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£12.99
Innovation and creativity have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators, and urban planners to describe the country’s unique standing in the world. While other countries supposedly suffer from regimentation and a fatal lack of imagination, the United States is often portrayed as an unmatched dynamo of new ideas and products. In his book, Thomas Frank disabuses us of this notion, offering a bold account of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce the class system. Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centring innovation and creativity in rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite.
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£25.00
Tadao Ando is one of the most celebrated architects of our time. Winner of the Pritzker Prize and numerous other international awards, his bold, concrete buildings and their interplay with light, shadow, and nature have become emblematic symbols of the modern world, blending modernist design with Eastern spirituality from his native Japan. Now, at eighty-five, Ando looks back on a lifetime of making. Born in a working-class family living amongst the ruins of post-war Osaka, he could not afford a university education. After a brief stint as a professional boxer, he taught himself architecture at night from books, founded a practice in a cheap rented room, and, after years of uncertainty, persistence, and belief, eventually saw his ‘concrete poetry’ built around the world. ‘Towards Light’ explores the stories behind his greatest buildings and shares wisdom drawn from pivotal moments in Ando’s life.
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£10.99
Monsters, in all their terrifying glory, have preoccupied humans since we began telling stories. But where did these stories come from? In this book, Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth – giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons – all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify. His far-ranging adventure takes him across the world. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, travels to an 18th-century Balkan vampire’s forest dwelling, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. On his travels, he discovers that the stories of the people and places that birthed them are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves.
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£12.99
A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick 2025 From New York Times bestselling author and television and podcast host, a powerful, wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society. We all feel it — the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ‘With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.’ Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition: attention has become a com
