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How the Chicken Crossed the World

Queen Victoria was obsessed with them. Socrates’ last words were about them. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using them. Hailed as a messenger of the gods, powerful sex symbol, gambling aid, all-purpose medicine and handy research tool, the humble chicken has been also cast as the epitome of evil, and the star of the world’s most famous joke.

Beginning with the discovery that the chicken’s unlikely ancestor is the T. Rex, How the Chicken Crossed the World tracks the chicken from its original domestication in the jungles of Southeast Asia some 10,000 years ago to today’s Western societies where it became the most engineered of animals, to the uncertain future of what is now humanity’s single most important source of protein. In a masterful combination of historical sleuthing and journalistic exploration on four continents, Lawler reframes the way we feel and think about all domesticated animals and even nature itself.

Traversa

A fascinating account of the hardships and hilarity Fran Sandham experienced during his epic solo journey on foot across Africa, from the Skeleton Coast to the Indian Ocean through Namibia, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania.

Inspired by the legendary crossings of the great explorers, Sandham left the daily grind of London to undertake an extraordinary adventure. Traversa describes his brushes with danger in the form of lions and snakes, land mines and bandits, his 2-month battle with a syphilitic donkey, malaria and the everyday troubles that arise when walking across Africa.

Underpinned with stories of the great explorers themselves – Livingstone, Stanley and Galton among others – Traversa is written proof of Sandham’s grit, determination and sheer obsession with Africa.

The Thief at the End of the World

In 1876, a man named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds out of the rain forests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. Those seeds, planted around the world in England’s colonial outposts, gave rise to the great rubber boom of the early twentieth century – an explosion of entrepreneurial and scientific industry that would change the world. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds – a sought-after prize for which many suffered and died – is the stuff of legend. In this lively account of obsession, greed, bravery and betrayal, author and journalist Joe Jackson brings to life a classic Victorian fortune-hunter and the empire that fueled, then abandoned, him. ‘The Thief at the End of the World’ is a thrilling true story of reckless courage and ambition.

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