Line up a room of strangers, show people photos, and ask who’s most attractive. We mostly agree. Now let a few months of real conversation pass, and that consensus falls apart. We stop agreeing on who’s desirable at all. It turns out the thing we treat as fixed, our romantic “rank”, shifts over time.

📕 Bonded by Evolution by Paul Eastwick is a UC Davis psychologist’s evidence-based takedown of everything the apps have told you about love.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

The most reassuring book on dating in years: proof that lasting love is built, not scored.

Headline Insight

The traits we chase in a partner, personality, values, lifestyle, humour, are poor predictors of who we’ll actually be happy with. Compatibility is real, but it’s almost impossible to spot from the outside.

The Review

Modern dating sells itself as a marketplace. You have a rank, a mate value built from looks, status and earning power, and your job is to find your level and stay put. Eastwick calls this story the EvoScript, and takes it apart with two decades of research.

The evidence for it, he shows, mostly comes from rating strangers in photos, where we do agree on who’s hot. With real conversations happen, though, and that consensus collapses within months. What predicts a lasting bond is not desirability, or a tidy checklist of traits. It’s compatibility, built through slow, often mundane moments of shared reality.

The book is warm, rigorous and openly impatient with the manosphere myths it dismantles. For anyone worn down by the apps, or by dating advice that sounds like economics, this is an evidenced-based tonic.

Further Insights

💙 Desirability has a shelf life: rate strangers from photos and we broadly agree on who’s attractive; a few months of real interaction later, that agreement all but vanishes.

💙 Your “type” barely counts: stated preferences like adventurous, extroverted, exciting predict almost nothing about who you actually end up happy with.

💙 The apps sell access, not matching: dating platforms widen your pool, but their compatibility algorithms are, in Eastwick’s reading, largely illusory.

Action Stations

1. Ditch the checklist for one date. Instead of screening for your usual type, go into your next date (or a coffee with someone new) with three real conversation topics, and pay attention to how their behaviour makes you feel rather than how they score.

2. Build the small network. Eastwick’s research favours in-person social webs over swiping. Say yes to one gathering this week where you’ll meet friends of friends.

3. Stay on good terms. He found that old dates often become valuable platonic connections that widen your world. Message someone you drifted from, no agenda.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world…and each other. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat.

Join Rebel Book Club this summer…. 1 month memberships in 10+ cities available!

Rebel Book Club City Memberships

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

How would you know if the life you’re living is actually yours?

Eva zu Beck had the high-flying job, the picture-perfect marriage, the lifestyle plenty of people aspire to. But she couldn’t shake the feeling she was living someone else’s dream. So she hit rock bottom, bought a one-way ticket, and left the whole thing behind.

📕 The Wilder Way by Eva zu Beck is the memoir of what happened next: one woman trading a ‘successful life’ for a life of solo, wild adventure, on her own terms.

Buy the Book

Most of us know the feeling of a life that looks right from the outside and feels wrong from the inside.

After walking away from her corporate world, Eva spends the next few years travelling solo to some of the planet’s most far-flung places: a lone horse trek across Mongolia, a COVID lockdown stranded on a remote island off Yemen, overlanding across the US in an eighteen-year-old truck with her dog, Vilk. Along the way she builds an online community of millions and finds love where she wasn’t looking.

What lifts this above the usual “quit your job and travel” story is Eva’s honesty about the cost; she sits with the tension between wanderlust and a longing for somewhere to call home, and refuses to pretend the wild path is an easy triumph.

For anyone wondering if another way of living is possible, this is your nudge.

Further Insights

🧭 Alone is not the same as lonely: Eva maps the space between the two, and shows how solitude, chosen on purpose, can be one of the most connecting experiences of all.

🔥 Freedom has a bill attached: she’s candid that leaving a rooted life for a transient one is disorienting, not just liberating, which is exactly what makes the story believable. The constant threat of men is very real.

🌍 Small worlds, deep roots: learning rare local languages and living with remote communities does more for her sense of belonging than any of the bucket-list feats.

Action Stations

1. Name your gilded cage. Write down one area of your life that looks right from the outside but feels off from the inside. You don’t have to fix it this week. Just see it clearly, the way Eva did before Nepal.

2. Book yourself one small solitude. Test the alone-versus-lonely idea. Take a solo walk, meal, or day trip with no phone and no company, and notice which one you actually feel.

3. Learn ten words. Pick a language spoken somewhere you’d love to go and learn ten words this week. Eva’s deepest connections came through language, not landmarks.

Join Rebel Book Club this summer…. 1 month memberships in 10+ cities available!

Rebel Book Club City Memberships

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Britain’s temperate rainforest, the moss-drenched, lichen-furred woodland that once cloaked a fifth of these islands, now clings on across less than 1% of the land. It’s rarer than tropical rainforest. Most of us have never knowingly stood in one. But one of the last surviving fragments happens to sit on a hill farm on Bodmin Moor…and its coming back.

📕 Our Oaken Bones by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison is the true story of a soldier, a broken family and a dying forest, and how each one set about healing the others.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A engrossing, tender memoir that will change how you see the woods on your doorstep, and make you want to plant a thousand more.

Headline Insight

The rarest habitat in Britain isn’t in some far-flung nature reserve. It’s a scrap of Atlantic rainforest in Cornwall most landowners have been grazing to death without ever knowing what they had….and it could heal us as we heal it.

The Review

Reeling from PTSD after Afghanistan and the grief of repeated miscarriages, Merlin and his wife Lizzie leave London for Cabilla, his childhood farm in Cornwall. What they find is a farm sliding into debt and a tangle of overgrazed, undervalued woodland that turns out to be one of the UK’s last fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest.

The book braids two recoveries together: a family learning to heal, and a habitat learning to breathe again. Hanbury-Tenison’s argument is that the two are not separate. Nature restores us as we restore it.

The book is neither heavy on nature-science or grand global promises, rather it grips you with its powerful personal storytelling; the miscarriages and the near-loss of his inspiring father Robin to Covid.

Rewilding, regenerating, natural-capital are buzzwords for a new economy based on the protection of nature. Our Oaken Bones makes this complicated and often otherly world feel relatable through both the tough human experiences shared and the poetic descriptions of mighty oaks, moss, streams and rocks.

Further Insights

🌧️ Rarer than the Amazon: temperate rainforest needs a wet, mild, oceanic climate, and Britain’s western fringe is one of the few places on Earth that provides it.

🌿 The forest is the record: the rare mosses, lichens and liverworts draping these trees take decades to establish, which is why you can’t simply replant a rainforest overnight.

