Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Society and Beliefs

All Who Live on Islands introduces a bold new voice in New Zealand literature. In these intimate and entertaining essays, Rose Lu takes us through personal history - a shopping trip with her Shanghai-born grandparents, her career in the Wellington tech industry, an epic hike through the Himalayas...

Pleasure should be a simple thing, but straight women are at the statistical bottom of the pile when it comes to finding a happy ending. There's a name for this phenomenon: it's called the pleasure gap. And when tracked against other gains in women's freedom, like pay or education, it is still al...

"A provocative debunking of accepted economic wisdom which offers a new pathway to a sustainable, survivable economy. Confronted by the devastating trends of the early twenty-first century - widening inequality, environmental destruction, and millions of workers stuck in precarious, soul destroyi...

Before the nineteenth century, the term normal was rarely ever associated with human behaviour. Normal was a term used in maths, for right angles. People weren't normal; triangles were. But from the 1830s, this branch of science really took off across Europe and North America, with a proliferatio...

In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film "I Am Not Your N...

History does not run in straight lines. It is made by men and women and by accident. The path of events and ideas does not stretch smoothly from Thucydides, through Machiavelli and thence to perpetual peace. Instead of inevitable progress, what we get is more often false starts, blind alleys, ran...

A timely, provocative exposé of American political and business leadership's deep ties to China: a network of people who believe they are doing the right thing--at a profound and often hidden cost to U.S. interests. The past few years have seen relations between China and the United States shift,...

"A profound and provocative examination of America in crisis, where unemployment, deindustrialization, and a bitter hopelessness and malaise have resulted in an epidemic of diseases of despair--drug abuse, gambling, suicide, magical thinking, xenophobia, and a culture of sadism and hate. America...

"The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other-- As Baby Boomers became teenagers in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, bu...

Inheriting her father's 7,000 acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, the author accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland, peeling back layers of the American story, the politics of food and the culture of the Great Plains.