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de Vita, Veruska : Deep Blue – Why We Love The Sea
0R330,00Deep Blue is a love letter to the sea, exploring humans’ deep connection with it and the bliss of swimming, diving, dipping and simply being in salt water.
Join De Vita, a learner free diver and open-water swimmer, as she delves into why the ocean calls to us.
Along the way she talks to those who find healing and wellness in swimming groups and cold-water immersion, scientists who study complex marine environments, elite athletes who swim super-human distances along our coasts and free divers who plumb the depths with one breath.
Water is primordial. It gives life. It represents hope and renewal. This book is not only for sea worshippers. It promises to inspire everyone to jump with joy into the waves – and offers reflections on our intimate relationship with the sea, which supports life on earth and requests that we respect it.
‘… there is a quiet here that doesn’t exist on land, a fluid suspension that reminds me that humans were never meant to be so rigid, so fixed in place. In the sea, we are both vulnerable and free …’
About the author
Veruska De Vita has worked in public relations and communications for 26 years and is a founding partner of Twiga Communications. She is a seasoned journalist with numerous pieces published in the Sunday Times, Fairlady, Inflight and The Sunday Independent. In 2012 she graduated with an MA in creative writing from Wits University. Her obsession with the sea began at an early age and she has always felt at home in the deep blue.
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Diamond Jared – Collapse
0R75,00Pre-loved | Good condition | Pages intact, light shelf wear
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
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Diamond Jared – Guns, Germs and Steel
0R75,00Pre-loved | Good condition | Pages intact, light shelf wear
“Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope … one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.”
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion?as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war?and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California’s Gold Medal
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Grant Adam – Option B
0R75,00Pre-loved | Very Good condition | Like new
From Facebook?s COO and Wharton?s top-rated professor, the #1 New York Times best-selling authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life?s inevitable setbacks.
After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. ?I was in ?the void,?? she writes, ?a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.? Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.
Option B combines Sheryl?s personal insights with Adam?s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart?and her journal?to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl?s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy.
Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. ?I want Dave,? she cried. Her friend replied, ?Option A is not available,? and then promised to help her make the most of Option B.
We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it. -
Hamilton Russell, Bridgid – Red Tape
0R395,00In the 1970s, South Africa’s wine industry was a closed shop – dominated by monopolies, Afrikaner nationalism and Apartheid-era control. Red Tape tells the remarkable story of Tim Hamilton Russell, a maverick entrepreneur and founder of Hamilton Russell Vineyards, who was determined to challenge this status quo. Defying restrictive laws, industry boycotts, and scepticism from the establishment, Tim pursued his vision to plant noble grape varietals in the Hemel-en-Aarde Valley – a region few believed in – proving the country could produce world-class table wines.
This richly detailed account, written by his daughter Bridgid Hamilton-Russell, uncovers the political obstacles he faced, the court battles he waged, and the legacy he built in establishing a wine region now recognised worldwide. Blending biography, social history, and an insider’s view of a transformative era, Red Tape reveals how courage and vision can reshape an industry.
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McGown Stephen – Six Years with Al Queda
0R75,00Pre-loved | Very Good condition | Like new
While riding his motorbike through Mali, on his way home from London to Johannesburg, Stephen McGown was taken captive in Timbuktu by Al Qaeda. Life as he knew it changed in that instant. With nothing to bargain with and everything to lose, for the next six years Steve became reluctantly engaged in what he refers to as, ?the greatest chess game of my life?.
Thousands of kilometres away in Johannesburg, the shock of his kidnapping hit his wife Cath and the rest of the McGown family. Working every option they could find ? from established diplomatic protocols to the murky back channels of the kidnap game ? they set to work on trying to free Steve.
To this day he holds the unenviable record of Al Qaeda?s longest held prisoner.
Six Years With Al Qaeda is not just an incredible story of mental strength, physical endurance and the resilience of the human spirit, but also a unique, nuanced perspective on one of the world?s most feared terrorist organisations. Not only did Steve survive his ordeal, but in many respects he came out of the desert both a changed man and a stronger, more positive human.
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Pikoli / Wiener Vusi / Mandy – My Second Initiation
0R75,00Pre-loved | Good condition | Pages intact, light shelf wear
My Second Initiation As National Director of Public Prosecutions from 2005 until 2007, Advocate Vusi Pikoli pursued criminal charges against the current President of South Africa Jacob Zuma and the convicted former National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi.
