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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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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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The Farewell Glacier

Nick Drake (Magdalene 1980)

The poems in The Farewell Glacier grew out of a journey to the High Arctic. In late 2010 Nick Drake sailed around Svalbad, an archipelago of islands 500 miles north of Norway, with people from Cape Farewell, the arts climate change organisation. It was the end of the Arctic summer. The sun took eight hours to set. When the sky briefly darkened, the Great Bear turned about their heads as it had for Pythias the Greek, the first European known to have explored this far north.

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Betting on China

Rob Koepp (Magdalene 1998)

The phrase “Made in China" is ubiquitous, and China's status as a consumer of everything from natural resources to advanced technology is well established, but how did it get there? Looking at the financial drivers of the country's phenomenal growth, in particular, the high-risk venture capital and private equity finance currently feeding the entrepreneurship and innovation that is positioning China at the forefront of tomorrow's industries, Betting on China sheds much needed light on the poorly understood, often disregarded subject of how the country became a global power.

Cover painting: Frank Auerbach, Head of Gerda Boehm, 1978–9 (detail). Oil on board, 56.5 x 71.1 cm (22 1/4 x 28 in). Private collection. Copyright © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art. Photograph courtesy of Yvonne Burt.

We Look Like This

Dan Burt (St John's 1964)

We Look Like This anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Burt's formal, muscular language evokes a world of war, want, cruelty and hope, as well as childhood among ‘tough Jews’ in Philadelphia, dominated by his father Joe, son of Ukrainian immigrants, butcher, boxer and, late in life, coastal fisherman. Joe's last world, Barnegat inlet and the sea off the New Jersey coast, are counterpoint to and salvation from hard streets for father and son.

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The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to London 1894-2012

David Miller (Peterhouse 1953)

The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC is a dramatic account of the history of the world’s foremost sporting spectacle. It is the lavishly illustrated story of the re-creation of the Olympic Games by Pierre de Coubertin, of the often controversial fortunes of the governing body, which was formed in 1894, and of the highs and lows of the Olympics themselves since the first Games in 1896.

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