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Kiraitu Murungi An Odyssey in Kenyan ...
In this painstakingly researched and insightful book, Professor Peter Kagwanja and co-author, Humphrey Ringera, offer a lucid panoramic view of contemporary Kenyan politics peered through the lenses of one of the iconic figures of the country's post-Mau Mau power elite — Kiraitu Murungi.
The authors of this buy-one-get-three narrative depart radically from the orthodox biographical writing, weaving the life story of Murungi together with the chronicles of the Mau Mau roots of freedom and the epic rise of a post-colonial power elite as the most significant development in the last half-century of Kenya's independence.
Arguably the best political portrait of a Kenyan politician since David Goldsworthy's Tom Mboya: The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget, the book succeeds in capturing the palpably tense political atmosphere, hustle and bustle and the risk-prone elbowing for power in the run-up to the 2013 elections.
The authors bring out the good, the bad and the ugly of the new Kenyan power elite in politics, academy, military and business as the generation with the historic mission to deliver the country to stable democracy and prosperity or push it down the cliff of anarchy, state failure and decay.
Kiraitu Murungi is a central actor in this unfolding national drama.
It Worked for Me In Life and Leadersh...
It Worked for Me is filled with vivid experiences and lessons learned that have shaped the legendary public service career of the four-star general and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. At its heart are Powell's "Thirteen Rules"—notes he gathered over the years and that now form the basis of his leadership presentations given throughout the world.
Powell's short but sweet rules—among them, "Get mad, then get over it" and "Share credit"—are illustrated by revealing personal stories that introduce and expand upon his principles for effective leadership: conviction, hard work, and, above all, respect for others. In work and in life, Powell writes, "it's about how we touch and are touched by the people we meet. It's all about the people."
A natural storyteller, Powell offers warm and engaging parables with wise advice on succeeding in the workplace and beyond. "Trust your people," he counsels as he delegates presidential briefing responsibilities to two junior State Department desk officers.
"Do your best—someone is watching," he advises those just starting out, recalling his own teenage summer job mopping floors in a soda-bottling factory.
Powell combines the insights he has gained serving in the top ranks of the military and in four presidential administrations with the lessons he's learned from his immigrant-family upbringing in the Bronx, his training in the ROTC, and his growth as an Army officer. The result is a powerful portrait of a leader who is reflective, self-effacing, and grateful for the contributions of everyone he works with.
Colin Powell's It Worked for Me is bound to inspire, move, and surprise readers. Thoughtful and revealing, it is a brilliant and original blueprint for leadership.
The Rose That Grew from Concrete By T...
The Rose That Grew from Concrete is a compelling collection of poetry. Tupac Shakur appreciated the sound and rhythm of words and the powerful affect they could have on people. He wrote these poems at 19 when he was part of a writing group conducted by Leila Steinberg, a writer and producer working in the music industry.
The book captures Shakur's passion and anger in a unique format. On the right side of the page is the typed version of each poem. On the left side is a copy of Shakur's own handwriting on notebook paper. Shakur drew an eye for "I" or used symbols to replace words like peace and love.
Two women who loved him dearly - his mother, Afeni Shakur, and poet and close friend Nikki Giovanni, share their thoughts in the preface and forward of the book.
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Se...
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia.
A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.
To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well.
In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.
An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.
Sowing the Mustard Seed by Yoweri Mus...
Sowing the Mustard Seed is a story of unflinching bravery. It is the story of unwavering search for a true, revolutionary and development-oriented leadership. The author takes the reader on a tell-all journey of the sacrifice that he and other young Ugandans decided to take in order to liberate their country from the jaws of helplessness to which the first post-independence governments had conspired to consign it.
In this spell-binding tale, told in the first-person voice, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni traces the journey of his life from his first few months on earth, through his education, after which he and other patriots embarked on a journey of seeking empowerment to overthrow the despotic regime of Idi Amin Dada.
