Tag Archives: Non-fiction

Shoe Dog – Phil Knight

Distance runner, backpacker, entrepreneur, leader, father, philanthropist – Phil Knight is, or has been, all of these, and his memoir Shoe Dog offers an honest and insightful depiction of his journey from college graduate to CEO of Nike. It’s the personal, human story of a man who’s deeply driven, plagued by doubts but utterly determined not to lose. It’s a potted history of one of the most famous brands in the world, from humble beginnings to vast multinational. It’s a fascinating journey through mid to late twentieth century America, and an inspiring (if occasionally terrifying) demonstration of how a business can maintain its values through thick and thin.
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Prisoners of Geography – Tim Marshall

Geopolitics – it’s one of those words that just sounds complicated. In Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall proves that it’s nothing of the sort by taking ten maps and clearly, simply showing how each of those countries or regions has been fundamentally affected by their geography. From Russia’s eternal search for a warm water port to the growing sovereignty disputes over the thawing Arctic’s natural resources, we’re introduced to the myriad ways that mountains, rivers, borders and oceans have shaped the development of the world as we see it today.
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When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is the memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2013, and died two years later. Published a little under a year after his death it’s a distillation of his thoughts on life, seen through the lenses of a lifelong passion for literature and the arts, and a keen awareness of mortality. Not many people see both sides of the doctor/patient relationship, nor have the combination of medical understanding, emotional awareness and literary skill to be able to offer such an honest and vivid depiction of this awful illness.
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The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer

Musician, street performer, TED speaker, blogger, Twitterer, couchsurfer, crowdfunder – Amanda Palmer is all these and more, and in her book The Art of Asking she offers up a brutally honest insight into her life and career as she gives her thoughts on what it means to ask for, and accept, other people’s help. She has made a career out of doing things her own way, from choosing to work full time as a living statue to fighting her way out of a major label record contract, and she is now rightfully recognised as a leading creative thinker in the modern, digital, social climate.

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Very Short Introductions Blog Book

The first Very Short Introduction book was published by Oxford University Press in 1995, and since then the series has expanded to the point that there are currently over 400 titles, from Classics (book 1) to Corporate Social Responsibility (book 414). The sheer variety of topics is incredible, but it can be a bit daunting when choosing from so many subjects. Help is at hand however, in the form of the VSI Blog Book, a collection of short essays from 30 VSI authors that provides a great little taster of each topic, giving the reader the chance to get a sense of each one and see what looks worth investigating further.

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Cat Sense – John Bradshaw

Love them or loathe them, cats are remarkably popular as pets; according to John Bradshaw in his book Cat Sense, domestic cats outnumber dogs by three to one, so chances are most people encounter them on a fairly regular basis. Unlike dogs however, who tend to be overt with their displays of affection and emotion, cats are often difficult to read; the purpose of Cat Sense then is to dig a little deeper into cats as a species in order to try and help cat lovers understand their feline companions better, and as a result make the lives of both cats and owners a little easier.

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Hegarty on Creativity – John Hegarty

You might never have heard of John Hegarty or his advertising agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), but unless you’ve been living in a cave your entire life you will have come across at least some of the work he’s been involved in. Vorsprung durch Technik? That was him. Levi’s adverts such as the guy dancing in his boxers in the launderette, or Flat Eric? Him too. He has sustained a creative career over an incredible four decades, and in Hegarty on Creativity he attempts to distil some of his philosophy regarding creativity and the creative process.

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Ancient Lives, New Discoveries – British Museum (John H. Taylor and Daniel Antoine)

The British Museum is famous for no end of reasons, but one of the things it’s most synonymous with is its collection of Egyptian mummies. Incredibly, over the 250+ years that the museum has been maintaining its collection it has never unwrapped any of the mummies; in 2014 it opened a new exhibition called Ancient Lives, New Discoveries which uses the results of new technology to peer beneath the wrappings of eight of the mummies and show them in a new light. This book is the companion to the exhibition and tells the stories, or at least as much as can be determined, of these eight people and how their mummified remains came to be held at the museum.

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Japanese Poems Steal Brains – Haiku Salut

For a band who describe themselves as “Baroque-pop-folktronic-neo-classical-something-or-other”, releasing a book of haiku probably isn’t too much of a stretch, creatively. Especially when that band is Haiku Salut, the Derbyshire three-piece who tour their aforementioned mixture of musical styles around the UK in an old postal van, playing songs like ‘Sounds like there’s a Pacman crunching away at your heart’ to an ever-growing fanbase. Illustrated by Katrine Brosnan, ‘Japanese poems steal brains’ is a collection of 100 haiku written by the band whilst on tour over the last three years.

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A Slip of the Keyboard – Terry Pratchett

According to Neil Gaiman’s foreword, behind the ‘jolly old elf’ veneer that many people see from meeting him at signings, conventions or interviews, Terry Pratchett is in fact filled with and driven by fury. Fury at injustices from the casual disinterest of unimpressed teachers to the baffling legal structure that doesn’t let a terminally ill patient choose the time and place of their death. When you look at his work in this light, you realise that Gaiman has a point. A Slip of the Keyboard collects together essays, articles and speech notes from across Pratchett’s whole career, from wet behind the ears journalist to Knight of the Realm, and while the topics vary wildly it’s a collection that showcases pretty much everything that makes him such a wonderful and well-loved writer.

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