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Book shelf

Explore a selection of publications by alumni and academics, and books with a link to the University or Cambridge

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Book cover shows a swan sailing across rippled water as musical notes rise from the surface.

Swansong

Henry Disney (Sidney Sussex 1959)

The final collection of poems by a scientist and poet near the end of an extraordinary life. The poems are poignant and straight to the point. There are no shades of grey. You will either concur with the poet or you may beg to differ, but you will not be neutral. Comments cover politics, current conflicts across the world, impacts of climate change and other concerns, which are treated with clarity and insight. You will be moved, you will be challenged and you will be stirred. The poems reflect on unusual incidents in the poet's life and comments on contemporary concerns of life today.

Book cover with a black background and title in bright orange text.

Vital Signs

Edward Ragg (Selwyn 1999)

Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, followed by the more experimental Exploring Rights (2020); and And Then the Rain Came (2022), an exposition on love and well-being forged under the global pandemic and climate crisis. This new work, Vital Signs, draws on the inspiration of the medical vital signs.

Book cover with a black and smoky background design.

Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspaper

Sarah Bartley (Homerton 2007) and Sarah Mullan

Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspaper traces a history of the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s), through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal's Teatro Jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK (2020s).

Book cover divided into pink on the top and black at the bottom.

The Future is Greater: A Working Mother's Guide to Finding Balance

Maxine Nwaneri (Murray Edwards 2007)

This book is one of "four guides to navigating and understanding the future of work." - Harper's Bazaar

It is the essential guide for every working mother who wants to learn how to prioritise herself and feel less overwhelmed in work and life. Do you feel like you never have enough time? Does everyone else’s needs come first? Do you keep pushing back on your dreams as you wait for the perfect time that just never seems to arrive? It’s time to stop simply surviving and start thriving in the life you were meant to lead.

Cover depicts the outside of a two story boat house on the river. A boat full of rowers glides past.

Cambridge Boathouses - Double Takes Along the River Cam

Naomi Davies (Jesus 1987) and Sara Rawlinson

Cambridge Boathouses, produced by Naomi Davies & Sara Rawlinson, is a compilation of the artists’ work with 56 full colour pages showing the splendour of all 22 Cambridge boathouses along the River Cam. Depicting them in unique combinations of photographs and watercolour, Sara & Naomi worked for two years to complete the series. Each of the boathouses is shown in this volume, along with architectural notes and details of the artistic process to make each image.

Book cover for The Day Before, featuring a rural, lakeside landscape with the sun shining through dark clouds.

The Day Before

Aoife Lyall (St John's 2009)

The Day Before beautifully captures the ordinary moments in life that crystallise in the face of crisis and threat. Focusing on the earliest weeks and months of the pandemic, these intimate and meticulous poems mark the lived experience of someone who must navigate a world she no longer understands, exploring first steps and last breaths, milestones, millstones, emigration, fly-tipping and the entire world to be found in the space behind the front door.

Book cover for In Whom We Trust, featuring a smoking high-rise building in the background.

In Whom We Trust

Hamid Varzi (Trinity Hall 1969)

In Whom We Trust traces the lives of three Cambridge University graduates—one American, one English, and one Iranian—whose intimate friendship is severely tested over the years by conflicting career paths in a rapidly modernising world, where battle lines are often as blurred as the governmental policies that put them there. This remarkable story is a thrilling mixture of political and religious intrigue set against a backdrop of historical events from the 1950s to the present.

Book cover features a river and waterfall landscape with cartoon children in the foreground,

Let's Save the World, Volume 1

Hamid Varzi (Trinity Hall 1969)

This illustrated poetry book encourages children's awareness of climate change, in a novel and unique manner. Instead of featuring adults preaching to children, the author portrays Nature herself addressing children directly through a talking tree, the sea and a honeybee. The book places children in Nature's shoes. As with Animal Farm, the book is suitable for both children and adults.

Book cover has an orange and yellow background, with a white silhouetted map of Africa.

The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights

Nat Rubner (King's 2008)

A study of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, one of the most important documents in modern African history, that positions it within the African Lives Matter struggle to assert an African identity rather than as simply a human rights document. The book describes its underlying African origins and how the principles of the OAU influenced its path and content.

Book cover for 'Lovebroken' featuring a wrinkled piece of white paper with a drawing of a head and shoulders.

Lovebroken

Finley de Witt (Murray Edwards 1984)

Have you ever struggled with your mental health, your terrible relatives or a dysfunctional relationship? Or simply wondered what the hell is wrong with you? This story is for you. Finley de Witt is a writer, bodyworker and trauma specialist with 30 years' experience. This account of her experiences with NHS psychotherapy and the cast of characters she encounters along the way will offer a message of hope to all. Trauma has never been so funny or so shocking.

