for the Depp v Heard trial. Having closely followed Johnny, Amber, and their camps, they spent the years leading up to and following the trial interviewing the couple's closest allies as well as their managers, lawyers, agents, business associates, publicists, assistants, and personal staff. The result is a Hollywood epic full of revealing details that tell a wider tale about the celebrity-industrial complex, modern fandom, inflammatory culture wars, and contemporary feminism.
Turning the lens around, Hollywood Vampires questions how the celebrity exploitation machine, strengthened by the forces of social media and legacy media alike, blurs the lines between fact and fiction, comedy and horror. It forces us to ask ourselves why we take celebrity culture so seriously in the first place – and who wins and who loses when Hollywood becomes the vehicle for our own personal and political causes.
All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil, Stephen Alford
Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot.
Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I and VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth's chief minister, Lord Burghley, for Cecil, there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies.
Many readers are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently. Cecil's sureness of purpose, his espionage network and good luck all conspired to keep England uninvaded and to create a new 'British' monarchy which has endured to the present day.
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, Nathalia Holt
The Himalayas – a snowcapped mountain range that hides treacherous glacier crossings, raiders poised to attack unsuspecting travellers, and air so thin that even seasoned explorers die of oxygen deprivation. Yet among the dangers lies one of the most beautiful and fragile ecosystems in the world.
During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.
Along the way, the Roosevelt expedition faced an incredible series of hardships as they disappeared in a blizzard, were attacked by robbers, overcome by sickness and disease, and lost their food supply in the mountains. The explorers would emerge transformed, although not everyone would survive. Beast in the Clouds brings alive these extraordinary events in a potent nonfiction thriller featuring the indomitable Roosevelt family.