🌳 A thousand-year timescale: Merlin’s charity, The Thousand Year Trust, isn’t aiming for a quick win, but to triple Britain’s rainforest cover to a million acres over the next 30 years and beyond.

Action Stations

1. Find your nearest fragment. The remaining rainforest clings to Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and western Scotland. Look one up, and if it’s reachable, go stand in it this month.

2. Adopt an acre. The Thousand Year Trust lets you sponsor a patch of Cabilla’s rainforest. A low-cost way to put Merlin’s argument into practice. Other orgs doing similar things: Oxygen Conservation, Restore, 30x30.

3. Rewild one square metre. You don’t need a farm. Leave a corner of a garden, balcony or verge un-mown and watch what returns.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us, now in 10 cities and online.

Pair it with: The Lost Rainforests of Britain by Guy Shrubsole, the campaigning, map-in-hand companion to Merlin’s more intimate memoir.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

The biggest threat to your business isn’t the market, the competition, or even AI. It’s you. Nikki Trott’s argument is that most of us are running on an extractive operating system, taking from people, planet and ourselves, and calling the depletion “success”.

📕 Sacred Business by Nikki Trott is a grounded, practical manifesto for redesigning how we lead, so that impact, profit and purpose finally pull in the same direction.

Buy Sacred Business

Quick Take

A fresh, clear-eyed plan for building a business that regenerates people and planet without sacrificing the bottom line.

Headline Insight

Trott’s central provocation: the most profitable businesses of the next decade won’t be sustainable despite giving back, they’ll be wildly profitable because they contribute to humanity and nature.

150-Word Review

For too long, business success has been built on extraction: growth at the expense of people, planet and often the team’s own health. Nikki Trott, a strategist who advises impact brands like Vivobarefoot (footwear poster child for circular, planet-first product design) and Bugaboo (pushchair brand), argues that this model is breaking down, and the leaders who thrive next are the ones who regenerate rather than deplete.

Her answer is a nine-principle framework across three stages: Mind, Being and Ecosystem. Each is a shift, from Competition to Symbiosis, from Linear to Cycles, from Short-Term to Evergreen.

The book is at its strongest when it refuses the usual trade-off, showing how purpose and profit can compound rather than compete. It’s grounded and refreshingly free of the woo you might fear from the title.

For any founder or leader who senses the old extractive playbook has run its course, this is a timely redesign manual.

Further Insights

Nine shifts, not nine hacks: the framework runs from inner work to systems thinking, on the logic that you can’t regenerate a business without first focusing the person running it.

The connection crisis: Trott’s diagnosis is that we’re severed from nature and our own nature, and that reconnection, not another growth sprint, is the real competitive edge.

Money can heal soil: as founding partner of regenerative investment firm Barefoot Ventures, she makes the case that capital can restore ecosystems and return a profit, rather than one at the cost of the other.

Action Stations

1. Run a cycles experiment. Rather than pushing in a straight line, map your week to your actual energy: front-load deep work when you’re sharpest, and let one task rest instead of forcing it.

2. Practise symbiosis. Reach out to someone you’d normally file under “competitor” and propose one small way to share or collaborate.

3. Bring it to the club. Raise the “profit versus planet is a false choice” idea at your next RBC meet and see where the discussion goes.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 11 cities (including Toronto) and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Your senses take in roughly 11 million bits of data a second. Your conscious mind handles about 50. We live life through a keyhole, and the beliefs we carry decide which sliver we get to see.

📕 Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal, written with Julie Li, is a science-backed manual for spotting the assumptions running your life without your permission, and swapping them for better ones.

This week we hosted a special event with Nir in London to dive into the topic.

Buy Beyond Belief

Headline Insight

Ahead of Wimbledon, Serena Williams was hesitating at the net, so her coach Patrick Mouratoglou told her the stats showed she was winning 80 percent of her points there. The number was invented. Her game transformed anyway, and she took the title. As Mouratoglou put it, the lie became the reality.

Eyal’s argument, developed with his wife and business partner Julie Li, is that beliefs sit between facts and faith: convictions that are open to revision when new evidence turns up. Treat them as tools rather than truths and you can put down the ones that no longer work.

Turing Beliefs Around

The book’s sharpest instrument is The Turnaround, an exercise for catching a limiting belief and converting it into a liberating one. Eyal tests it on himself, reframing the racing heart before a big talk as extra oxygen for a better performance.

“I’m not a numbers person.”
The turnaround: I haven’t practised numbers in a context that matters to me.

“I’m not creative.”
The turnaround: I create constantly, just not in the format I was assessed on.

“I’m an introvert, so I can’t network.”
The turnaround: I’m an introvert, so I network in ways that suit me.

“I’m terrible with names.”
The turnaround: I don’t currently pay attention when names are given.

“I’m just not a reader.”
The turnaround: I haven’t found the books, or the people, that make reading feel like something other than work.

It’s strongest where it refuses the easy sell. He notes that placebo inhalers eased asthma symptoms without shifting lung capacity at all. Belief moves plenty but not everything.

Further Insights

Your labels are your limits: “I’m bad at maths”, “I’m too old”, “I’m not disciplined” start life as descriptions and end up as self-fulfilling rules that steal your agency.

Vision boards can backfire: Fantasising about success without acting on it leaves people flatter, not fulfilled. Pair the goal with the obstacle in front of it instead, and you face reality rather than admiring it.

The best beliefs are provisional: enough certainty to act on, enough flex to drop when the evidence changes.

Action Stations

1. Name one label. Write down a sentence you’ve said about yourself more than three times this year. That’s a rule you wrote and forgot you were following.

2. Run one tiny experiment. Eyal’s test is “what actually happens when I try this?”, not “will this transform my life?” Most limiting beliefs survive because we never test them once.

3. Do a Serena. Pick one thing you’ve decided you’re bad at and act, for a week, as if you were good at it. Note what changes in the doing, not the feeling.

4. Bring it to the club. At your next Rebel meet, ask the room: what’s a belief you’ve changed your mind about this year?

If this one lands, read next: Mindset by Carol Dweck, the foundation stone Eyal builds on and then argues with.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 11 cities (including Toronto) and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Sarah Wilson has spent years and more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists and spiritual leaders exploring a difficult question: what if the unease many of us carry is an accurate reflection of this moment in history? Her answer is that every complex civilisation before ours eventually buckled, and we are already inside our own version of that unravelling, and that we can face it positively.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A both feisty and tender guidebook to living fully while the systems around us wobble.

