In the Jaws of the Dragon by Ron Asher

$35.00 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

"China Inc., the business arm of China's repressive dictatorship, is trying to take over the world by buying key sectors of various countries' economies as part of its strategic plan for global control of the world's resources. China's rapid arms build-up suggests that it is preparing to back its ever i ncreasing demands on other countries with force. China chose New Zealand as the first Western country with which to have a free trade agreement, which is more about colonising and dominating our economy than about free trade. Since then the New Zealand government has bent over backwards to accommodate the interests of China Inc. - often at the expense of the prospects and interests of ordinary New Zealanders. This book should be read by every New Zealander since it affects the future prospects of the country in respect of economic welfare, sovereignty and national security. It is a case of getting a grip on the situation now or sleepwalking to a situation where New Zealanders will finish up as lowly paid serfs in the land that was built by the sweat and toil of the pioneers."--Back cover. ...Show more

The Final Choice: End of Life Suffering: Is Assisted Dying the Answer? by Caralise Trayes

$29.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics | Reading Level: near fine

BE INFORMED FOR YOUR VOTE AT THE REFERENDUM On 17 October 2020 A Kiwi journalist on the hunt for the truth about assisted dying and the End of Life Choice Act. Join her on a journey of discovery as she tells the stories of those with terminal illness and interviews lawyers, doctors, ethicists and cleric s around New Zealand and the world. Includes interviews from Act MP David Seymour, Shirley Seales (mother of the late Lecretia Seales), Dr Jack Havill and Mary Panko PhD of the End-of-Life Choice Society, as well as influencer & disabilities advocate Claire Freeman, palliative care expert Professor Roderick MacLeod MNZM and NZ Disability Rights Commissioner, Paula Tesoriero MNZM among many others. Written in a remarkably personable way while plunging into some of life's most challenging topics, and resurfacing with intriguing results ...Show more

Fridays with Jim - Conversations about Our Country with Jim Bolger by David Cohen

$45.00 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

A FORMER NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER CANDIDLY REVIEWS HIS LIFE AND THE STATE OF THE NATION. A self-taught son of Irish immigrants, devout Catholic, rough-hewn King Country farmer and farming lobbyist, Jim Bolger entered New Zealand political life in the 1970s. He was a flinty Minister of Labour under Rob ert Muldoon and Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997. As ambassador to Washington, he helped create warmer relations with the United States. In recent years, he has chaired boards, served as the chancellor of the University of Waikato and marked more than a half-century of marriage to Joan, with whom he has nine children. Never given to orthodoxies, yet staunchly National in his politics, in his stillenergetic eighties he remains an impressively brisk progressive thinker. For six months he regularly sat down on Fridays with the writer David Cohen to reflect on his life and times, our nation and world. Fridays with Jim reveals a quintessential man of the old New Zealand who is fully in synch with the new New Zealand, and with plenty of ideas about where its all heading. ...Show more

How I Became a Socialist by William Morris

$24.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

The definitive collection of political writings from William Morris William Morris is famous as a designer, poet and artist, but his work as a political thinker and activist is little known. This collection, the first of his political writings published for nearly 50 years, shows Morris as one of the mo st original and inspiring socialist intellectuals of his generation. Covering essays and lectures ranging through the relation between art and politics, to his visions for a socialist society and his strident anti-imperialism, this is an essential volume which shows Morris at his engaged and dazzling best. ...Show more

The Art of Fairness - The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean by David Bodanis

$37.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

Money and Power - The World Leaders Who Changed Economics by Vincent Cable

$36.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

A captivating economic history of government all over the world.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends by Nicole Perlroth

$32.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

Zero day- a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world's computer networks invisibly until discovered. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to tap into any iPhone, dismantle safety controls at a chemical plant and shut down the power in an entire nation just ask the Ukraine. Zero days are the blood diamonds of the security trade, pursued by nation states, defense contractors, cybercriminals, and security defenders alike. In this market, governments aren't regulators; they are clients paying huge sums to hackers willing to turn over gaps in the Internet, and stay silent about them. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth's discovery, unpacked. A intrepid journalist unravels an opaque, code-driven market from the outside in encountering spies, hackers, arms dealers, mercenaries and a few unsung heroes along the way. As the stakes get higher and higher in the rush to push the world's critical infrastructure online, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is the urgent and alarming discovery of one of the world's most extreme threats. ...Show more

