What is America? A Short History of the New World Order

category: current affairs

From the award-winning, #1 bestselling author of A Short History of Progress comes another surprising, frightening and essential book.

The United States is now the world’s lone superpower, whose deeds could make or break this century. For better and worse, America has Americanized the world. How, in a mere two centuries, did a marginal frontier society become the de facto ruler of the world? Why do America’s great achievements in democracy, prosperity, and civil rights often seem threatened by forces within itself?

Brimming with insight into history and human behaviour, and written in Wright’s captivating style, What Is America? shows how this came to pass; how the United States, which regards itself as the most modern country on earth, is also deeply archaic, a stronghold not only of religious fundamentalism but of “modern” beliefs in limitless progress and a universal mission that have fallen under suspicion elsewhere in the west, a rethinking driven by two World Wars and the reckless looting of our planet.

What Is America? peels away historical myths to show how the United States’ legacy of conquest and empire-building -from the old Indian wars to the Iraq War of today -has shaped the modern world.

A Short History of Progress

category: current affairs

Each time history repeats itself, so it’s said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water—the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have unleashed but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment’s inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Henderson’s Spear: A Novel

category: fiction

Liv, a Canadian filmmaker, is writing from a Tahitian jail, piecing together her troubled past and her family’s buried history for the unknown daughter she gave up at birth. The search for her father, a pilot missing since the Korean War, has brought her to the Polynesian islands in the South Seas and landed her behind bars on a trumped-up murder charge. In the stillness of her cell, Liv ponders the secret journal of her ancestor Frank Henderson, who came to these same waters a century before on an extraordinary three-year voyage with Queen Victoria’s grandsons—Prince George (later George V) and his elder brother, Prince Eddy, who would die young and disgraced.

Through unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing story, and a deep understanding of the landscape and culture of the South Seas, Henderson’s Spear explores the patterns of history and the accidents of love.

A Scientific Romance: A Novel

category: fiction

It is 1999, and David Lambert, jilted lover and museum curator, is about to discover the startling news of the return of H. G. Wells’ time machine to London. Motivated by a host of unanswered questions and innate curiosity, Lambert propels himself deep into the next millennium. As he sets foot in the luxuriant but menacing new landscape, he soon begins to explore the ruins of his life, a labyrinth of erotic obsession and remorse involving his old friend Bird, and Anita—the beautiful, eccentric Egyptologist they both loved, mysteriously dead at thirty-two. A Scientific Romance is a book of surpassing creativity and intelligence, as evocative as it is cautionary.