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

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The Best Water Skier in Luxembourg

Keith Kahn-Harris (Robinson 1991)

The Best Waterskier In Luxembourg recounts sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris's encounters with those who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of excellence while almost no one else is looking. It’s a book about unsung heroes, in unsung communities, doing incredible things. It’s mostly travelogue, with a bit of sociology thrown in. It’s also a challenge he has set himself to discover worlds he knows nothing about, to search out the odd, the quirky and the eccentric but not to ridicule them.

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The Colleges of Cambridge University

Andrew Hunter-Blair (Cambridge resident and local history author)

Cambridge University is one of the most well-known and iconic universities, boasting a reputation unsurpassed by few others. This new title from Andrew Hunter-Blair provides a unique insight into the workings, both past and present, of the 31 colleges that comprise Cambridge University, showcasing the college connections whilst also detailing the university’s diverse roles.

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Florida's First Constitution: The Constitution of Cádiz

Dr M C Mirow (Gonville & Caius 1988)

St. Augustine’s central square, the Plaza de la Constitución, is not named for the United States Constitution. Instead, its name comes from Florida’s first constitution, the Spanish Constitution of Cádiz of 1812.

Daily political life in Florida’s Spanish colonial cities was governed by this document, and cities like St. Augustine ordered their activities around the requirements, rights, and duties expressed in this Constitution. This Constitution governed Spanish Florida from 1812 to 1815 and then again from 1820 until 1821 when Spain turned Florida over to the United States.

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Exposure: Forty Poems by Jonathan Steffen

Jonathan Steffen (King's 1978)

Exposure brings together 40 poems written by Jonathan Steffen over a period of 30 years. It also brings these poems together with forty photographs by different photographers from around the world.

The poems in Exposure lay bare the endless range of emotions triggered by love. Some of them have previously appeared in anthologies and magazines; others are published here for the first time ever. Each poem has been matched with the original work of a contemporary photographer that illustrates some aspect of the text, providing a powerful commentary on the verse.

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There is an I in Team

Dr Mark de Rond (Fellow of Darwin College, Reader at Cambridge Judge Business School)

In this book, management scholar Mark de Rond explores the worlds of professional sports and high performance athletes as well as the latest social and psychological research to reveal counterintuitive lessons about teams. Why is it so hard to get teams to perform to their potential? How can people work more effectively together on teams? Why does conflict happen even when intentions are aligned - and is that conflict harmful, or can it actually help the group dynamic?

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Creating Learning without Limits

Dr Mandy Swann (Homerton 1982, lecturer at the Faculty of Education), Alison Peacock, Susan Hard, Mary Jane Drummond

This book tells the story of how one primary school community worked to build a learning environment that is inclusive, humane and enabling for everybody, a place free from the damaging effects of fixed ability thinking and practices. Drawing on compelling accounts of everyday life in the school, it describes how, in just a few years, the school (once in special measures) grew into a thriving community, with distinctive views of learning, curriculum and pedagogy, monitoring and accountability that found expression in every aspect of school life.

Life on the edge: Peter Danckwerts GC, MBE, FRS

Dr Peter Varey (Gonville and Caius 1960)

Peter Danckwerts was brilliant, witty and wise. A hero of the London Blitz, disarming parachute mines at 23, Danckwerts later turned his sharp intellect to chemical processing, studying at MIT to find out how the Americans did it. Back in the UK at Cambridge University, where he became Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering, he made an international reputation for himself as an innovator.

This biography covers his interest in wine, women and song, as well as his wide grasp of things scientific and the great sympathy and generosity he showed to his colleagues and many friends.

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The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Dr John Coates (King's 1982, researcher at Cambridge Neuroscience)

The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially younger men - significantly, the fear of risk is not reduced in women. Similarly, intense failure leads to a rise in levels of cortisol, the anti-testosterone hormone that lowers the appetite for risk across an entire spectrum of decisions.

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Crack Scam

Tony Stowell (Trinity 1956)

This is a fast-paced action thriller set in an authentic background in which two ordinary people become unwittingly caught up in the harsh world of illegal drug dealing. The action is seen through the eyes of Oliver Howsen, a production engineer, and a young accountant, Emma Crawford, who by chance discover that their firm is being used to launder drug money. They, and the reader, are propelled from tranquil Cotswold life into the merciless world of illicit drugs to a final dramatic denoument.

