I just bought a bunch of new books from Amazon:

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions – US link/ UK link by Dan Ariely. This is pop psychology book about how we behave and how, as the subtitle puts it, hidden forces influence our everyday decisions., the reviews look really good. And may be it will help me be even more manipulative?
• The Junior Officers Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars – US link/ UK link by Patrick Hennessey. The author has apparently written a notable and thought-provoking memoir of his experiences of training at Sandhurst and of serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is an intelligent, literate piece of work that stands far above the production line of MacNab/Ryan ghost-written SAS shoot-em-ups. An English graduate, Hennessey has attempted to represent the primary experience of life as a junior officer in the modern British Army. What makes the book so notable is the candour with which he’s prepared to describe disturbing psychological developments in the soldiers’ attitude to war.
• I’m Down: A Memoir – US link/ UK link by Mishna Wolff. I bought this for my biracial daughter on the evidence of the blurb: Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. ‘He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol – telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. He walked like a black man, he talked like a black man and he played sports like a black man. You couldn’t tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried’, writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter down with all-things black. But Mishna didn’t fit in with the other kids in her neighborhood: she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing, she couldn’t double dutch and she was the worst player on her all-black basketball team. Yet when she was finally sent to a rich all-white school, she was too black to fit in with her white classmates – and she was more uncool than ever. This hip, funny memoir will have readers howling with laughter, recommending it to friends and questioning what it means to be black or white in America.
• Wall and Piece – US link/ UK link by Banksy. I was never a huge fan of Banksy as his art, to my view, has little depth. One look, a laugh, and you move on. You couldn’t stand and look for ages. But the book is supposed to be really funny. I’ll let you know…
• Streetwise Spycraft – US link/ UK link by Barry Davies. Hopefully this will give me the skills I need to sneak around unobtrusively…
• Backwards in High Heels: The Impossible Art of Being Female – US link/ UK link by Tania Kindersley. I bought this one for my wife and daughter as both of them worry too much. It is not a self-help book or a style guide, but full of kindly practical advice and information about subjects from love to grief to philosophy. Worldly, witty and wonderfully wise, this lovely book about negotiating the world if you’re a modern woman should be handed out free on the NHS.
• 100 Suns – US link/UK link by Michael Light. I bought this because I love nuclear explosions and this extraordinary book photographically documents one hundred US nuclear detonations from the 215 declared atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the US between July 1945 and November 1962. After that date the tests were carried out underground. Within that period a total of 1030 tests in total are known to have been executed. The atmospheric tests were conducted in the Nevada desert and on various islands in the Pacific. The book is divided between the desert and the ocean.

I’ll let you know what they are really like once they arrive and I read them. Which might take a while as I already have three shelves of unread books…