Ever wanted to hug a manatee, swim with gigantic blue whales or seek out Komodo dragons? Now you can with wildlife expert Mark Carwardine’s new book ‘Ultimate Wildlife Experiences.’

The new book, on sale online and in book stores across the country, is an encyclopaedia of the best wildlife experiences the world has to offer. Along with beautiful images, Mark provides captivating descriptions, leaving you simply itching to pack your bags and get on the road.

Advice, inspiration, travel tips and essential information combined, make this book an unmissable read for anyone interested in travelling, wildlife and their next adventure.

Fellow traveller Kate Humble said: “Fantastic! Mark has planned all my wildlife holidays for the next 20 years!”

Not only does Mark provide a book full-to-bursting with unmissable experiences but explains where to go, when to go and how to plan your trip.

Now available in both hardback and softback, you can enjoy the world’s wildlife at your own leisure.

People around the world are fascinated by wildlife and wildlife conservationists – they are captivated by the animals, and those people working in the remote corners of the Earth to save them. Wildlife Heroes provides a visual and written window into the world of these admired individuals, the fascinating species and the issues that must be resolved to save them.

The book’s stunning photos capture the beauty of the animals and the magnetism of the heroes as they work in the often gruelling conditions where the animals live. Each chapter is introduced with a personal essay by celebrities who themselves are committed wildlife champions, including actor Ted Danson (Cheers, CSI), actress Stephanie Powers (Heart to Heart, Herbie Rides Again), US Representative Jay Inslee, TV Host Jack Hanna (Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures, Into The Wild), and author Kuki Gallman (I Dreamed of Africa).

Wildlife Heroes will appeal to both avid animal enthusiasts and casual readers wishing to learn more about our planet and the people working to protect it.

Since the late 1990s, the United States has funnelled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work?

Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fuelled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a “narco-state” under the control of a “narco-bourgeoisie” which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

Sent in 1910 to live with distant relatives who own a rubber plantation along the Amazon River, English orphan Maia is excited. She believes she is in for brightly coloured macaws, enormous butterflies, and “curtains of sweetly scented orchids trailing from the trees.” Her British classmates warn her of man-eating alligators and wild, murderous Indians. Unfortunately, no one cautions Maia about her nasty, xenophobic cousins, who douse the house in bug spray and forbid her from venturing beyond their coiffed compound. Maia, however, is resourceful enough to find herself smack in the middle of more excitement than she ever imagined, from a mysterious “Indian” with an inheritance, to an itinerant actor dreading his impending adolescence, to a remarkable journey down the Amazon in search of the legendary giant sloth.

Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson is an amazing book and is highly recommended for children ranging from 9-12 years. This novel was runner up of the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Award.

A new book from Assouline, Brazilian Style, explores contemporary Brazil through photography of everything from tiny bikinis to musician Seu Jorge to the monumental architecture of the capital, Brasilia.

With an introduction and captions by Brazil aficionado Armand Limnander, the book is organized like an informal encyclopedia, which makes it easy to dip in and out of pages, whether they’re about the country’s most famous movies – see ‘City of God’ – or most famous aesthetic procedures – see ‘Brazilian Wax.’ With regards to the latter, the amount of skin in the book is well-suited to the often sexy subject matter – see ‘Dental Floss,’ an entry that’s not about oral hygiene products.

Brazilian Style is available for purchase at Assouline Boutiques worldwide and through www.assouline.com.

From the acclaimed journalist and best-selling author of God Is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages – with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices – past and present – that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) god/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, youll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and many others. And they’re all set in context and commented upon as only Christopher Hitchens – political and literary journalist extraordinaire – can. Atheist? Believer? Uncertain? No matter: The Portable Atheist will speak to you and engage you every step of the way.

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists.” Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the US$40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order,” dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Chossudovsky peels back layers of rhetoric to reveal a complex web of deceit aimed at luring the American people and the rest of the world into accepting a military solution which threatens the future of humanity.

The last chapter includes an analysis of the London 7/7 Bomb Attacks.

Noam Chomsky is one of the most hysterically abused figures in the world today. Even his critics have to concede that his work in the field of linguistics – beginning to decode the structure of how language is formed in the human brain – makes him one of the most important intellectuals alive. But when he applies the same rigorous method to figuring out how power – especially the American government’s – works, he is pepper-sprayed with smears. He is a self-hating Holocaust denier, a jihad-loving traitor, a Pol Pot-licking communist, and on and on.

If all you know of his work is the smears, then Hopes and Prospects will be a revelation. In his dry, understated way, he excavates the reality behind the Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table to examine. Everyone is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice – yet each one is a shock if you rely on news brought to you by corporations and corrupt right-wing billionaires.