Privacy Is Power - Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz

$37.00 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

As the data economy grows in power, Carissa Véliz exposes how our privacy is eroded by big tech and governments, why that matters and what we can do about it. The moment you check your phone in the morning you are giving away your data. Before you've even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organi sations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept, and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your 'suggested friends' on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy. Without your permission, or even your awareness, tech companies are harvesting your information, your location, your likes, your habits, and sharing it amongst themselves. They're not just selling your data. They're selling the power to influence you. Even when you've explicitly asked them not to. And it's not just you. It's all your contacts too. Digital technology is stealing our personal data and with it our power to make free choices. To reclaim that power and democracy, we must protect our privacy. What can we do? So much is at stake. Our phones, our TVs, even our washing machines are spies in our own homes. We need new regulation. We need to pressure policy-makers for red lines on the data economy. And we need to stop sharing and to adopt privacy-friendly alternatives to Google, Facebook and other online platforms. Short, terrifying, practical: Privacy is Power highlights the implications of our laid-back attitude to data and sets out how we can take back control. If you liked The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, you'll love Privacy is Power because it provides a philosophical perspective on the politics of privacy, and it offers a very practical outlook, both for policymakers and ordinary citizens. ...Show more

Quarterly Essay 80: The High Road: What Australia Can Learn From New Zealand by Laura Tingle

$30.00 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

In a tumultuous year, Australia and New Zealand have never been closer, as we move towards a shared travel zone. But why, despite being so close, do we seem to know so little about each other? And is there such a thing as national character? In this wise and illuminating essay, Laura Tingle looks at lea dership, economics, history and more. Competitiveness has marked our relationship from its earliest days. In the past half-century, both countries have been compelled to remake themselves amid shifting economic fortunes. New Zealand has been held up as a model for everything from tax reform to the way we conduct our politics. What have been the outcomes? How do they compare to ours? Tingle considers everything from Morrison and Ardern as national leaders to the different ways each country has dealt with its colonial legacy. What could we learn from New Zealand? And it from us? This is a perceptive, often amusing introduction to a country just like ours in some ways, but quite different in others.   ...Show more

The Wake-Up Call - How the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West - and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait; Adrian Wooldridge

$29.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

An urgent and informed look at the challenges Britain and world governments will face in a post-Covid-19 world. The Covid crisis has not just highlighted the failures of certain governments, it is accelerating a shift in the balance of power from West to East. After a decade where politics in the US an d the UK has been consumed with inward-facing struggles, countries like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, as well as China, have made extraordinary advances economically, technologically and politically. In this beautifully crafted essay, Micklethwait and Wooldridge explain how we ended up in this mess and explore the possible routes out. If Western governments respond creatively to the crisis, they will have a chance of reversing decades of decline; if they dither and delay while Asia continues to improve, the prospect of a new Eastern-dominated world order will increase. The big question facing the world is whether the West can rise to the challenge as it has before. ...Show more

Azadi - Freedom. Fascism. Fiction by Arundhati Roy

$17.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF MY SEDITIOUS HEART AND THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS, A NEW AND PRESSING DISPATCH FROM THE HEART OF THE CROWD AND THE SOLITUDE OF A WRITER'S DESK The chant of 'Azadi!' - Urdu for 'Freedom!' - is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see a s the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom - a chasm or a bridge? - the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The Coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world. ...Show more

A Thousand Small Sanities - The Moral Adventure of Liberalism by Adam Gopnik

$24.99 NZD

Category: Current Affairs & Politics

'WITTY, HUMANE, LEARNED' NEW YORK TIMES The New York Times-bestselling author offers a stirring defence of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democr acy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation. ...Show more