Three Wild Dogs (and the truth), Markus Zusak
What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs – Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?
The answer can only be chaos: there are street fights, park fights, public shaming, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed…not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning.
There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family.
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly
Drawing on over one hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes the reader to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalised, and autoplayed.
Building on her years of reporting on streaming, music journalist Pelly details the consequences of the Spotify model by examining both sides of what the company calls its two-sided marketplace: the listeners who pay with their dollars and data, and the musicians who provide the material powering it all. The music business is notoriously opaque, but here Pelly lifts the veil on major stories like streaming services filling popular playlists with low-cost stock music and the rise of new payola-like practices.
The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe, Marlene L Daut
Slave, revolutionary, king, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to end slavery. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe began fighting with Napoleon's forces against the formerly enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, reuniting with those he had abandoned, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe – after nine years of his rule as King Henry I – shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet.
But why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti's first ruler, Dessalines? And what caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north and the other led by President Pétion in the south?
Drawing from a trove of previously overlooked sources to paint a captivating history of his life and the awe-inspiring kingdom he built, Marlene L Daut offers a fresh perspective on a figure long overshadowed by caricature and cliché. Peeling back the layers of myth and misconception reveals a man driven by both noble ideals and profound flaws, as unforgettable as he is enigmatic.
In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space Irvin, Weathersby Jr
Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same.
The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, Erika Howsare
Deer have been an important part of the world that humans occupy for millennia. They’re one of the only large animals that can thrive in our presence. In the 21st century, our relationship is full of contradictions: We hunt and protect them, we cull them from suburbs while making them an icon of wilderness, we see them both as victims and as pests. But there is no doubt that we have a connection to deer: in mythology and story, in ecosystems biological and digital, in cities and in forests.
Delving into the historical roots of these tangled attitudes and how they play out in the present, Erika Howsare observes scientists capture and collar fawns, hunters show off their trophies, a museum interpreter teaching American history while tanning a deer hide, an animal-control officer collecting the carcasses of deer killed by sharpshooters, and a woman bottle-raising orphaned fawns in her backyard. As she reports these stories, Howsare’s eye is always on the bigger picture: Why do we look at deer in the ways we do, and what do these animals reveal about human involvement in the natural world?
When We Sold God’s Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon, Alex Cuadros
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí berries from centuries-old trees. The first highway pierced through in 1960. Ranchers, loggers, and prospectors invaded, and the kids lost their families to terrible new weapons and diseases. Pushed by the government to assimilate, they struggled to figure out their new, capitalist reality, discovering its wonders – cars, refrigerators, TV sets, phones – as well as a way to acquire them: by selling the natural riches of their own forest home.
They had to partner with the white men who’d hunted them, but their wealth grew legendary, the envy of the nation – until decades of suppressed trauma erupted into a massacre, bloody retribution that made headlines across the globe.
Based on six years of immersive reporting and research, When We Sold God’s Eye tells a unique kind of adventure story, one that begins with a river journey by Theodore Roosevelt and ends with smugglers from New York City’s Diamond District. It’s a story of survival against all odds; of the temptations of wealth and the dream of prosperity; of an ecosystem threatened by our hunger for resources; of genocide and revenge. It’s a tragedy as old as the first European encounters with Indigenous people, playing out in the present day. But most of all, it’s the saga of a few audacious individuals – Pio, Maria, Oita, and their friends – and their attempts to adapt and even thrive in the most unlikely circumstances.
All information sourced from publishers.
