Profile Books

RAJA SHEHADEH’S PALESTINIAN WALKS WINS ORWELL PRIZE02 Apr 2008

Profile author Raja Shehadeh has been awarded the prestigious Orwell Prize for Political writing for his acclaimed book Palestinian Walks. The book describes over two decades of turmoil and change in the Middle East, steered via the history-soaked landscape of Palestine. A lawyer and human rights activist of independent temper, Raja has always found much-needed peace by taking walks in the Palestinian hills – a landscape which, owing to occupation, Jewish settlements and disastrous environmental policies, is fast disappearing.
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Profile Titles Longlisted for World’s Most Prestigious Award for Science Writing25 Apr 2008

Two Profile titles have made the twelve-strong longlist for the world’s most prestigious award for science writing – the Royal Society Prize for Science Books 2008.
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Our Longest Days on the BBC website02 Apr 2008

As Jamie Oliver calls for a return to a wartime diet, a new book documenting how ordinary families survived the austerity of World War II provides some useful lessons in belt tightening.
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More Profile authors win prizes!01 May 2008

Susan Hill has won the prestigious Yorkshire Post Fiction book of the year for The Man in the Picture.
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Click here for more information about ‘Clean’

Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing
Katherine Ashenburg
Napoleon once wrote in a love letter to Josephine ‘I return to Paris in five days. Stop washing.’ To smell like a human was not always the misdemeanour it is today. Body odour was in fact an important factor of sex and courtship, considered by some to be a powerful aphrodisiac, as we see in Napoleon’s letter. Contrary to what we like to think, no bodily odour is innately disgusting, instead it is our noses which adapt to fit our beliefs.
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We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity
Charles Leadbeater
We-think is about what the rise of these phenomena (not all to do with the internet) means for the way we organise ourselves – not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators.
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Click here for more information about ‘We-Think’

Click here for more information about ‘Our Longest Days’

Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War
Edited by Sandra Koa Wing
For six years the people of Britain endured bombs and the threat of invasion, and more than 140,000 civilians were killed or seriously wounded. Men and women were called to serve in the armed forces in record numbers, and everyone experienced air raids and rationing. In these terrible times, volunteers of almost every age, class and occupation wrote diaries for the “Mass Observation” project, which was set up in the 1930s to collect the voices of ordinary men and women.
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Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt
Joyce Tyldesley
She was the last ruler of the Macedonian dynasty of Ptolemies who had ruled Egypt for three centuries. Highly educated (she was the only one of the Ptolemies to read and speak ancient Egyptian as well as the court Greek) and very clever (her famous liaisons with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were as much to do with politics as the heart), she steered her kingdom through impossibly taxing internal problems and against greedy Roman imperialism.
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Click here for more information about ‘Cleopatra’

Click here for more information about ‘Futurecast 2020’

Futurecast 2020: A Global Blueprint
Robert Shapiro
Rapid technological advances, globalisation, unparalleled demographic changes and the rise of China and India as superpowers mean that we are entering an unprecedented age. Rob Shapiro employs his immense experience in international politics to sketch a blueprint for the coming fifteen years, tracing the path combined global forces may lead us. This is neither hopelessly idealistic nor a tale of woe and Armageddon: Shapiro is persistently lucid, penetrating and even-handed in delineating the world as it stands and predicting the way it will walk.
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	The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order David Smith The rise of China and India will be the outstanding development of the 21st century, raising fundamental questions about both the structure of the world economy and the balance of global geopolitical power. MORE

China and America: A Time of Reckoning
Charles Dumas
In his last book, The Bill from the China Shop, Charles Dumas predicted how the Asian savings glut would force-feed US mortgage borrowing to excess. China and America points to the next risks. The current credit crunch is likely to be followed by an economic downswing, led by housing, but with weakened household wealth and confidence prolonging the pain.
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Click here for more information about ‘Get out of my Life’

Get out of my Life: But First Take Me and Alex Into Town
Tony Wolf and Suzanne Franks
This is the best survival manual for parents who find themselves marooned among volatile and incomprehensible aliens on Planet Teen. It looks at all the difficult issues of bringing up teenagers – school, sex, drugs and even suicide. But it’s the title of the second chapter, ’What They Do and Why’ that best captures the book’s spirit and technique, explaining how to translate teenage behaviour into its true, often less complicated meaning. One key mistake, for instance, is getting involved in no-win conflicts instead of having the wisdom to shut up when shutting up would be the most effective – albeit least satisfying – thing to do.
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	Guide to Financial Management John Tennent Managers are constantly expected to make decisions fully understanding the financial consequence. In the absence of formal training few people are prepared for the responsibilities of dealing with management reports, budgets and capital proposals, and find themselves embarrassed by their lack of understanding. MORE

More From Our Own Correspondent: Dispatches from Misha Glenny, John Simpson Caroline Wyatt and many more
Edited by Tony Grant
These dispatches take the reader to the four corners of the earth, from a Maoist wedding to the most dangerous road in the world. Follow the last hitch-hiker in northern France, discover the buffalo mounted police in Brazil, celebrate a home birth in Hungary and get absorbed by saffron in Kashmir. From the boy who lived in a tire to the British troops in Iraq, meet the real people behind the news on this breathtaking journey through the world we live in.
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Click here for more information about ‘More From Our Own Correspondent’

Click here for more information about ‘Fixing Climate’

Fixing Climate: The story of climate science – and how to stop global warming
Robert Kunzig and Wallace S. Broecker
With Broeker as his guide, award-winning science writer Robert Kunzig looks back at Earth’s volatile climate history so as to shed light on the challenges ahead. Ice ages, planetary orbits, a giant ‘conveyor belt’ in the ocean … it’s a riveting story full of maverick thinkers, extraordinary discoveries and an urgent blueprint for action.
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