Tag Archives: Non Fiction

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Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia – Christina Thompson

For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

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Dopamine Detox : A Short Guide to Remove Distractions and Train Your Brain to Do Hard Things – Thibaut Meurisse, edited by Kerry J. Donovan

Do you keep procrastinating? Do you feel restless and unable to focus on your work? Do you have trouble getting excited about major goals?

If so, you might need a dopamine detox.

In today’s world, where distractions are everywhere, the ability to focus has become more and more difficult to achieve. We are constantly being stimulated, feeling restless, often without knowing why.

When the time comes to work, we suddenly find an excess of other things to do. Instead of working toward our goals, we go for a walk, grab a coffee, or check our emails. Everything seems like a great idea—everything except the very things we should be doing.

Do you recognize yourself in the above situation?

If so, don’t worry. You’re simply overstimulated.

Dopamine Detox will help you lower your level of stimulation and regain focus in 48 hours or less, so that you can tackle your key tasks.

More specifically, in Dopamine Detox you’ll discover:

  • what dopamine is and how it works
  • the main benefits of completing a dopamine detox
  • 3 simple steps to implement a successful detox in the next 48 hours
  • practical exercises to eliminate distractions and boost your focus
  • simple tools and techniques to avoid overstimulation and help you stay focused, and much more.

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Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer – Sunil Gupta

What is life like inside Asia’s largest prison?

What happens when a man is hanged, but his pulse refuses to give up even after two hours?

Did Nirbhaya’s rapist, Ram Singh, commit suicide or was he murdered?

For the first time we have a riveting account from an insider who has spent close to four decades as an officer at Tihar Jail during some of the most turbulent times in Indian political history.

For the first time he breaks his silence about all he’s seen – from the first man he met in Tihar, Charles Sobhraj, to the controversies surrounding former CBI head, Alok Verma.

Responsible for carrying out ‘Black Warrants’, Gupta witnessed 14 hangings, the most recent and his last, being that of Afzal Guru. Joining him is award-winning journalist Sunetra Choudhury whose recent book Behind Bars is a bestseller and took her deep inside the maze of prisons. Read this book for the most intimate and raw account of India’s judicial and criminal justice system.

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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global – Laura Spinney

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today, those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate languages, such as Dante’s Inferno and the Rig Veda, to the love poetry of Rumi and The Lord of the Rings. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of the world’s population. How did this happen?

Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

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Persians: The Age of the Great Kings – Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

The Achaemenid Persian kings ruled over the largest empire of antiquity, stretching from Libya to the steppes of Asia and from Ethiopia to Pakistan. From the palace-city of Persepolis, Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes, and their heirs reigned supreme for centuries until the conquests of Alexander of Macedon brought the empire to a swift and unexpected end in the late 330s BCE.

In Persians, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the epic story of this dynasty and the world it ruled. Drawing on Iranian inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, art, and archaeology, he shows how the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the world’s first superpower—one built, despite its imperial ambition, on cooperation and tolerance. This is the definitive history of the Achaemenid dynasty and its legacies in modern-day Iran, a book that completely reshapes our understanding of the ancient world.