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.




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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

...

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 ...

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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* Cities cover just 2% of the world's surface, but consume 75% of the world's resources
* Global food production increased by
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* Cities cover just 2% of the world's surface, but consume 75% of the world's resources
* Global food production increased by
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A goblin has come to visit & you'd better take care... because he says he's hungry, hungry, hungry! He will chase you all around the house
- but if you offer him a jellybean, all will be well! A bouncing, rhythmic text with an irresistible refrain joins forces with wildly exuberant illustration to create a jolly romp of a picture book.
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In 1966 a group of highly respected aerospace engineers revealed that US scientists were perfecting ways to control gravity. They predicted a breakthrough would come by the end of the decade, ushering in an era of limitless, clean propulsion for a new breed of fuelless transport systems
- & weapons beyond our imagination. Of course it never happened. Or did it? Forty years on a chance encounter with one of the engineers who made that prediction forces a highly sceptical aerospace & defence journalist, Nick Cook, to consider the possibility that America did indeed crack the gravity code
- & has covered up ever since. His investigations moved from the corridors of NASA to the dark heartland of America's classified weapons establishment, where it became clear that a half century ago, in the dying days of the Third Reich, Nazi scientists were racing to perfect a Pandora's Box of high technology that would deliver Germany from defeat. History says that they failed. But the trail that takes Cook deep into the once-impenetrable empire of SS General Hans Kammler
- the man charged by Adolf Hitler with perfecting German secret weapons technology
- says otherwise. In his pursuit of Kammler, Cook finally establishes the truth: America is determined to hang onto its secrets, but the stakes are enormous & others are now in the race to acquire a suppressed technology.



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