NON-FICTION BOOKS
THE ANARCHY by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, $33)
Say what you like about the wicked Google, Facebook, etc. At least they don’t slaughter tens of thousands of their opponents. The East India Company knew no such restraint. Starting as a trading company, it grew to effectively rule almost all of India, had a private army twice the size of the British Army and generated almost half of Britain’s trade. William Dalrymple charts the company’s victories over India’s traditional rulers, armed with a combination of capitalism, brute force and divide-and-rule. Vividly told, this is history on an epic scale — with a warning about what can happen when multinationals get too big to control. (MF)
THE BASIS OF EVERYTHING by Andrew Ramsay (Harpercollins, $45)
The fascinating story of two unlikely scientists from poor Antipodean backgrounds, New Zealand’s Ernest Rutherford and Australia’s Marcus Oliphant, whose genius won them a place at the heart of snobby British academia. Inevitably they are remembered mainly for opening the path to the nuclear age but the book is a reminder that their work also laid the foundations for radar, diagnostic-imaging machines, television screens, radio-carbon dating and much more. Andrew Ramsay has done an amazing research job uncovering countless delightful and telling details about the pair. Remarkably, he also explains with extraordinary clarity not only what they did but how they got there. (JE)
CHASTISE by Max Hastings (Harpercollins, $40)
A revisionist review of one of the great ripping yarns from Britain’s effort in World War II, the Dambusters raid. Max Hastings acknowledges that using bouncing bombs to break dams in Germany’s industrial heartland involved both inspired technological innovation and brave and brilliant flying. He concedes that it provided an embattled country with a huge morale boost and inflicted a shocking disaster upon the Third Reich. But he also points out that dambusting was never going to inflict the crippling blow claimed for it — the main victims were ordinary Germans and foreign women in forced labour camps — and like the wider bombing offensive, it was “both ruthless and strategically deluded”. Nonetheless, if you haven’t heard the story before, it’s still a rattling good read. (JE)
THE COOK VOYAGES ENCOUNTERS by Janet Davidson
(Te Papa Press, $65)
During their epic voyages, James Cook and his companions collected many “artificial curiosities”, as they called them — from fish hooks, to weapons, musical instruments, clothing, even an entire canoe (lost at sea, unfortunately). This is an illustrated listing of objects gathered on those voyages and since collected by Te Papa in Wellington, presented in a form that’s part museum catalogue, part coffee-table book. The text is a straightforward description of the voyages and what was gathered where but for many readers the appeal is likely to lie in the many photographs of items from New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and the Americas. (MF)
HOW TO BE A DICTATOR by Frank Dikotter (Bloomsbury, $33)
It isn’t easy being a dictator. Bumping off your rivals and seizing the apparatus of power is all well and good but it takes more than brute force to maintain control. For any dictator who wants to stick around, it’s vital to at least look as though you have the support of the masses. The key, argues Frank Dikotter, is to create a personality cult. In succinct portrayals of eight dictators (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti) he describes how each went about that task. There are differences but what is most telling — however varied their ideologies — are the similarities in the techniques of dictatorship. (MF)