Non Fiction

Showing 49–64 of 72 resultsSorted by popularity

Tinseltown
€17.50
The remarkable inside story of how two Hollywood A-listers, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, stunned the football world by buying a non-league club in North Wales. It was one of the most extraordinary takeovers British football has known. In February 2021, Ryan Reynolds joined with Rob McElhenney to buy Wrexham AFC, a non-league team in North Wales.

Wrexham, a former coal and steel town dealing with its post-industrial legacy, suddenly found itself at the centre of global attention, with broadcast networks around the world descending to discover what was going on. The club became the subject of a smash hit Disney+ docu-series, Welcome to Wrexham. Tinseltown tells the story of this extraordinary, unpredictable and often surreal football takeover and the remarkable events that followed.

Written with the full cooperation of Wrexham AFC, it is the inside story of what happened when Hollywood met a dot on a map. How a town was transformed when its football club, aspiring only to survive on the fifth rung of the British football ladder, was sprinkled with gold dust and found ambition again. With unique access to players, the manager and the club’s executives, the book charts the club’s attempts to climb up the pyramid, providing a vivid sense of what it is like to play for this ‘Hollywood’ team and the pressure and spotlight that comes with it.

At their only press conference since buying the club, nobody laughed when Reynolds and McElhenney said the Premier League could be an aspiration. ‘Couldn’t we theoretically make this happen?’ McElhenney asked. ‘Why not dream big?’ added Reynolds. ‘If you don’t dream big, you will never go there, so why not?’

Tinseltown is the story of how they did just that.

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Revolution
€17.50
The inside story of Mikel Arteta’s astonishing transformation of ArsenalNovember 2019. Unai Emery’s final game as Arsenal manager sees the Gunners languishing eighth in the league. Appointed in the dying embers of the Wenger years, Emery’s 18 months as Arsenal boss has seen the team and the club go backwards – playing unimaginative, pragmatic football, and recently losing to London rivals Chelsea in the final of the Europa League.

Something had to change; a fresh head with fresh ideas. A new leader.This is the story of how Mikel Arteta turned Arsenal into one of the most exciting, innovative and feared teams in the league. From cutting his teeth as an assistant under Pep Guardiola before joining Arsenal in the winter of 2019, through to title contenders years later – including bust-ups, Covid, disappointments, FA Cup wins, fan revolt, and eventually the rise of an extraordinary young team standing on the edge of greatness – this book will be the first of its kind to explore the workings of Arteta’s philosophy and how he transformed the club from outsiders to title challengers.With chapters on his tactical innovations, in-game strategies, transfer insight and, of course, an account of the memorable 2022-23 season – Revolution is the story of an extraordinary football ascent and the first draft of Arsenal’s new history.

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Poor
€16.50
As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O’Sullivan making anything of her life. When she became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless, what followed were five years of barely coping.

This is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. How the seeds of self-belief planted by teachers in childhood stayed with her. How she found mentors whose encouragement revived those seeds in adulthood.

Katriona is now an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education. Poor is her stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids’ futures. Of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.

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Chasing Shadows
€19.95
Three very different men battle to control their destinies as they hurtle through the hall of mirrors of the global shadow economy.

Jack Kelly, a veteran US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, tasked with following a trail of dirty money across continents from a top-secret investigative unit based in Virginia.

Salvatore Pititto is an ambitious Mafia capo working on a vast cocaine shipment who becomes unexpectedly pulled into an arms-smuggling conspiracy.

Mustafa Badreddine is a ghost-like master terrorist wanted by governments across the world who has been secretly dispatched to Syria for his final mission.

Each man, born in radically different circumstances in the 1960s, is in his own way grappling with the powerful and unstoppable forces that shape the world around us; forces which topple governments, send refugees fleeing across borders, and put guns in the hands of mercenaries and militias. Each has devoted his whole life to an institution – the DEA, the Mafia and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah – and each will eventually be destroyed or betrayed by the thing they believe in the most.