“A book for dark times that is filled with light and hope.” Peter Frankopan

Heatwaves, wildfires, floods, AI overwhelm, political rupture, an economy rewarding fewer and fewer: the headlines arrive hourly and we either doomscroll or look away. Wilson’s argument, built on collapse theorists like Joseph Tainter and Joanna Macy, is that the unease is rational. Every complex civilisation eventually strains under its own weight, and ours, she says, is already there. She calls the tangle of overlapping crises the metacrisis, and pushes back on both denial and despair as routes through it.

The book is strongest when Wilson stays personal, turning huge, abstract threats into a raw conversation about how to actually live: whether to have kids, how to spend your days, what to hold close.

She offers no policy fixes, and isn’t trying to. This one’s for anyone tired by pretending everything’s fine and surprised not more are responding with urgency to the challenges.

Further Insights

🧠 Collapse has a track record: drawing on Joseph Tainter’s study of fallen civilisations, Wilson argues complexity eventually outpaces the energy needed to sustain it.

Meet ‘moloch’: the game-theory name for the traps where everyone competes into outcomes nobody actually wants, from arms races to attention economies.

Your anxiety might be accurate: Wilson reframes widespread dread not as personal dysfunction but as a sane response to real signals, which is partly why early readers say the book made them feel less alone.

Action Stations

1. Name your moloch. Pick one race-to-the-bottom running your week, the phone, the inbox, the comparison spiral, and deliberately step out of it (and ideally back into nature).

2. Answer the question you’ve been dodging. Wilson poses the big ones head-on: kids, money, whether to prep. Choose one and journal on it for ten minutes instead of letting it nag in the background.

3. Eat the stars. Wilson’s own practice is to relish what’s genuinely valuable. Do one small, undistracted act of attention or beauty this week and notice what it does to the dread.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 11 cities (including Toronto) and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Why are so many young men vanishing into a world of video games, porn and depression? Its a growing debate and concern across our society. This week we read about a man who went looking for the answer in the strangest place possible: by going back undercover into a world he once briefly belonged to himself.

📕 Lost Boys: Undercover in the Manosphere by James Bloodworth is a gripping, unsettling, often darkly funny journey into the manosphere, from the journalist behind Hired, and guest at our next online members event.

Quick Take

A fearless, humane field guide to how lonely boys get turned into angry men, and what it would take to bring them back.

Buy the Book

Headline Insight

The men Bloodworth meets aren’t monsters first - they’re lonely. The radicalisation comes later, manufactured by people getting rich off their isolation.

150-Word Review

Bloodworth opens with a confession: twenty years ago, a confused young man, he paid £2000 to attend a pickup artist bootcamp. Lost Boys is his return to that world, now expanded into a sprawling online economy of gurus, grifters and grievance.

He maps the terrain through its three pills: blue (asleep), red (awake to a world supposedly rigged against men) and black (pure nihilism). He sits in incel forums, endures a Make Men Great Again conference in Orlando, and dissects the appeal of figures like Jordan Peterson, who “took young men seriously because he seemed to take them seriously”.

The book is strongest when it refuses easy contempt. Bloodworth shows how ordinary loneliness gets slowly reorganised into rage, then monetised. He also dismantles the movement’s founding myths.

For anyone trying to understand the boys in their life, this is the essential companion piece to Netflix’s Adolescence.

Further Insights

🧠 The first incel forum was a breakup: it grew out of PUAHate.com, men who’d tried the pickup playbook, failed, and curdled into something darker.

🔥 The far right is one click away: Bloodworth traces how the manosphere bleeds directly into far-right politics, often via the same conspiracy theories about who’s “really” to blame for men’s loss of status.

💬 The myths don’t survive contact with data: the idea that a handful of men monopolise all the women, or that women routinely make false assault claims, falls apart under scrutiny, yet both keep boys hooked.

Action Stations

1. Have the awkward chat. If there’s a teenage boy in your life, ask what they’re actually watching on YouTube and TikTok. Don’t lecture, just listen. Bloodworth’s whole point is that boys radicalise when no one’s paying attention.

2. Audit your own feed. Spend ten minutes looking at who the algorithm serves you on masculinity, dating or “self-improvement”. Notice how fast grievance gets recommended once you linger.

3. Find the exit story. The book ends with a young man who walked out of the manosphere entirely. Read it, then ask yourself what made his way back possible.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us… now in 10 cities and online.

Pairs well with: Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates, the female-perspective counterpart that maps the same networks from the receiving end of their hostility.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

It’s easy to read the news and conclude that nothing works any more. Health systems buckling, climates breaking, politics fracturing. But what if the problem isn’t that solutions don’t exist - it’s that we’re looking in the wrong places?

📕 Braver New World by John Kampfner is a globe-trotting hunt for the countries solving the problems we all want answers to.

Buy the Book

Headline Insight

The places leading on innovation aren’t the obvious wealthy nations. The author finds solutions to society’s biggest problems in: Japan, Canada, Austria, Finland, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Morocco, India and Estonia.

The Review

Kampfner, an award-winning foreign correspondent, refuses to accept the sense of stagnation, decline and division and goes looking for evidence that things can be done differently.

His method is simple: travel to 10 countries and report on what’s actually working.

Estonia, where 97.6% of citizens access state services online, has become the world’s first fully digital government in a single generation.

Costa Rica tripled its economy while doubling its forest cover (it has no army and remains at peace).

Taiwan delivers 90% patient satisfaction at a fraction of the NHS’s cost.

Japan’s care homes ensure dignity in later life by bringing the generations together under one roof.

Kampfner doesn’t pretend these countries are utopias. But each one offers a transferable lesson. Copy what works!

Further Insights

• 🏠 Housing without stigma: In Vienna, 60% of residents live in subsidised housing - and communities thrive rather than suffer for it.

• ☀️ Energy from the desert: Moroccan solar panels in the Sahara generate enough clean power for two million homes.

• 🧠 Schooling for uncertainty: Finnish classrooms prepare children for a changing world that teaching-to-the-test systems don’t.

Action Stations

1. Steal one idea this week. Pick a single example from the book — digital government, intergenerational care — and ask where this might work.

2. Swap doom for data. Next time you catch yourself saying “nothing works,” name one thing that demonstrably does.

3. Vote with your feet. Look up one local initiative tackling a problem you care about, and turn up, donate, or share it.
   