It also delves into other wars, such as the long-drawn-out bid to neutralize Joseph Kony’s ragtag Lord’s Resistance Army and professionalizing the Ugandan army, after many years of sectarianism. Besides illuminating the struggles of the past, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni shares his vision for Uganda and the pillars he has over the years put in place as President to ensure Uganda’s future is secure both economically and socially.
Written in easily accessible but highly Africanized language, it is a tale of unstinting focus and commitment that will both inform and inspire the reader.
A Primates Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life among the Baboons.
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.
"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa.
An exhilarating account of Sapolsky & and twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti — for man and beast alike.
Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes ever more enamored of his subjects — unique and compelling characters in their own right — and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.
By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.
A Noble But Onerous Duty: An Autobiog...
From a humble beginning as a son of employees in white settlers' farms in the central Rift Valley, Dr Francis K. Sang overcame many odds to rise through the ranks of the Kenya Police and become the 4th Kenyan Director of the Criminal Investigation Department. He served in this position for 4 years before he was transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the changeover of government in Kenya at the end of 2002.
He was tasked with the establishment of the Nairobi Secretariat to coordinate issues to do with small arms in the region. This he did and later helped transform the secretariat into the Regional Centre for Small Arms (RECSA), a regional inter-governmental body that coordinates activities aimed at controlling and reducing the proliferation of small arms and light weapons in the Eastern Africa, Great Lakes and Horn of Africa region and bordering states.
In this autobiography, he relates his experiences, from the difficult circumstances surrounding his birth and childhood, his struggles to get an education in spite of the many obstacles that he faced and his experiences in the police force, particularly in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) during the tenure of the 2nd President of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi.
He also relates his experiences after the NARC Government took over in 2002 and sent most senior security officers in the former government packing, either on retirement or on transfer to other less prestigious positions. He further relates how, through determination, he has been able to achieve his academic dreams which had been deferred earlier in his life owing to financial constraints, culminating in the acquisition of a PhD late in life.
He also speaks about the role his family has played in enabling him to achieve all he has in his life. Reflecting on his long journey that has brought him to the place where he is today, the author also gives a number of insights on his work and life. This autobiography should serve as interesting reading to the general public as well as to persons serving in the disciplined forces, considering that it is the first from amongst persons that have served in the police force and risen through the ranks to the very top.
Memoirs of a Kenyan Spymaster by Bart...
Bart Joseph Kibati, who started dreaming as a schoolboy of becoming a James Bond type intelligence agent and rose to become a deputy director of intelligence with the notorious Special Branch, the predecessor of the National Intelligence Service, tells all in this first ever memoir by a top level Kenyan spy-master.
Kibati’s memoir also offers an insight into Kenya’s political and social history.
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate.
Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards.
The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s.
His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman.
But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.
Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic.
Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees).
Titan The Life of John D Rockefeller Sr
John D. Rockefeller, Sr.--history's first billionaire and the patriarch of America's most famous dynasty--is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians.
Now Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning biographer of the Morgan and Warburg banking families, gives us a history of the mogul "etched with uncommon objectivity and literary grace . . . as detailed, balanced, and psychologically insightful a portrait of the tycoon as we may ever have" (Kirkus Reviews).
Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller's exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book will indelibly alter our image of this most enigmatic capitalist.
Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world's richest man by creating America's most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded "the Octopus" by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.
Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation's history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.
While providing abundant new evidence of Rockefeller's misdeeds, Chernow discards the stereotype of the cold-blooded monster to sketch an unforgettably human portrait of a quirky, eccentric original. A devout Baptist and temperance advocate, Rockefeller gave money more generously--his chosen philanthropies included the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, and what is today Rockefeller University--than anyone before him.
Titan presents a finely nuanced portrait of a fascinating, complex man, synthesizing his public and private lives and disclosing numerous family scandals, tragedies, and misfortunes that have never before come to light.
John D. Rockefeller's story captures a pivotal moment in American history, documenting the dramatic post-Civil War shift from small business to the rise of giant corporations that irrevocably transformed the nation.