Set during 2015 and 2016, as the global order began to implode under the pressures of the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis, CHASING SHADOWS looks back over the historical conflicts, events and personal histories that have shaped the lives of these three men. It’s a book that shows the betrayals, the disillusionment and the violence as Jack Kelly hunts down his targets.

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Life After Capitalism
€26.95
Author of national bestseller Life After Google and generation-defining Wealth and Poverty, venture capitalist, futurist, and pioneering thinker extraordinaire George Gilder pinpoints how the clash of creativity with power at the heart of economic systems leads to global cognitive dissonance and argues that the creation of the novel taps capitalism’s infinite promise and is humanity’s only path of escape from stagnation and tyranny. Gilder once more rocks the archetypes of modern information theory and economics with a paradigm-shifting salvo of sheer brilliance. The capitalist era is over-get ready for life after capitalism.

For more than two hundred years, capitalism spread wealth around the globe, bringing unprecedented prosperity and progress, liberating human potential. But something has gone terribly wrong in the world economy. Creativity and faith in the future-capitalism’s crucial ingredients-seem to have run out.

The elites think they can maintain a nation’s wealth by printing money and investing it in favored industries. Their trust in bureaucratic experts, their cautionary paranoia, and their delusional belief that they can “control” everything from the spread of a virus to the weather, are sucking the life out of the economy. Ordinary people, their freedoms restricted, their prospects dim, are losing their faith in their institutions.

Such misguided corporatism and pride, confusion and despair, are the result of a deep misunderstanding of capitalism itself. The bestselling futurist and venture capitalist George Gilder explains why economics is not an incentive system to be manipulated but an information system to be freed. Material resources are essentially as plentiful as the atoms of the universe.

What drives economic growth in a free market is our limitless human ingenuity and creativity. Prophetic, inspiring, and paradigm-shifting, Life after Capitalism is a once-in-a-generation classic.

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10-Year Record of BTS
€38.95
THE FIRST EVER OFFICIAL BOOK – Published in celebration of BTS’s 10th Anniversary, stories that go beyond what you already know about BTS, including unreleased photos, QR codes of videos, and all album information. After taking their first step into the world on June 13, 2013, BTS will celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut in June 2023. They have risen to the peak as an iconic global artist and during this meaningful time, they look back on their footsteps in the first official book.

In doing so, BTS nurtures the power to build brighter days and they choose to take another step on a road that no one has gone before. BTS shares personal, behind-the-scenes stories of their journey so far through interviews and more than three years of in-depth coverage by Myeongseok Kang, who has written about K-pop and other Korean pop culture in various media. Presented chronologically in seven chapters from before the debut of BTS to the present, their vivid voices and opinions harmonize to tell a sincere, lively, and deep story.

In individual interviews that have been conducted without a camera or makeup, they illuminate their musical journey from multiple angles and discuss its significance. In addition, portrait photos that show BTS as individuals and artists open the book, and throughout there are concept photos, tracklists of all previous albums, and over 330 QR codes. As digital artists, BTS has been communicating with the world through the internet and this book allows readers to immediately access trailers, music videos, and more online to have a rich understanding of all the key moments in BTS history.

Complete with a timeline of all major milestones, BEYOND THE STORY is a remarkable archive-truly everything about BTS in one volume.

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Adventures in Wonderland
€15.95
Irishman Paul Charles is one of the leading music agents on the planet. Over the past 40 years, he has worked with some of the biggest names in music, at different times managing the careers of Van Morrison, Ray Davies of The Kinks, Gerry Rafferty, The Waterboys and Dexys Midnight Runners, and launching Tanita Tikaram – the teenage star whose debut album sold almost 5 million copies – into the world.

In his role with the Asgard agency, he has also promoted shows featuring many of the leading artists in the world, including The Police, U2, Van Morrison, Dire Straits, Carole King, Meatloaf, David Gilmour, BB King, Emmylou Harris and John Lee Hooker.

Paul has also been involved since the early days with Glastonbury Festival, with his artists topping the bill on more than one occasion before he was invited by Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis to take on the daunting – and inspiring – task of booking the Acoustic Stage at the festival every year, a role he has carried out for the past 30 years.