For example, he uncovers the story of why Haiti is so poor, and could be shaken to pieces by an earthquake that would have killed only a handful in California. It’s a story of man-made earthquakes, one after another. The country was the first to rebel against slavery and to cast off the whip-hand – and was brutally punished by the French Empire. Every time it has begun to rise to its feet, it has been kicked back down, with the American Empire taking over to topple its elected leaders (the last was put on a plane at gunpoint in 2008) and stifle any moves towards development.

But who has heard about it? Who tries to hold our leaders accountable for it? Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole. He explains that Ronald Reagan – the great hero of the U.S. right – was a great champion of jihadism. It was Reagan who encouraged Pakistan simultaneously to become fundamentalist, and acquire nuclear weapons. Chomsky coolly condemns “the global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan,” for geopolitical reasons, with no concern for the after-effects.

But Reagan remains unstained. Chomsky quotes the great American historian Francis Jennings, who noted that “In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings.” Instead, Chomsky says, history is too often ruled by Thucydides maxim: “The strong do as they wish, while the poor suffer as they must.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. This is a book woven through with hope and awe at all the people who slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky’s strongest model – and the world’s – is Bolivia’s experiment with radical democracy. After 30 years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America.

In his cool blizzard of facts and sources, the hot air of his critics seems to melt away. To pluck one example, the leftist-turned-neocon supporter Nick Cohen has accused Chomsky of being soft on jihadism (as well as of “not being bothered” by “the crimes of Adolf Hitler”). Yet Chomsky points out that an analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a “seven-fold increase in jihadism.” If you really hate jihadism, you have to figure out what reduces it, rather than engage in bluster. Chomsky supported the path that produces fewer jihadis, while Cohen supports the path that produces more.

Chomsky presents all this plainly, and a sly sense of humour. Describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan, he notes: “People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends.”

Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people – a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn’t be left buried in our sandpit of propaganda and lies.

A previously unpublished diary by the Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara has been unveiled in Cuba.

His widow, Aleida March, said she had decided to publish the writings unedited.

She said she wanted readers to get to know Che Guevara just as he was.

Diary of a Combatant covers his three-year guerrilla campaign which resulted in the overthrow of then-president Gen Fulgencio Batista and brought Fidel Castro to power.

The publishers said Che Guevara, a doctor by training, had terrible handwriting and it had taken them unusually long to decipher it.

The diary covers the period from the landing on Cuban shores of the revolutionaries on board the yacht Granma on 2 December 1956 to 1 January 1959, when they ousted Gen Batista.

The diary shed light on “Che Guevara’s impressions of Cuba, its culture, identity and political context,” according to the publishers.

Che Guevara’s other writings have done well in the past.

The diary of his guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, where he was captured and executed in 1967, sold extremely well when it was released in 1968. It has been re-printed many times.

The Motorcycle Diaries, his memoir of a road trip through Latin America when he was 23 years old, also did well commercially and was turned into a successful film.

The Savage Detectives, written by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, traces the story of a Mexican avant-garde literary movement in the 1920’s – visceral realism. The book begins and ends with a diary-style narrative from the perspective of García Madero, a seventeen-year-old aspiring Mexican poet. The portion between these bookends is filled with short, detailed narratives from the perspective of dozens of different characters, each with their own unique voice, experience, and relation to any of the three main characters – Arturo Belano, Ulises Lima, and Cesárea Tinajero. These individuals (as well as the countless other whose paths cross theirs) live, travel, and experience the ups and down of life all across the globe between the years 1976 and 1996.

In his narrative, García Madero portrays himself as an intelligent, passionate, and inexperienced young man who desperately wants to have his poetry published. He recounts, via diary entries, dropping out of the university to write poetry, his first sexual encounters, and making new friends, including the visceral realists Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. The three share a passion for the movement and, in the final section of the book they venture throughout Mexico in search of the founder of visceral realism, Cesárea Tinajero.

The 52 characters that narrate the central portion of the novel form an intricate network of interaction. The convoluted intermingling of well-developed characters, complex plot lines, and international geography is initially baffling; however the disorientation gradually transitions into a strong intrigue and fascination, although it never culminates in a full understanding of the story. Bolaño is able to entwine several themes and elements into his story, often simultaneously; these range from dark and thrilling, to tender and erotic, and even humorous. The author knows how to prescribe each element in its prefect dosage, aptly balancing drama, tragedy, passion, sadness, hope, happiness, uncertainty, and longing.

Bolaño is a literary genius: he is able to take on several personas and narrative perspectives on a seemingly narrow topic, he regularly resorts to an elevated and eloquent writing style and choice of diction, and he contrives brilliant metaphors and myths which branch out from the linear plot line.

Neither this book, nor this author is for everyone. Both The Savage Detectives and 2666 are excessively dense, complicated, and overwhelming reads; yet both are highly engaging and exceedingly well-written pieces. Some literary experts believe Roberto Bolaño is one of the greatest writers of our time.