Human Planet is the first natural history documentary series to turn the camera on ourselves, the human species. Taking the ...

For fifteen-year-old Martin, growing up in Slough, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, reggae music, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cut-throat Teds & a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet
- until he is beaten up & thrown in the Grand Union Canal with his best mate Smiles. Fast forward to 1988, & Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian express after three years working in a Hong Kong bar, remembering the highs & lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with catastrophe. Fast forward to 2000, & Joe is sitting pretty
- earning a living as a DJ, selling records & fight tickets. Life is sweet again
- until a face from the past forces him to re-live that night in 1977 & deal with the fall-out.


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For fifteen-year-old Martin, growing up in Slough, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, reggae music, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cut-throat Teds & a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet
- until he is beaten up & thrown in the Grand Union Canal with his best mate Smiles. Fast forward to 1988, & Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian express after three years working in a Hong Kong bar, remembering the highs & lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with catastrophe. Fast forward to 2000, & Joe is sitting pretty
- earning a living as a DJ, selling records & fight tickets. Life is sweet again
- until a face from the past forces him to re-live that night in 1977 & deal with the fall-out.


...

Jacques Rebière & Thomas Midwinter, both sixteen when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries & contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works & whether madness is the price we pay for being human.
As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques's brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found.
Thomas's sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men, which threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fräulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them.
As the concerns of the old century fade & the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of what it means to be alive seems to hang in the balance.
This is Sebastian Faulks's most ambitious novel yet, with scenes of emotional power recalling his most celebrated work, yet set here on an even larger scale.
Moving & challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men & women really are.




...

Jacques Rebière & Thomas Midwinter, both sixteen when the story starts in 1876, come from different countries & contrasting families. They are united by an ambition to understand how the mind works & whether madness is the price we pay for being human.
As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa. Their search is made urgent by the case of Jacques's brother Olivier, for whose severe illness no name has yet been found.
Thomas's sister Sonia becomes the pivotal figure in the volatile relationship between the two men, which threatens to explode with the arrival in their Austrian sanatorium of an enigmatic patient, Fräulein Katharina von A, whose illness epitomises all that divides them.
As the concerns of the old century fade & the First World War divides Europe, the novel rises to a climax in which the value of what it means to be alive seems to hang in the balance.
This is Sebastian Faulks's most ambitious novel yet, with scenes of emotional power recalling his most celebrated work, yet set here on an even larger scale.
Moving & challenging in equal measure, Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men & women really are.




...

As young boys both Jacques Rebière & Thomas Midwinter become fascinated with trying to understand the human mind. As psychiatrists, their quest takes them from the squalor of the Victorian lunatic asylum to the crowded lecture halls of the renowned Professor Charcot in Paris; from the heights of the Sierra Madre in California to the plains of unexplored Africa.

As the concerns of the old century fade & the First World War divides Europe, the two men

...

Human Traces explores the question of what kind of beings men & women really are.
Jacques Rebière & Thomas Midwinter,
...

A unique & compelling study of history & morality in the twentieth century, this book examines the psychology which made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda & Bosnia. In modern technological war, victims are distant & responsibility is fragmented. The scientists making the atomic bomb thought they were only providing a weapon: how it was used was the responsibility of society. The people who dropped the bomb were only obeying orders. The machinery of political decision-taking was so complex that no one among the politicians was unambiguously responsible. No one thought of themselves as causing the horrors of Hiroshima. One topic of the book is tribalism: about how, in Rwanda & in the former Yugoslavia, people who once lived together became trapped into mutual fear & hatred. Another topic is how, in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China & in Cambodia, systems of belief made atrocities possible. The analysis of Nazism looks at the emotionally powerful combination of tribalism & belief which enabled people to do things otherwise unimaginable. Drawing on accounts of participants, victims & observers, Jonathan Glover shows that different atrocities have common patterns which suggest weak points in our psychology. The resulting picture is used as a guide for the ethics we should create if we hope to ove ...

This is the story of Humbert, a working horse, Mister Firkin, his master, & the Lord Mayor of London. Mister Firkin was a scrap-iron dealer & he would travel the streets of London with Humbert, shouting ' Any scrap, any old iron for sale?' The Brewery horses are terrible snobs & show off about how important they are because they are used in the Lord Mayor's Show. But when disaster strikes, it's Humbert who rushes to rescue & escorts the Mayor to Mansion House. ...

When German troops surround Leningrad & cut off food supplies in the autumn of 1941, no one imagines that the siege will last almost three years & take hundreds of thousands of lives. As the first 'hungry winter' sets in, the city's residents strip the bark off trees, boil & eat moss-covered stones, & trade priceless antiques for half a loaf of bread
- & sex for a chunk of sugar.

But the scientists at the Institute of Plant Industry pledge to protect their collection of rare seeds, painstakingly gathered from all over the world, no matter what the human cost. But as the siege continues, the group divides into those who would preserve their principles at the price of starvation, & others who turn to deception
- & more sinister measures
- to survive.

A powerful, stunningly precise & beautifully written novel about human nature under life's harshest pressures. Reminiscent of Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room & Bernhard Schlink's The Reader in its brevity, spareness & power, it is a quite remarkable debut.






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