New Non-Fiction

Ayn Rand is best known as the author of the perennially bestselling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. All together, more than 12 million copies of the two novels have been sold in the United States. The books have attracted three generations of readers, shaped the foundation of the Libertarian movement, and influenced White House economic policies throughout the Reagan years and beyond. A passionate advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and individual rights, Rand remains a powerful force in the political perceptions of Americans today. Yet twenty-five years after her death, her readers know little about her life.

In this seminal biography, Anne C. Heller traces the controversial author’s life from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, Heller reveals previously unknown facts about Rand’s history and looks at Rand with new research and a fresh perspective.

Based on original research in Russia, dozens of interviews with Rand’s acquaintances and former acolytes, and previously unexamined archives of tapes and letters, Ayn Rand and the World She Made is a comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century.

‘Somerset Maugham? If anybody ever sold their soul to the devil, he did, and with sizzling relish!’ Stephen Tennant, in a letter to Hugo Vickers

For nearly sixty years Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was one of the most famous writers in the world, and yet his personal life was largely kept hidden. An enormously successful playwright and the author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-one novels – several of which, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge, are now established classics – Maugham early became an expert at concealment.

Predominantly homosexual, Maugham made a disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome, although deeply in love with the charming but dissolute Gerald Haxton. It was partly to escape his wife that Maugham undertook the extensive journeys in the Far East that inspired so many of his memorable short stories. A talented linguist, during both world wars Maugham worked for British Intelligence. In between he moved in literary and theatrical circles in London, New York and Hollywood and entertained lavishly at his luxurious villa in the south of France. Outwardly his life was richly rewarding, but privately he suffered anguish from an unrequited love affair and a shocking final betrayal.

Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham’s extensive private correspondence as well as to important family testimony, which sheds a fascinating new light on this complex and extraordinary man.

This is the first major biography of America’s twenty-eighth president in nearly two decades, from one of America’s foremost scholars, Woodrow Wilson.

A Democrat who reclaimed the White House after sixteen years of Republican administrations, Wilson was a transformative president — he helped create the regulatory bodies and legislation that prefigured FDR’s New Deal and would prove central to governance through the early twenty-first century, including the Federal Reserve system and the Clayton Antitrust Act; he guided the nation through World War I; and, although his advocacy in favour of joining the League of Nations proved unsuccessful, he nonetheless established a new way of thinking about international relations that would carry America into the United Nations era. Yet Wilson also steadfastly resisted progress for civil rights, while his attorney general launched an aggressive attack on civil liberties.

Even as he reminds us of the foundational scope of Wilson’s domestic policy achievements, John Milton Cooper, Jr., reshapes our understanding of the man himself: his Wilson is warm and gracious — not at all the dour puritan of popular imagination. As the president of Princeton, his encounters with the often rancorous battles of academe prepared him for state and national politics. Just two years after he was elected governor of New Jersey, Wilson, now a leader in the progressive movement, won the Democratic presidential nomination and went on to defeat Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in one of the twentieth century’s most memorable presidential elections. Ever the professor, Wilson relied on the strength of his intellectual convictions and the power of reason to win over the American people.

John Milton Cooper, Jr. gives us a vigorous, lasting record of Wilson’s life and achievements. This is a long overdue, revelatory portrait of one of America's most important presidents — particularly resonant now, as another president seeks to change the way government relates to the people and regulates the economy.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policeman's Union, offers his first major work of non-fiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels.

A shy manifesto; an impractical handbook; the true story of a fabulist; an entire life in parts and pieces: Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as it goes on being written every day. As a son, a husband, and above all as a father of four young children, Chabon's memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played — on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key — by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.

Malcolm Gladwell is the master of playful yet profound insight. His ability to see underneath the surface of the seemingly mundane taps into a fundamental human impulse: curiosity. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Malcolm Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising new ways of looking at them, and the world around us.

Are smart people overrated? What can pit bulls teach us about crime? Why are problems like homelessness easier to solve than to manage? How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job? Gladwell explores the minor geniuses, the underdogs and the overlooked, and reveals how everyone and everything contains an intriguing story. What the Dog Saw is Gladwell at his very best — asking questions and seeking answers in his inimitable style.