Packed with jaw-dropping stories, including the time when he was almost burned alive along with his precious record collection, and pen pictures of the kind of stars we all want to know more about, Adventures In Wonderland is also one of the most complete insights into the world – and the business – of music that you will ever encounter. It is a must-read for every music fan – and for students of how the world of rock ’n’ roll works alike.

Powerfully honest, often hilarious, frequently touching, and with wonderfully evocative photos, Adventures in Wonderland is a thoroughly joyous trip that will inspire readers to fall in love with music – whether for the first time or, better still, all over again…

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I Will Be Good
€18.50
Meet Peig McManus, an unforgettable Dublin character whose story will make you laugh and cry. Her memoir of a 1940s’ childhood is recounted with candour and wit, as she describes her early years in the last of the city’s tenements, under the shadow of the Second World War. Even in the midst of sorrow, as the ravages of poverty and tuberculosis prevailed, there was always singing and laughter.

Peig recalls happy family gatherings in their tenement rooms before their way of life was shattered when the slums were cleared, making way for the migration of inner-city families to Dublin’s new suburbs. Peig learned early about class distinction, chastity and shame, and fought against social prejudice to become one of Ireland’s foremost campaigners for educational reform. But a quiet sorrow lay at the heart of her life, one which could not be hidden forever.

Now, in her eighties, Peig shares her story: an inspiring journey through the trials and triumphs of a remarkableIrish woman who refused to do what she was told.

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Foreign Bodies
€19.95
Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.

Characteristically, with Schama the message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope – in hospitals and prisons, palaces and slums – are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong and Mumbai.

At the heart of it all, an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine. A gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as ‘the saviour of mankind’ for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world’s first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice.

Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, ‘there are no foreigners, only familiars’.

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Great Hatred
€13.50
A gripping investigation into one of Irish history’s greatest mysteries, Great Hatred reveals the true story behind one of the most significant political assassinations to ever have been committed on British soil.

‘Heart-stopping . . . The book is both forensic and a page-turner, and ultimately deeply tragic, for Ireland as much as for the murder victim.‘ MICHAEL PORTILLO

On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson – the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War – was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significant political murder to have taken place on British soil for more than a century.

His assassins were well-educated and pious men. One had lost a leg during the Battle of Passchendaele. Shocking British society to the core, the shooting caused consternation in the government and almost restarted the conflict between Britain and Ireland that had ended with the Anglo-Irish Treaty just five months earlier.

Wilson’s assassination triggered the Irish Civil War, which cast the darkest of shadows over the new Irish State. Who ordered the killing? Why did two English-born Irish nationalists kill an Irish-born British imperialist? What was Wilson’s role in the Northern Ireland government and the violence which matched the intensity of the Troubles fifty years later? Why would Michael Collins, who risked his life to sign a peace treaty with Great Britain, want one of its most famous soldiers dead, and how did the Wilson assassination lead to Collins’ tragic death in an ambush two months later?

Drawing upon newly released archival material and never-before-seen documentation, Great Hatred is a revelatory work that sheds light on a moment that changed the course of Irish and British history for ever.

‘McGreevy provides more than the anatomy of a political murder; in reconstructing this era of blood, poverty and wartime trauma, he also gives full expression to the terrible forces that WB Yeats once called the “fanatic heart” and the “great hatred”.‘ THE TIMES

‘Thoughtful and well-researched . . . an important and valuable addition to the library of the Irish Revolution.‘PROFESSOR DIARMAID FERRITER, University College Dublin

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Spare
€26.95
It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow – and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling – and how their lives would play out from that point on. For Harry, this is that story at last.

With its raw, unflinching honesty, Spare is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief. Prince Harry wishes to support British charities with donations from his proceeds from Spare. The Duke of Sussex has donated $1,500,000 to Sentebale, an organisation he founded with Prince Seeiso in their mothers’ legacies, which supports vulnerable children and young people in Lesotho and Botswana affected by HIV/AIDS.

