Book shelf

Book shelf

Image (cropped) by Jessica Ruscello under CC0 1.0 licence

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

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Bhadrajee S. Hewage (St Edmund's 2020)

Our understanding that the Buddha emerged from the Middle Gangetic region of the Indian subcontinent has been largely unchallenged for the past 200 years. However, can we truly trust our existing knowledge regarding the geographical locations associated with early Buddhism? Could the Buddha’s origins, in fact, lie elsewhere?

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Laurence Baillie Brown (King's 1972)

This real historical Game of Thrones is set in the late fifteenth century in the Wars of the Roses. A disgruntled younger son of a fallen Duke, Eddy De-la-Pole, bisexual and deeply ambitious, dominated by his beloved mother Alice Chaucer (the poet's granddaughter), nurtures a bromance with Anthony Wydville, brother of the Yorkist Queen. But the manipulative Queen separates them. How will Eddy choose between his beloved friend and the rising star of the dynastic firmament, Richard Duke of Gloucester?

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Ian Lewis (Fitzwilliam 1972)

London, 1913. 14–year–old Billy Bean is a thief. He’s also a talented street performer, and he’s picked up by Fred Karno’s music–hall company. Then Charlie Chaplin leaves Karno for the movies, and Billy is sent to America to replace him. Billy wants to work in movies, too, and it’s not long before he gets his lucky break. But his luck runs out and the movie career goes badly. Soon he’s on the streets again, hoping that his childhood skills and a cheeky grin will keep him from starvation.

A historical novel for all ages 10+.

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Michael B Morrison (Darwin 1978)

Golf had been played in Scotland for centuries with virtually no interest expressed in it south of the border. By the mid-19th century it was acknowledged as the national sport of Scotland, while the English remained stubbornly unmoved by the game. Even when other sports such as football, cricket, rugby and tennis were taking off in England in the 1870s, golf was only played by a small minority in a scattering of places around the country.

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Kylie Moore-Gilbert (Wolfson 2009)

'The sky above our heads was uncaged and unlike us, free.' The Uncaged Sky is Kylie Moore-Gilbert's remarkable story of courage and resilience, and a powerful meditation on hope, solidarity and what it means to be free. On 12 September 2018 British-Australian academic Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran Airport by Iran's feared Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Convicted of espionage in a shadowy trial presided over by Iran's most notorious judge, she was given a 10 year sentence and ultimately spent 804 days incarcerated in Tehran's Evin and Qarchak prisons.

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Garry Powell (Selwyn 1974)

Welshman Huw Lloyd-Jones teaches Creative Writing at a charming college in the American South, and is in love with his beautiful wife, Miranda. But his idyllic life is about to change. His despotic Chair, Frida Shamburger, turns against him, and Miranda reveals that he can no longer count on her love. Huw must fight to save his job and marriage. Yet can a middle-aged white man survive in the woke jungle of academia? And with a sinister psychiatrist and a women's guru encouraging Miranda to be independent, can the couple's love prevail?

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Janak Gunatilleke (Clare 2013)

Do you want to learn about how AI can and can’t help improve healthcare? Do you want to learn how to improve the adoption of AI in healthcare? AI is often seen as a silver bullet, but in many instances AI and data based solutions in healthcare don’t fully address the problem and are sometimes not clinically safe. The current adoption of AI in healthcare is at best ad hoc, with a large number of solutions stuck in the proof of concept stage, limited to certain specialities or without robust evidence of their effectiveness.

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Adrian Hon (Trinity 2000)

How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation - and what we can do about it. Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet.

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Jeremy Hudson (Christ's 1973)

Christian converts of the second century CE - writing a century or so after the death of Jesus - engaged in debates with non-Christians educated in classical Graeco-Roman culture, seeking to persuade them of the truth of Christianity. This book shows how they used the ancient Jewish Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) in their arguments, even though their audiences were unfamiliar with those texts.

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Phillip R Brown (St John's 1972)

Diary of the Last Man is a fictional diary written by an anonymous 'patient' whom is undergoing compulsory experimental trials designed to discover a vaccine to combat a virus, known as the Omega Strain, which is quickly decimating the entire human race. Kept in solitary confinement and under close surveillance, he is permitted to make diary entries in the hope that they may shed light on the cerebral effects of the experimental 'medication' to which he is subjected.