George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. Eleven diaries are presented here, and we know there may be two more from his time in Spain hidden away in the NKVD Archives in Moscow. Covering the period 1931–1949, this volume follows Orwell from his early years as a writer up to his last literary notebook.

His Hop-Picking Diary covers some of Orwell’s time spent down and out; a wonderful entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains. The notes from his travels through industrial England, which formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, show the development of the gifted young novelist and impassioned social commentator. ‘Frightful landscape of slag-heaps and belching chimneys.[...] Beards of ice on lock gates.’ This same acute power of observation is evident in his diaries from Morocco, where he also encountered extreme poverty. We catch a glimpse of a different Orwell at home. His domestic diaries chart the progress of his garden and animals with a keen eye, from the succinct, ‘Pig active again.’ to the more poetic, ‘One of the plants that carries the snow most beautifully is lavender.’

The wartime diaries make fascinating reading, from descriptions of events overseas, to the daily violence closer to home and his astute perspective on the politics of both. Orwell offers a different take on the typical view of the home front. ‘War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is 'Evil be thou my good', and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.’

The diaries provide a new and entirely refreshing insight into Orwell’s character and help towards an understanding of his great works.

Here at last is the long awaited sequel to the international bestselling phenomenon, Freakonomics. Steven Levitt, the original rogue economist, and Stephen Dubner have been working hard, uncovering the hidden side of even more controversial subjects, from charity to terrorism and prostitution. And with their inimitable style and wit, they will take us on another gripping journey of discovery.

Superfreakonomics will once again transform the way we look at the world.

Eating Animals is a uniquely passionate, powerful and provocative exploration of what we eat, and why, by the bestselling author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

'This story didn't begin as a book. I simply wanted to know — for myself and my family — what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? What are the economic, social and environmental effects? Are there animals that it is straightforwardly right to eat? Are there situations in which not eating animals is wrong? If this began as a personal quest, it didn't stay that way for long…' Jonathan Safran Foer

This magisterial history of the first modern war is on the scale of John Keegan's classics, A History of Warfare and The First World War. In his sweeping, unputdownable narrative he highlights the geography, leadership and strategic logic at the heart of the conflict.

John Keegan writes: ‘The geography of the battlefield is to me a living reality. I know the appearance of the battlefields, I know the distances between them, I know the cemeteries in which the dead were buried. What constantly puzzles me, however, is to relate the landmarks of the war to its events, chronology, strategy and logic. That war went on for so long – four years – over such an enormous space – the Confederacy covered an area as large as Europe west of Russia – and involved so many battles – 260 is the common reckoning – and so many people that its events conform to no pattern at all.

'How to make sense of the war is the question. In recent years, this became the primary concern of historians, after nearly a century of writing concerned either with arguing the rights or wrongs or simply re-telling the story chronologically.

'The story of America is, in one of its dimensions, that of man and wilderness. The story can be told as one in which man tames and dominates; it can equally be told as one in which nature is never really subdued, always bides its time, often asserts its power to remind men of their pygmy status. The Civil War is certainly a story of the struggle of man against man; it is equally a story of the struggle of man against geography, in which those who had a feel for the country eventually succeeded because they knew how to work with the landscape instead of ignoring or defying it.’

In 1901 the Australian colonies came together to form a new nation which, for the next twenty-six years, was governed from Melbourne. It was a small city, a place where people knew each other—not just the people who mattered, but those who didn’t yet—where small changes loomed large and the import of big changes could scarcely be imagined. Yet in the extraordinary first quarter of the twentieth century, as the world lurched headlong into a new era, this overgrown town, in all but name the nation’s capital, oversaw the birth of modern Australia.

In Capital, Kristin Otto describes how it happened. She looks at the developments that shaped the world we know today: from the story of Helena Rubinstein and the invention of the cosmetics industry to the world’s first feature film to confectionery king Mac Robertson, packaging pioneer and author of the city’s first motor car fatality. And she traces, with the lightest of touches, the web of influence, friendship and sheer coincidence that held it all together.

For anyone who knows Melbourne, Capital will be a fascinating conversation with an old friend. For anyone who doesn’t, it will be a revelation.