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Rethinking the Keynesian Revolution: Keynes, Hayek, and the Wicksell Connection

Tyler Beck Goodspeed (Emmanuel 2008)

While standard accounts of the 1930s debates surrounding economic thought pit John Maynard Keynes against Friedrich von Hayek in a clash of ideology, this reflexive dichotomy is in many respects superficial. It is the argument of this book that both Keynes and Hayek developed their respective theories of the business cycle within the tradition of Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, and that this shared genealogy manifested itself in significant theoretical affinities between the two supposed antagonists.

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Betrayed by Nature: The War on Cancer

Dr Robin Hesketh (Senior Lecturer, Department of Biochemistry)

Despite the medical advances of the last century, cancer kills over half-a-million people every year in the United States. Yet despite the tenacity of this universal scourge, the science behind the disease remains a mystery to many people.

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Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Autism Research Centre)

In Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness Simon Baron-Cohen takes fascinating and challenging new look at what exactly makes our behaviour uniquely human. How can we ever explain human cruelty? We have always struggled to understand why some people behave in the most evil way imaginable, while others are completely self-sacrificing. Is it possible that - rather than thinking in terms of 'good' and 'evil' - all of us instead lie somewhere on the empathy spectrum, and our position on that spectrum can be affected by both genes and our environments?

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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Dr Robert Macfarlane (Pembroke 1994)

In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove - roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers.

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The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and Her People

Andrew Marr (Trinity 1977)

With the flair for narrative and the meticulous research that readers have come to expect, Andrew Marr turns his attention to the monarch and to the monarchy, chronicling the Queen's pivotal role at the centre of the state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and making a strong case for the institution itself.

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Royal River: Power, Pageantry & the Thames

Dr David Starkey (Fitzwilliam 1964), Simon Thurley and Sarah Monks

This lavishly illustrated catalogue, published to accompany the major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in 2012, explores the history of the Thames as a stage for Royal power, celebration and symbolism. It provides a thematic overview of major events and key individuals from the Tudor age onwards. Dr David Starkey, the leading authority on Britain's royal history, is the exhibition's guest curator. In the book, Dr Starkey and other experts examine the history of the Thames, London's greatest 'street' .

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A Brief Life of the Queen

Robert Lacey (Selwyn 1963)

The Queen is a succinct and intimate biography of Elizabeth II, who has managed to remain enigmatic yet is the most recognized woman in the world. For more than 30 years Robert Lacey has been gathering material from the members of the Queen's inner circle - her friends, relatives, private secretaries and prime ministers - and the results are distilled in this elegant, small format hardback, at under £10 contrasting deliberately with the other weighty and expensive Jubilee tomes.

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Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters

Ed Smith (Peterhouse 1995)

Tracing the history of the concepts of luck and fortune, destiny and fate, from the Ancient Greeks to the present day - in religion, in banking, in politics - Ed Smith argues that the question of luck versus skill is as pertinent today as it has ever been. Weaving in his personal stories - notably the fortunate encounter, on a train he seemed fated to miss, with a beautiful stranger who would become his wife - he challenges us to think again about chance, and to re-examine the question of innate ability and of privileges, both accidental and unavoidable, that are conferred at birth.

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Love, Mortality and the Moving Image

Professor Emma Wilson (Newnham 1985)

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study scrutinizes emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing. Its focus is on love, tenderness, and eroticism, on the undoing of the self in desire and loss, and on the pursuit of relations with a missing other.

The Plan: How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket

Steve James (Hughes Hall 1988)

In 1999, England slumped to a new low in their long and tumultuous cricket history. Defeat in a home series at the hands of a mediocre New Zealand team saw them fall to the bottom of the world Test rankings, below even Zimbabwe. Yet only just over a decade later, England had reached the top. It has been a remarkable and profound transformation, brought about largely by two men with an insatiable desire to succeed, Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower.

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The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre versus Camus

Dr Andy Martin (King's 1980)

Jean-Paul Sartre is the author of possibly the most notorious one-liner of twentieth-century philosophy: 'Hell is other people'. Albert Camus was The Outsider. The two men first came together in Occupied Paris in the middle of the Second World War, and quickly became friends, comrades, and mutual admirers. But the intellectual honeymoon was short-lived.

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