With cameos by Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Jung, J. Pierpont Morgan, William James, Henry Clay Frick, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers, Titan turns Rockefeller's life into a vivid tapestry of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It is Ron Chernow's signal triumph that he narrates this monumental saga with all the sweep, drama, and insight that this giant subject deserves.
E mc2 by David Bodanis
'By the end of the astonishing E=mc2, a dedicated reader will have achieved, if only by osmosis, an understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity and feel quite at ease dining with Nobel Prize winners.
It's a lucid, even thrilling study: the very best kind of science journalism. I didn't know I could know so much.' Fay Weldon, Books of the Year, Washington Post
In 1905, Albert Einstein produced five historic papers that shattered many cherished scientific beliefs.
One of those papers introduced the theory of special relativity and his legendary equation, E=mc2. Generations have grown up knowing that equation changed the shape of our world, but without understanding what it really means and why it is so significant.
In this fascinating biography David Bodanis tells the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. He looks at the elements 'e', 'm' and 'c'; and honours the scientists whose landmark discoveries paved the way for Einstein.
He plots the course of the equation through the twentieth century, showing how our lives have been revolutionized by its applications; and looks far ahead to the future.
But as with any biography, it is the human stories that really ignite the subject - stories of love, courage and tragedy, of near misses, disappointments and disasters that, brought together by Bodanis in this remarkable book, turn Einstein's seemingly impenetrable theory into a dramatic and accessible human achievement.
We the People by Rev Timothy Njoya
Timothy Murere Njoya makes a decision to convert to Christianity. He is met with threats of a beating. The year is 1956. The Mau Mau had taken to the forest determined to win back the land stolen from them by British settlers.
Now, Njoya has an all-consuming purpose. Based on his newfound sovereignty, he dedicates his life to restoring the people’s humanity and the country’s nationhood.
His pursuit sees him thrice defrocked and, thrice left for dead, but he is thrice reinstated and thrice rises again, surviving against the odds to see the beginning of the realization of his dream—a Constitution based on the sovereignty of We the People.
Peeling Back the Mask by Miguna Miguna
Peeling Back the Mask is an insider's account from one of the Kenyan Prime Minister's former adviser detailing instances of corruption and fraud at the highest level of Kenyan government.
With massive online and media coverage, this book has become the spearhead of a national campaign to aspire to a new corruption-free Kenya.
This remarkable book generated twenty thousand hits on the publisher website within hours of its announcement and Google reports Miguna Miguna is in the top five subjects searched online in Africa.
In the House of the Interpreter by Ng...
Renowned novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o was a student at a prestigious, British-run boarding school near Nairobi when the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty gripped his country.
While he enjoyed scouting trips and chess tournaments, his family home was razed to the ground and his brother, a member of the insurgency, was captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. But Ngugi could not escape history, and eventually found himself jailed after a run in with the forces of colonialism.
Ngugi richly and poignantly evokes the experiences that would transform him into a world-class writer and, as a political dissident, a moral compass to us all. A winning celebration of the implacable determination of youth and the power of hope, here is a searing account of the history of a man—and the story of a nation.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Ma...
Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime.
Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors ("I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare") will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read."
I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallmann
At the age of twenty-five, Kuki Gallman, divorced and badly injured in a devastating car accident, left Italy to convalesce in Africa with the man who would become her second husband.
Enchanted by the land, they established a vast ranch on the Laikipia plateau in Kenya. But Africa's splendor came with a price. Filled with pain and joy, beauty and drama, Gallman's haunting memoir "captures perfectly the magic of Kenya"
This Child will be great by Sirleaf E...
In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf shares the story of her rise to power, including her early childhood; her experiences with abuse, imprisonment, and exile; and her fight for democracy and social justice. She reveals her determination to succeed in multiple worlds, from her studies in the United States to her work as an international bank executive, to campaigning in some of Liberia's most desperate and war-torn villages and neighborhoods.
It is the tale of an outspoken political and social reformer who fought the oppression of dictators and championed change. By telling her story, Sirleaf encourages women everywhere to pursue leadership roles at the highest levels of power, and gives us all hope that we can change the world.