If you like the sound of Braver New World, you might also enjoy more books from our factual optimism stack:

Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie
Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Citizens by Jon Alexander

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us… now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I’ve been a member of Rebel Book Club for about 5 years and I absolutely love it!
From the get-go it’s been more than just a book club. It pushes me to read non-fiction books I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise, across themes that challenge, inspire, and broaden my thinking. The community is warm and welcoming full of people who want to learn, question, and grow. The meetups and virtual events are always well run. Highly recommend!” Anna

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

June at Rebel Book Club, we’re going somewhere uncomfortable. This month’s theme is the Manosphere - not to platform it, but to better understand it. How did so many men end up angry or lost? What does this mean for men and women? What are the better paths forward? Three books made the shortlist. Members voted. Winner…

Quick Take

A journalist turns the lens on his own gender and asks the question most men won’t: what if the system we built is the problem? The system set up by men for men doesn’t work for men - or women - either.

Buy the Book

The Review

Wrongly, men still hold most of the structural advantages - better pay, less unpaid labour, more institutional power. And yet, by midlife (and some a lot earlier), an alarming number end up anxious, exhausted, depressed, and very reluctant to admit they are. Suicide remains the leading cause of death for men under 50 in the UK.

Matt Rudd — deputy editor of The Sunday Times Magazine and long-time columnist on masculinity — spent two years interviewing men across their thirties, forties, and fifties to find out why. He goes back to the beginning, tracing how the seeds of midlife misery are sown in the school playground and cultivated through adolescence into adulthood. The culprits are familiar but newly examined: the gold star culture of competitive schooling, the addictive pull of technology, the career ladder as a trap, the stoicism that kills.

This isn’t a lecture - it’s wry, honest, and genuinely funny in places. Rudd includes himself in the mess. And crucially, he doesn’t leave men (or the people who love them) without hope.

Also on the shortlist…

Of Boys and Men — Richard V. Reeves. A Brookings scholar and father of three sons makes a careful, data-driven case that boys and men are falling behind in education, work, and family life, and that the left has been slow to take it seriously. Far from a backlash book - it’s a both/and argument that takes women’s progress seriously while making room for male struggle.

Lost Boys: Undercover in the Manosphere - Investigative journalist James Bloodworth (author of Hired) goes undercover in pickup artist bootcamps, incel forums, and the orbit of Andrew Tate. Part memoir, part reportage, asking how a generation of young men got pulled in - and what the mainstream is failing to give them.

Further Insights

• The burden of busyness: Men are conditioned to equate productivity with worth - which means slowing down feels like failure, even when burnout is already underway.

• Friendship in freefall: Male friendships tend to be activity-based rather than emotionally sustained. When the activity stops (job change, kids, relocation), the connection often goes with it.

• The manosphere is a symptom: Movements like the incel community and figures like Andrew Tate don’t create male discontent - they exploit it. Rudd’s book points to the emotional vacuum those spaces are filling.

Action Stations

1. Do a man audit: Think of three men in your life - friends, family, colleagues. When did you last have a real conversation with them? Call them.

2. Name the trap: Rudd traces male misery to a handful of patterns - the gold star chase, the stoic default, the career-as-identity trap. Which one resonates most for you?

3. Ask about the impact on women: What does this shift mean for women too, and what can we all do about it? We’re in this life together!

Interested in reading, learning and sharing with other curious minds?

Join Rebel Book Club in June - up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At RBC we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

@rebelbookclubWe met at the Atheaneum Hotel and Residences in Mayfair for our latest book club meetup! Our hosts Diana and Frankie took us through key themes from the book and we learned the 'why' from cyber psychologist Dr. Elaine Kasket. If you love nonfiction books and want to join a community of book lovers in 10 cities worldwide, message us now 😄 #nonfiction #londonmeetups #bookclubs #londonbookclub #bookclubmeetup

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

We live in an age where you can spit in a tube, post it off, and get a report telling you where your ancestors came from and what diseases you might be predisposed to. DNA feels simultaneously mundane and miraculous. But how much do we actually understand it? How much are we getting dangerously wrong?

📕 The Secrets of Our DNA by Professor Turi King is a myth-busting tour through the science that is reshaping crime, identity, history, health, and what it means to be human.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A brilliant, accessible guide to what DNA can - and crucially, can’t - tell us about who we are and how we live.

Headline Insight

Your genes reveal a predisposition, not a fate - and understanding the difference might be one of the most important things you ever learn.

Professor Turi King is the scientist who identified the bones of Richard III from beneath a Leicester car park. She led the project to sequence Hitler’s genome. When it comes to DNA, she’s seen things most of us can barely imagine - and in The Secrets of Our DNA, she brings all of it together.

The book works through 12 landmark cases that changed how the world understands genetics - from the OJ Simpson trial to Dolly the sheep, from mistaken dinosaur DNA to Angelina Jolie’s decision to undergo a preventive mastectomy after learning about her BRCA1 gene. Each story opens a window into what modern genetics actually does, how it’s used (and misused), and why the stakes keep rising.

What King does brilliantly is tell 2 truths at once: DNA is an extraordinary, world-altering tool and it is also frequently misunderstood, oversimplified, and sometimes weaponised. She’s unsparing on the legacy of eugenics. She’s clear-eyed about the limitations of ancestry testing. She insists that genetic science must work for everyone - not just those with access or privilege.

This is the book for anyone who’s ever taken a DNA test, feared a family diagnosis, or wondered how a cold case gets solved decades later.

Further Insights

• DNA doesn’t determine your destiny: King is emphatic; a genetic predisposition to a disease is not fixed. Context, behaviour, and environment all play a role in how genes actually express themselves.

• The forensic revolution is younger than you think: DNA wasn’t used in a criminal trial until 1986. In less than forty years, it has transformed policing, exonerated the wrongly convicted, and solved cases that had gone cold for decades.

• We are more interconnected than we realise: Genetic research consistently shows that the categories we use to divide ourselves — race, nationality, ancestry — are far messier and more overlapping than popular culture suggests.

Action Stations

1. Question your ancestry results: If you’ve taken a direct-to-consumer DNA test, revisit the small print. King’s book is a useful prompt to think about what those results actually mean and what they don’t.

2. Have the health conversation: Use this book as a prompt to talk to someone in your family about genetic health history.

3. Read a case study that unsettles you: King covers eugenics head-on. If it’s a chapter of history you’ve been vague on, dive in. Comfortable reading rarely changes us.

Interested in reading, learning and sharing with other curious minds?

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At RBC we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

@rebelbookclubWant to make new friends in London and 10+ cities worldwide as an adult? Join our organised book club in London where we meet up every month to read nonfiction books! There is no pressure to read and we meet authors and experts to discuss the theme of the topic so you always learn something new each month. Message us for more details! #londonmeetups #bookclubmeetup #bookclub #bookclubs #booktok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

While politicians fall, armies retreat, and regimes rise and crumble, some places just keep opening their doors the next morning.

