The Bear Hunter is a unique story of football obsession. Author John Irwin vowed to track down each of the 86 players who featured in the club's nine successive league title triumphs between 1988 and 1997. His obsession took him around the world during seven years of adventures as he turned bear hunter to meet his heroes.

Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that rather than controlling the disreputable, jail disorients and degrades these people, indoctrinating new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issu...

This book is one mans story of engineering and mountaineering. It is an inspirational account of how one young man built his life from very modest beginningswith little money or education, joining the adult world as an apprentice engineer, going on to academic distinction and a great career as a director of a large manufacturing concern in South Africa. It is an account also of how that young man found himself and tested himself against some great challenges in the mountains of Ireland and...

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the...

'From the helicopter I could see the property's waterholes surrounded by paperback trees, its red-stone cliffs lit by the rising sun. And grass, endless seas of grass. Here was the vision splendid: Nat Buchanan's grass castle. Gurindji country. And my country, Australia.'This is big country, the outback, home to the largest cattle and sheep stations in the world. Yet few of us know what goes on behind the farm gate. What's life really like when next door is 500 kilometres away, and ...

The hidden brain is the voice in our ear when we make the most important decisions in our lives—but we’re never aware of it. The hidden brain decides whom we fall in love with and whom we hate. It tells us to vote for the white candidate and convict the dark-skinned defendant, to hire the thin woman but pay her less than the man doing the same job. It can direct us to safety when disaster strikes and move us to extraordinary acts of altruism. But it can also be manipulated to turn an ordin...

'If Ray Mears isn't a Great Living Englishman, then goodness me, who is? Ray is a persuader, pragmatist and populariser in the Durrell-Attenborough-Bellamy tradition.' - Robert Crampton, The TimesRay Mears is a household name through his television series Tracks, World of Survival, Bushcraft Survival, The Real Heroes of Telemark and many more. He is a private individual who shuns publicity whenever possible and would pre...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Unfair succinctly and persuasively recounts cutting-edge research testifying to the faulty and inaccurate procedures that underpin virtually all aspects of our criminal justice system, illustrating many with case studies.”—The Boston GlobeA child is gunned down by a police officer; an investigator ignores critical clues in a case; an innocent man confesses to a crime he did not commit; a jury acquits a killer....

Did you know?In 1884 the Circle Line opened and was described in The Times as 'a form of mild torture which no person would undergo if he could conveniently help it.'According to one psychologist, Tube commuters can experience greater levels of stress than a police officer facing a rioting mob or even a fighter pilot going into a dogfight.Underground trains have only twice been used to transport deceased people in coffins: William Gladston...

As Britain moved from austerity to prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s, it became clear that British Railways needed to modernise its equipment and rationalise its network if it was to hold its own in the face of growing competition from road and air transport.After attempting to maintain pre-war networks and technology in the 1950s, a reversal of policy in the 1960s brought line closures, new liveries and the last breath of steam, as Dr Beeching and his successors s...

When Harvard-trained sociologist Peter Moskos left the classroom to become a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District, he was thrust deep into police culture and the ways of the street--the nerve-rattling patrols, the thriving drug corners, and a world of poverty and violence that outsiders never see. In Cop in the Hood, Moskos reveals the truths he learned on the midnight shift.Through Moskos's eyes, we see police academy graduates unprepared for the realities of the street, s...

Another treat for Harry Hill fans! Britain's favourite comedian, Harry Hill, loves it when people make silly mistakes. So much that he has put together a rib-tickling book of howlers, wacky stories and bloopers for all the family. The Bumper Book of Bloopers contains Harry's favourite goofs picked from the world's daftest newspapers and magazines - and believe it or not every single one of them is a genuine boob!