A person in a white doctor's jacket and stethoscope around their neck holds a gun.

The Watcher, the Mechanic and the Doctor's Wife

Michael Duggan (Clare 1981)

In a perilous era, only the most skilled are summoned to safeguard our way of life. Amidst the allure of sex and drugs, the deceit of crooks, and the intricate dance between the police and doctors, this tale offers a deep dive into the world of clinical medicine. It spotlights a unique cadre of practitioners determined to make a difference, even as they navigate the challenges of an underfunded NHS, a government stretched thin, and a public often left in the dark. Medicine is not just a profession; it's a calling.

A mother and her young child sit on the kerb with their possessions.

Displaced: Refugees, trauma, and integration within nations

Shaifali Sandhya (Trinity 1994)

Armed conflicts, natural disasters, poverty, and the pandemic have forced over 117 million people to abandon their homes and heritage. Surging pushbacks, protection gaps, and deportations precipitate refugees’ exclusion from equitable economic, social, cultural, political, and reproductive rights, amplifying suffering. As such displaced communities will shoulder a silent epidemic of posttraumatic stress as well as other debilitating ailments, which are often passed down to future generations.

A dark sea sits beneath a large star-lit sky

Remarkable It Is: Late Life Poems

Eugene Stelzig (King's 1966)

The title—Remarkable It Is—refers to the poet’s calling to notice things that most of us take for granted (such as our breathing and our hearts beating) but that actually constitute the miracle of our being alive. These poems range from the playfully wistful, to the probingly thoughtful (about old age and the specter of mortality as well as our place in the universe), and the satirical (especially about contemporary politics and world events).

Beige cover with multicoloured circles arranged in a bar graph.

Financial Joy

Ken Okoroafor (Downing 2014) and Mary Okoroafor

Stop worrying about money. Start enjoying your life.

This 10-week plan will help you to turn your life around and design a life of financial freedom filled with the small experiences that bring you joy.

A woman in a blue dress sits at the piano with her back to the viewer.

Women and the Piano - a History in Fifty Lives

Susan Tomes (Kings 1972)

Throughout most of the piano’s history, women pianists lacked access to formal training and were excluded from male-dominated performance spaces. Even the modern piano’s keys were designed without consideration of women’s typically smaller hands. Yet despite their music being largely confined to the domestic sphere, women continued to play, perform, and compose on their own terms.

Book cover shows people hiking through the countryside and a close up of someone tying their shoelace

Exercise: A Scientific and Clinical Cverview

Dr Hugh JN Bethell (St John's 1960) & Prof David Brodie

A comprehensive description of the science of physical performance, how to measure it, its place in maintaining good health and its role in the prevention and treatment of a variety of diseases - particularly the degenerative conditions of later life.

The book also describes the woefully inadequate activity levels of our population, the dangers of sedentary lifestyles and the huge social and financial benefits to be gained by increasing exercise for all.

The book cover shows a silhouetted figure staring into the sunset over a mountainous landscape

Beyond the Horizon might be Better

Sola Amure (Christ's 1976)

Sola Amure’s childhood was spent between Nigeria and England.

In Nigeria his family enjoyed every material comfort: the only things lacking from his early life were love and affection. He was very upset at the huge disparity between people like his family and those families struggling to eat.

The book cover depicts cylinders of materials in neat lines

Materials and Sustainability: Building A Circular Future

Paul Foulkes-Arellano (Queens 1982) & Julia L Freer Goldstein

This book examines sustainable manufacturing, from the extraction of materials to processing, use and disposal, and argues that significant changes in all of the above are needed for the world to progress toward a more circular economy.

A yellow and black depiction of Mecca (a 3D cube in shape) on a deep blue background.

Labbaikallah - Life Lessons In A Spiritual Journey

Siti Malini Mat (Newnham 1999)

A collection of introspective reflections in the hajj journey of a regular Muslim lady, when she made it a point to deliberately ask herself, in almost each step of the way:

What does this mean to me?
What can I learn from this?
How can the lessons help me grow to become a better Muslim and a better person?

Nietzsche’s Political Economy book cover, brown background with green bold text

Nietzsche’s Political Economy

Dmitri G. Safronov (Girton 2016)

Nietzsche’s Political Economy is a pioneering appraisal of Nietzsche’s critique of industrial culture and its unfolding crisis. The author contends that Nietzsche remains unique in conceptualizing the upheavals of modern political economy in terms of the crisis of its governing values.

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