📕 The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet is a sweeping, intimate people’s history of Afghanistan, told through the staff and guests of one extraordinary hotel.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

Forget the generals and the geopolitics. The real story of Afghanistan over the last 50 years is told by a housekeeper, a chef, and a hotel that refused to close.

The 150-Word Review

For most of us, Afghanistan exists as a flicker on our news channels - invasion, withdrawal, collapse, repeat. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, does something different with this book: she ignores the official version. Instead, she tells five decades of Afghan history through the Inter-Continental Kabul, the country’s first luxury hotel, which opened in 1969 and has somehow stayed standing through Soviet occupation, civil war, two Taliban regimes, and a US-led invasion.

The result is a portrait of ordinary people doing extraordinary things; Hazrat the septuagenarian housekeeper still ironing sheets to 1970s standards, Abida becoming the hotel’s first female chef after 2001, young staff hiding in broom closets during a 2018 suicide attack. Doucet makes you care about a country in a way its stereotypical image doesn’t.

Further Insights

• The “Paris of Central Asia”: In the 1970s, Kabul was a stop on the hippie trail, with haute cuisine, fashion shows, and a kingdom that felt firmly part of the modern world.

• Witness as work: Doucet has been reporting on Afghanistan since 1988 — long enough to know the staff by name. The book shows that real journalism is the willingness to keep returning, and not rush for a story.

• Resilience is carrying on: The hotel’s true heroes aren’t the celebrities and statesmen who passed through, but the cleaners, cooks and clerks who kept turning up to work after rocket attacks, regime changes and massacres.

Action Stations

1. Find your own “hotel”. What’s a place in your city — a café, a barber, a corner shop — that’s outlasted everything around it? Visit it this week and ask why.

2. Push back on a headline. Next time a country appears in your feed as a one-word story (collapse, crisis, conflict), spend ten minutes finding a first-person account from someone who lives there.

3. Audit your news diet. Swap one doom-scroll session this week for a long-form piece by a correspondent who’s covered their patch for decades.

Interested in reading, learning and sharing with other curious minds?

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At RBC we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

@rebelbookclubWe're a nonfiction book club with hundreds of members in over 10 cities worldwide! If you're looking for a like-minded tribe of book lovers, there's no better place to meet them than at one of our monthly meet ups. Message us to join! #booktok #bookclubs #bookclub #bookclubmeetup #londonmeetups

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

What we walk past every day, it turns out, is a stage set. Behind the scenes of our city, something far stranger is happening.

📕 London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is a true-crime investigation into the death of a 19-year-old boy that becomes, almost without you noticing, a portrait of a city in moral freefall.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A teenager’s mysterious fall from a Thames-side balcony cracks open the seedy machinery of London’s dark-money economy. Keefe reports it like a thriller you can’t put down.

Headline Insight

Zac Brettler didn’t die because he was unlucky. He died because a city had quietly remade itself into “a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money” and a privately educated kid with a Walter Mitty streak walked straight into it.

In November 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler fell from a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. His parents thought they knew their son. They didn’t. Zac had been moving through London posing as Zac Ismailov, the heir to a fictional Russian oligarch fortune, mingling with extortionists, dubious financiers, and at least one man known as Indian Dave.

Patrick Radden Keefe — the New Yorker journalist behind Empire of Pain (an RBC read) and Say Nothing — follows the Brettlers’ grief-fuelled investigation into what really happened. Scotland Yard, hollowed out by years of cuts, fumbled the case. The financial sector, stuffed with what Keefe calls professional facilitators, looked the other way.

What emerges is more than a true-crime story. It’s an indictment of a city where aspiration curdled into fantasy, and fantasy turned deadly. A devastating, propulsive read about the cost of believing the lie.

Further Insights

• 📕 Aspiration as accelerant: Zac came from comfort but envied the oligarch kids at his school — a reminder that proximity to extreme wealth warps young minds in ways money itself cannot fix.

• 🧠 Institutional drift: Keefe documents the “bizarre passivity of Scotland Yard”, exposing what happens when public institutions are starved of resources at exactly the moment criminal sophistication accelerates.

• 🔥 London as character: The book argues the city itself has mutated — its property market, its private members’ clubs, its lawyers and PRs — into infrastructure for laundering reputations as much as roubles.

Action Stations

1. Walk your city differently this week. Pick a familiar route and look up — at the windows, the developments, the names on the buildings. Ask: who actually owns this? London Falling is a masterclass in seeing what’s hidden in plain sight.

2. Audit your ambition. Zac’s tragedy began with envy of a life he wasn’t living. Spend ten minutes journalling: where in your life are you performing wealth, status, or success that isn’t really yours?

3. Read like an investigator. Pick one news story you’ve half-followed this week and trace it back to its source documents. Keefe’s superpower is patience — dive into one rabbit hole instead of skimming ten.
   
   

   Buy the Book

   
   

   Interested in reading, learning and sharing with other curious minds?
   
   Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At RBC we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.
   

Join Rebel Book Club

@rebelbookclubAt our latest book club meetup at @Penguin Random House HQ, 100+ members came together to explore The Brain at Rest with author Dr. Joseph Jebelli, diving into the science behind why doing nothing might be the key to better thinking, creativity, and overall wellbeing. From how rest impacts memory to why constant busyness can hold us back, this was one of those conversations that really makes you rethink your daily habits. Big thanks to @DASH Drinks and @Lemonaid & ChariTea for keeping us refreshed 😋 #bookclub #bookclubmeetup #BookTok #londonmeetups #nonfiction

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

📕 A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot is the memoir of the woman whose courage in a French courtroom became a global rallying cry.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A searing, touching memoir from a woman who refused to hide - and in doing so, changed the conversation about sexual violence.

Headline Insight

For decades, survivors have carried a shame that was never theirs to begin with. Pelicot’s simple, significant act — waiving her anonymity, demanding the trial be held in open court — is an inspiring example of how one person can shift the cultural weight from one set of shoulders to another.

The 150-Word Review

In 2020, Gisèle Pelicot got a phone call from a local police station. By the end of that week, her fifty-year marriage — and the life she thought she had — had collapsed. Her husband Dominique had been secretly drugging her for nearly a decade and inviting strangers into their home to rape her while she lay unconscious.

What makes this book extraordinary is both the horror of the crimes and Pelicot’s response.

Refusing anonymity, she walked into a courtroom in Avignon and declared: “Shame must change sides.”