Prince Harry will also donate to the non-profit organisation WellChild in the amount of GBP300,000. WellChild, which he has been Royal patron of for fifteen years, makes it possible for children and young people with complex health needs to be cared for at home instead of hospital, wherever possible.

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
€19.95
‘Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name.

My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.’

So begins the riveting story of acclaimed actor Matthew Perry, taking us along on his journey from childhood ambition to fame to addiction and recovery in the aftermath of a life-threatening health scare. Before the frequent hospital visits and stints in rehab, there was five-year-old Matthew, who travelled from Montreal to Los Angeles, shuffling between his separated parents; fourteen-year-old Matthew, who was a nationally ranked tennis star in Canada; twenty-four-year-old Matthew, who nabbed a coveted role as a lead cast member on the talked-about pilot then called Friends Like Us.

. . and so much more.

In an extraordinary story that only he could tell – and in the heartfelt, hilarious, and warmly familiar way only he could tell it – Matthew Perry lays bare the fractured family that raised him (and also left him to his own devices), the desire for recognition that drove him to fame, and the void inside him that could not be filled even by his greatest dreams coming true.

But he also details the peace he’s found in sobriety and how he feels about the ubiquity of Friends, sharing stories about his castmates and other stars he met along the way. Frank, self-aware, and with his trademark humour, Perry vividly depicts his lifelong battle with addiction and what fuelled it despite seemingly having it all.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an unforgettable memoir that is both intimate and eye-opening – as well as a hand extended to anyone struggling with sobriety. Unflinchingly honest, moving, and uproariously funny, this is the book fans have been waiting for.

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Time and Tide
€19.95
A poignant and introspective memoir from Irish journalist and broadcaster Charlie Bird. In 2021, Charlie Bird was diagnosed with motor neurone disease – a man whose voice was so synonymous with his career faced losing it completely. Yet knowing he had just a short time left with family and friends, what emerged was a great sense of resilience and motivation to take advantage of every moment.

Here, Charlie reflects on his life and phenomenal broadcast career through the lens of his diagnosis, as he ponders the big questions and takes stock of the small moments that we so often overlook. Written over the course of 2022 as his health deteriorated, with the help of long-time friend and fellow journalist Ray Burke, this is a candid and unforgettable story about the triumph of the human spirit and, ultimately, what it means to be alive.

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All Down Darkness Wide
€17.50
A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet – a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. When Sean meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis.

Wrestling with this, Sean Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s suffering.

By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty.

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In Love
€15.50
In January 2020, Amy Bloom travelled with her husband Brian to Switzerland, where he was helped by Dignitas to end his life while Amy sat with him and held his hand. Brian was terminally ill and for the last year of his life Amy had struggled to find a way to support his wish to take control of his death, to not submerge ‘into the darkness of an expiring existence’. Written with piercing insight and wit, In Love is Bloom’s intimate, authentic and startling account of losing Brian, first slowly to the disease of Alzheimer’s, and then on becoming a widow.

It charts the anxiety and pain of the process that led them to Dignitas, while never avoiding the complex ethical problems that are raised by assisted death. A poignant love letter to Bloom’s husband and a passionate outpouring of grief, In Love reaffirms the power and value of human relationships.

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I See You
€15.00
I See You is a collection of interviews from musicians, artists and activists, curated by Thom Yorke. Thom Yorke is responsible for the questions asked during the interviews and also answers the questions for the zine’s preface.

Featured names include the environmentalist and writer George Monbiot, Orkney-born performance poet Harry Josephine and director and screenwriter Luca Guadagnino. Further interviews are provided by electronic composer Laurie Spiegel, experimental musician Kali Malone and visual artist Christian Holstad, New York-based painter and printmaker Amy Cutler and Jun Takahashi, founder of fashion brand Undercover.

The zine’s artwork is by Stanley Donwood and Tchocky, with additional art courtesy of Holstad. It was designed and produced by Crack Magazine and printed by Generation Press – a leading organisation in sustainable printing.

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Liber