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Philip G Cohen (Peterhouse 1972)

This time-bending novel of Cambridge life breaks all the rules. It's a coming-of-age story in the Cambridge of Aleister Crowley. Like many other books, this book is about a journey. But unlike other books, the destination of the journey is the point where the parallel lines meet. The narrator is locked inside the book. The only way he can get out of it is by persuading one of the other characters in the book to finish off the writing process for him. But before he can do this, he has to make a journey.

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Richard G Derwent (Queens' 1965)

This book identifies four key forms of air pollution: indoor, urban, regional and global. It discusses how these four types of pollution are manifest in today’s society and examines the scientific and policy challenges that stand in the way of progress. Written in a style that balances scientific underpinnings with accessible language, the authors examine the sources and historical context of air pollutants, before dedicating a chapter to each of the key forms.

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Ruth Evans (ed.) (St Catharine's 1981)

In the late 1950’s Bill and Win emerged into adult life from a society ravaged by World War Two. They met at Durham University and fell in love. Together they longed for a faith that would guide them, in their love for one another, from the shadows of the past into a more secure future. They came from very different backgrounds and they had acquired spiritual hopes and queries without certainties. Moved and intrigued by Jesus of Nazareth, neither of them claimed to truly know who He was or to understand Him. Without finding an answer, they got married.

Zulu mask with abstract red impression of a figure holding a sword and spear
Gareth Williams (Queens' 1984)

Serving Shaka is a dramatic evocation of Zulu nation building, immersing the reader in vivid battle scenes, poignant relationships and tense political machinations. Having masterminded Napoleon Bonaparte's escape from St Helena with his friend Emile Beraud in Needing Napoleon, history teacher Richard Davey now finds himself stranded on the African coast. Richard and Emile encounter Shaka Zulu, a leader even more ruthless and ambitious than the former French emperor.

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Barbara Brend (Newnham 1959)

An illustrated reference book for students and scholars of Persian art, poetry, and literature. With this book, Barbara Brend provides thorough consideration of two celebrated Persian manuscripts housed in the British Library. These two copies of the Khamsah (Quintet) a set of five narrative poems by twelfth-century poet Nizami, a master of allegorical poetry in Persian literature, were produced in Herat in the fifteenth century, one of the greatest periods of Persian painting. Although well known, the manuscripts have never before been written about in relation to each other.

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Robin Hesketh (Selwyn 1978)

One in two of us will develop cancer at some point in our lives, and yet many of us don't understand how cancers arise. How many different kinds of cancer are there? What treatments are available? What does the future hold in terms of developing new therapies? This book demystifies cancer by explaining the underlying cell and molecular biology in a clear and accessible style. It answers the questions commonly asked about cancer such as what causes cancer and how cancer develops. It explains how DNA makes proteins and how mutations can corrupt those proteins.

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Michael Aubrey (Clare 1961)

In Is That Really True, Sir?, the artist, barrister, schoolmaster, musician, journalist and explorer Michael Aubrey negotiates a succession of improbable events and narrow escapes. Starting with a vivid account of his wartime childhood, Aubrey shares the joys, hazards, surprises and often hilarious disasters of his colourful experiences in many countries, encountering a range of unusual people along the way. With a comic lightness of touch, he revels in life's absurdities at the same time as celebrating the beauty and harmony of the various worlds which he has inhabited.

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Trevor Rollings (Trinity 1969)

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These questions form the title of an 1897 painting by the French artist Paul Gauguin. He knew he was pushing the limits of human knowledge by asking them. He also knew they are not new questions. Our ancestors began to ask them on the African savannah. The Roman poet Lucretius posed them in his long poem On the Nature of Things, written just before the Christian era. He sought natural explanations for the behaviour of matter, without recourse to gods. But he also knew that the world we see is largely a creation of our mind.

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Laura Carter (Trinity Hall 2008)

Histories of Everyday Life is a study of the production and consumption of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It traces how non-academic historians, many of them women, developed a new breed of social history after the First World War, identified as the ‘history of everyday life’. The ‘history of everyday life’ was a pedagogical construct based on the perceived educational needs of the new, mass democracy. It was popularized to ordinary people in educational settings, through books, in classrooms and museums, and on BBC radio.

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Kevin R. Cox (Downing 1958)

All cities are different, but some are more different than others. American cities are in sharp contrast to those of Western Europe, not least the sprawl. But in the US itself, there is a staggering variety, albeit with some continuities: how to understand cities at that particular intersection? Columbus is a latecomer in American urban history; one of only two rapidly growing cities in the country’s northeast quadrant. It is more like a Sunbelt city in its enhanced sprawl and post-industrial character, so those general characteristics help in understanding.

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