A Hymn to Life, written with novelist Judith Perrignon, is not a trial transcript. It’s a full portrait — childhood, first love, motherhood, career, and the slow work of rebuilding a self after catastrophic betrayal. Part memoir, part act of defiance, it’s a book about refusing to be defined by what was done to you.

Further Insights

• The ordinariness is the point: Pelicot describes herself as a woman who was “content with my little life.” The men convicted alongside her husband were neighbours, tradesmen, a journalist — not monsters in the abstract. That’s the uncomfortable lesson.

• Open court as protest: She could have had the trial held privately. She chose public. The videos her husband filmed were shown in open session, forcing a country — and the world — to actually look.

• From victim to witness: Pelicot has said she no longer wants the label “victim.” The book’s project is to reclaim the role of narrator — telling her story in her own words, on her own terms.

Action Stations

1. Read slowly. This isn’t a book to skim on your commute. Give it the evenings it deserves.

2. Have the conversation with a partner, a son, a daughter, a friend. About consent, about shame, about who we protect and who we don’t. Pelicot’s whole point is that silence is the problem.

3. Support an organisation doing the work. Rape Crisis, Refuge, The Survivors Trust.
   

   Buy the Book

Interested in reading, learning and sharing with other curious minds?

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

What actually happens when someone crosses the Channel in a small boat?

Who decides their fate — and how qualified are they to do it?

📕 Anywhere But Here by Nicola Kelly is a forensic, human investigation into Britain’s asylum system — told by a journalist who once worked inside the Home Office herself.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A gripping, ground-level account of how Britain’s asylum system broke down — and what it costs all of us when it doesn’t work.

Headline Insight

Some of the people conducting life-and-death asylum interviews — the conversations that determine whether someone gets to stay or gets deported — were recruited from fast food chains and supermarkets, with minimal training. The system isn’t just struggling. It was never properly built.

150-Word Review

There’s a gap between what we think we know about the small boats crisis and what’s actually happening on the ground. Nicola Kelly has the authority of someone who’s been on both sides — first as a diplomat and Home Office insider, then as an investigative journalist.

Anywhere But Here follows coastguards stretched to breaking point, immigration barristers pulling off last-minute reprieves, and teenagers arriving alone in a country that doesn’t know what to do with them. Kelly traces the thread from Windrush to the Rwanda plan, showing how political short-termism created a system that fails asylum seekers and British citizens alike.

What makes this book stand out is its refusal to simplify. Kelly gives space to every perspective — the Home Office officials, the local communities, the people risking everything to cross the Channel.

Further Insights

• The hostile environment by design: Kelly reveals how deliberate policy choices — not just underfunding — created a system intended to deter rather than process, with devastating human consequences.

• Access all areas: As a former Home Office insider turned journalist, Kelly brings a rare dual perspective — she understands both the institutional pressures and the human cost of bureaucratic failure.

• It’s not just about “them”: The book makes a compelling case that a broken asylum system undermines the rule of law, wastes public money, and erodes trust in government for everyone — not just those seeking refuge.

Action Stations

1. Challenge one assumption this week: Next time you encounter a news story about immigration, pause before reacting. Ask yourself: what’s the source? What’s missing? Kelly’s book is a masterclass in looking past the headline.

2. Learn one person’s story: Visit the UN Refugee Agency’s website (unhcr.org) or a local refugee charity and read a single first-hand account. One real story is worth a thousand opinion columns.

3. Talk about it — properly: Bring up this book (or this newsletter) with a friend or colleague. Not to argue, but to ask: what kind of asylum system would we design if we started from scratch?
   

   Buy the Book

Like this?

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

When was the last time you typed something into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and thought, “I could be doing this so much better”?

Most of us are using AI every day now - but very few of us have been taught how to use it well. It’s like being handed the keys to a Formula 1 car and told to figure it out in a car park.

📕 How to Talk to AI by Jamie Bartlett is a practical, no-nonsense guide to getting dramatically better results from AI - whether you’re writing emails, making decisions, or trying to think more clearly.

…and, here at RBC, we’re a fan of Jamie Bartlett’s work. We’ve previously read The Dark Net - where Jamie attended our London event ‘undercover’ - as well as the ongoing tech-thriller podcast-book, The Missing Cryptoqueen. If you’re curious about this giant tech wave washing over us, Jamie is a hard guide to beat.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A crash course in prompt craft that will make you wonder how you ever got by with “Can you help me with…”

Headline Insight

The difference between a useless AI response and a genuinely brilliant one almost never comes down to the technology, it comes down to the quality of the question you asked.

150-Word Review

What often happens: you ask an AI something, get a bland, generic answer, and walk away thinking the tech is overrated. But Bartlett argues the problem isn’t the machine, it’s us. We haven’t learned the language.

How to Talk to AI breaks down the art of prompt engineering — not in a techy, jargon-heavy way, but as a communication skill anyone can pick up. Think of it as learning to brief a very fast, very literal colleague who has read the entire internet but has zero context about your life.

Bartlett covers everything from structuring requests and assigning roles to chaining prompts for complex tasks. The examples are grounded and practical - drafting better emails, stress-testing business ideas, even improving how you argue with yourself.

It’s not a book about AI hype. It’s a book about becoming a clearer thinker with a very powerful tool that’s changing how we work significantly.

Further Insights

• Context is everything: The more specific background you give an AI, the less generic waffle you get back — Bartlett calls this “front-loading the brief.”

• Role-play works: Asking AI to respond as a specific type of expert (a sceptical investor, a primary school teacher) dramatically sharpens the output.

• Iteration beats perfection: The best AI users don’t write one perfect prompt — they have a conversation, refining as they go, treating it like a collaboration rather than a search engine.

Action Stations

1. Rewrite your worst prompt: Go back to a recent AI conversation where the output was disappointing. Rewrite the prompt with more context, a clear role, and a specific format request. Compare the results.

2. Try the “explain it to a 10-year-old” test: Take a concept you’re working on and ask AI to explain it at three different levels of complexity. Notice how the framing of your request changes everything.

3. Get good with AI: Join our friends at Good with AI for free masterclasses and 6-week human-led, training cohorts. £50 off any cohort with ‘RBC.’

Like this?

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Here’s a question worth sitting with: when was the last time you were genuinely bored? Not waiting-for-the-kettle bored - properly, uncomfortably, nothing-to-do bored. If you can’t remember, that might be the point.

📕 Dopamine Nation by Dr Anna Lembke is a fascinating, urgent guide to understanding why we’re all a little bit addicted - and what to do about it.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A Stanford psychiatrist reveals how our relentless pursuit of pleasure is actually making us miserable and offers a surprisingly simple framework to recalibrate.

Headline Insight

The problem isn’t that we enjoy things. It’s that we’ve eliminated nearly all friction between desire and reward - and our brains are paying the price.

Review (..in a 150 words)

We live in a world of unprecedented access to feel-good stimuli. Food, screens, shopping, porn, social media - everything engineered to hit fast and hit hard. Dr Anna Lembke, chief of Stanford’s addiction medicine clinic, argues this isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a public health crisis hiding in plain sight.

Her central framework is the pleasure-pain balance - a neurological seesaw where every hit of dopamine is followed by an equal and opposite dip. Chase pleasure relentlessly, and the brain recalibrates. The baseline drops. You need more just to feel normal.

What makes this book fly is Lembke’s honesty. She shares her own compulsive romance-novel habit alongside patient stories spanning opioids to video games - no hierarchy of addiction, just the same hijacked brain chemistry.

The antidote? Deliberate discomfort. Cold showers, fasting, boredom. It sounds counterintuitive, but the science is compelling. This one’s for anyone who’s ever unlocked their phone without knowing why.

Further Insights

• The pleasure-pain seesaw is physical: Dopamine doesn’t just drop back to baseline after a hit — it dips below it, which is why the comedown from a binge feels worse than where you started.

• Radical honesty as medicine: Lembke argues that truthfulness — especially about our consumption habits — is one of the most powerful tools for breaking compulsive cycles, partly because shame thrives in secrecy.

• Prescribing pain on purpose: From ice baths to intermittent fasting, deliberate exposure to mild discomfort can actually reset the brain’s reward pathways and restore the capacity for everyday joy.

Action Stations

1. Track your “thumb habits” for 48 hours. Every time you reach for your phone, pause and note what triggered it. Boredom? Anxiety? Habit? Don’t judge — just notice. Patterns reveal themselves fast.

2. Try a dopamine fast — even a small one. Pick one source of easy pleasure (social media, sugar, news scrolling) and take 24 hours off. Pay attention to what fills the gap.

3. Start a conversation. Share your biggest dopamine trap — the thing you reach for on autopilot — and ask others to add theirs.

4. Introduce one “speed bump” this week. Put your phone in another room while you eat. Delete one app from your home screen. Make the easy thing slightly harder and see what shifts.

Join Rebel Book Club — up your reading game and connect with curious minds in-person and online every month. At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online. Join Rebel Book Club

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

How much African history did you learn at school?

If your answer is “the slave trade and maybe apartheid,” you’re not alone.

Most of us were handed a version of Africa’s story that starts with European arrival - as if the continent was sitting in a waiting room for thousands of years before that. It wasn’t. Not even close.

📕 An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi is a sweeping, ambitious reclaiming of the continent’s past - told through African voices.

Buy the Book

Quick Take

A continent-spanning journey through Africa’s extraordinary civilisations, told by the people who lived them — and the historians, storytellers and archaeologists keeping those stories alive.

Surprising Insight

The Kingdom of Kush, in modern-day Sudan, built around a thousand pyramids — roughly ten times more than Egypt — and it predates ancient Greece and Rome by centuries.

150-Word Review

Here’s the problem: Africa’s history has been told almost exclusively through the lens of what was done to it. Slavery. Colonialism. Aid.

Zeinab Badawi — Sudanese-born broadcaster, journalist and president of SOAS — flips that narrative.

The book grew out of a BBC documentary series, and you can feel that on-the-ground energy in the writing. Badawi visited over thirty countries, interviewing local historians, archaeologists and storytellers to piece together a history that spans from the earliest humans right through to independence.

The result is full of jaw-dropping moments. Mansa Musa, the 14th-century ruler of the Mali Empire, was so fabulously wealthy that when he stopped in Cairo on pilgrimage, the amount of gold he spent crashed its price for over a decade. The Kushite queens — known as Kandakas — inspired modern Sudanese women protesters during the 2019 uprising.

This isn’t a dry textbook. It’s part travelogue, part detective story, part love letter to a continent whose story is everyone’s story. Ideal for anyone who suspects their history education had some significant gaps.

Further Insights

• Everyone is originally from Africa: Badawi opens with a radical but scientifically grounded premise — all humans were dark-skinned until around 8,000–12,000 years ago, with lighter features only evolving as people migrated beyond the continent. This is all of our history.

• Africa was never isolated: Mansa Musa’s 1324 pilgrimage to Mecca — with 12,000 followers and 600 silk-clad servants — demonstrates that sub-Saharan Africa was deeply integrated into the global economy during the medieval period, even as Europe suffered through the Black Death.

• History shapes identity: Badawi argues that people need more than economic development — they need a sense of who they are and where they’ve come from. Understanding your own history isn’t a luxury. It’s a foundation.
  

Action Stations

1. Watch the BBC series. Badawi’s 20-part documentary, The History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, is free on BBC YouTube.

2. Name what’s missing. Grab a pen and write down everything you learned about African history at school. Notice the gaps. That awareness alone is the first step toward a fuller picture of the world.

3. Explore one African civilisation deeper. Pick one — Kush, Aksum, Mali, Benin, the Asante — and spend 20 minutes reading or watching. You’ll be amazed at what was never on the curriculum.

At Rebel Book Club we’re all about reading and learning from non-fiction that can help us make sense of our fast changing world. Every month we read, meet, learn and repeat. Join us…now in 10 cities and online. Join Rebel Book Club

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Suri and McClelland explain how that happens in both human brains and AI systems, and why it matters that the same idea — emergence — underpins both.

Headline Insight:

The neural networks powering ChatGPT and every other AI tool you’ve been playing with? They were originally built as models of the human brain.

We didn’t just invent AI out of thin air — we modelled it on ourselves. Now those models are getting good enough to force us to ask the question: what actually IS a mind?

Suri and McClelland argue that mind isn’t a thing sitting behind your brain. It’s a process. A pattern that emerges when billions of simple parts interact over time. No single neuron thinks. But together, they produce thoughts, feelings, decisions, habits, consciousness.

The same principle applies to AI systems: stack enough simple processing units together, connect them, feed them data, and something mind-like starts to emerge.

Buy the Book

150-Word Review:

The Emergent Mind is the AI book for people who are tired of AI books that are either breathless hype or existential doom.

The authors walk you through how your brain actually works — how decisions get made below the surface of conscious experience, why habits form, why context shapes everything — and then show you how the same principles drive the AI systems transforming our world.

They use analogies (ant colonies, rivers), imagined dialogues between historical figures, and clear diagrams to make genuinely complex neuroscience feel approachable without dumbing it down.

Crucially, they’re not reducing humans to machines. They’re showing that understanding how minds emerge — in brains and in silicon — can actually increase our compassion.

The implications for how we think about intelligence, free will, and what it means to be human are enormous.

Further Insights:

There’s a concept called distributed representations. Instead of your brain storing a memory in one neat little box, knowledge is spread as patterns across huge networks of neurons. That’s why context changes everything — why the same word means different things in different sentences, why your mood shifts your perception, why you can change your mind.

It’s also what’s happening inside AI systems. When people talk about the “black box” of AI, this is what they mean: information isn’t stored in labelled folders, it’s distributed across millions of connections. Understanding this doesn’t just help you grasp how AI works — it changes how you think about yourself. Your thoughts aren’t fixed. Your habits aren’t permanent. Your mind is a river, not a filing cabinet.

The other idea worth sitting with: the authors argue there’s no fundamental barrier to AI developing more autonomous, goal-driven behaviour in the future.

Action Stations:

1. Reframe the AI conversation. Next time someone tells you AI is “just a tool” or “going to take all our jobs,” push for nuance. This book gives you the language to talk about what AI actually IS — and how it relates to your own brain. That’s a much more interesting conversation.

2. Notice your own emergence. Pay attention this week to a decision you make on autopilot — a habit, a gut reaction, a snap judgement. Ask yourself: what patterns of experience created that? Suri and McClelland would say it’s your neural network doing its thing, shaped by every input it’s ever received. That’s not depressing — it’s empowering, because patterns can be reshaped.

3. Pair it with something practical. If you’re using AI tools at work (and you probably are), read this alongside your next prompt session. Understanding that these systems learn through distributed patterns — not rules — will make you a better user. You’ll start to understand why AI is brilliant at some things and hopeless at others.

   
   

What’s happening at Rebel Book Club this month? We’re exploring modern stories of Africa. Join our March events on Africa is Not a Country and meet Dipo.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Headline Insight: In 1885, European powers sat around a table in Berlin and carved up an entire continent - drawing borders through communities, cultures, and histories that had existed for centuries. No African leaders were invited. That conference shaped the Africa the world thinks it knows today: a simplified, flattened version built on colonial convenience. Faloyin argues that the stereotypes we still carry - poverty, safari, famine, strife - are not just lazy. They’re inherited and they need retiring.

Buy the Book

150-Word Review:

Africa Is Not a Country is the kind of book that makes you realise how much many of us have been looking at an entire continent through a keyhole. Faloyin - born in Chicago, raised in Lagos, living in London - writes with the authority of someone who’s lived between worlds and the humour of someone who’s tired of explaining why those worlds aren’t the same place.

He takes on colonial mapmaking, white saviour culture, Hollywood stereotypes, democracy through the lens of seven dictatorships, and - brilliantly - the great West African jollof rice debate.

What makes the book fly is its refusal to play the victim card. This isn’t a lecture. It’s an invitation to see 54 countries, not one. To hear stories of youth-led movements, booming cities, and cultural pride alongside the harder truths.

Further Insights:

The 1885 Berlin Conference is one of those historical moments that should be common knowledge but isn’t. European and American powers divided 80% of a self-governing continent between themselves - ignoring religions, languages, ethnic groups, and centuries of existing governance. The borders they drew still define Africa’s nations today. Faloyin traces a line from that conference room to the charity ads of the 1980s, to Hollywood’s obsession with safari backdrops, to the KONY 2012 campaign - showing how a century of outside storytelling created the stereotype of a helpless continent in need of Western rescue.

But the counter-story is surging. Afrobeats is a global force. Nollywood produces more films than Hollywood. Lagos is one of the fastest-growing cities on the planet - there’s more children alive today in Nigeria than the whole of Europe. A young, digitally connected generation is rewriting the narrative - and building the new economy.

Action Stations:

1. Notice the language. Next time you hear someone say “Africa” as if it’s one place, pause. Would they say “Europe” to describe both Finland and Greece?

2. Follow African voices. Swap one Western news source in your feed for an African one. Try The Continent (a weekly newspaper distributed via WhatsApp), Al Jazeera Africa.

3. Make it your next book recommendation. This is a perfect discussion book - it’s entertaining, it’s political, and it’ll change how your group sees the world. Ask: “What single story have I been told about a place or people - and what might I be missing?”

Join our March events on Africa is Not a Country and meet Dipo.

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club

Buy the Book

Quick Take:
A warm, non-judgmental exploration of our relationship with alcohol and the deeper longings it often masks.

Headline Insight:
Alcohol doesn’t quench thirst - it can keep you thirsty for more. The real question isn’t “is my drinking bad enough?” but “is my life good enough?”

150 word review
In What Are You Thirsty For?, Anna Donaghey reframes our relationship with alcohol by placing it in a wider cultural story. For centuries, alcohol has been woven into ritual, religion, celebration and survival - safer than water, central to social bonding, a marker of adulthood and belonging. But in modern life, that ancient role has quietly shifted. Alcohol is no longer occasional or ceremonial; it’s constant, commercialised, and emotionally outsourced - a tool for stress relief, confidence, reward and escape.

Donaghey doesn’t argue for abstinence or giult. Instead, she asks a deeper question: what job has alcohol been hired to do in our lives - and is it still serving us?

Drawing on personal insight and cultural observation, the book invites readers to notice the gap between intention and experience, habit and desire. It’s not about drinking “less” necessarily, but being more deliberate, with choice rather than default.

Further Insights

• Not rules, but questions: The book isn’t about abstinence or labels - it’s about awareness and choice.

• Habit vs. desire: Donaghey suggests alcohol often fills psychological “jobs” that have little to do with thirst.

• Life under the habit: The deeper inquiry she proposes touches on self-worth, routine, connection, and emotional coping.

Action Stations – Reflective Experiments

1. Ask the big question: Tonight, don’t monitor your drink - ask: What am I actually thirsty for right now?

2. Notice your “jobs”: List the emotional needs you think alcohol satisfies. Then ask: Is there another way to meet them?

3. Track the tension: For one week, note the gap between what you intend (“just one drink”) and how you feel after - trends often tell truths we ignore.

4. Swap a default: Replace one habitual drink this week with a non-alcoholic alternative and reflect on how it feels.

Join our February events on What Are You Thirsty For?

Join Rebel Book Club

”I joined Rebel Book Club using their 6-in-12-months membership back in 2024, and this year it was a no-brainer to renew.”

This is your sign to join or gift Rebel Book Club today.

Join Rebel Book Club