2009 Shortlist
It is commonly believed that the Great Depression of 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions taken by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for the Second World War and reverberated for decades. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, the Great Depression and the year 1929 remain the benchmarks for true financial mayhem. Offering a new understanding of the global nature of financial crises, Lords of Finance offers a timely and arresting reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, of their fallibility, and of the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/lords-of-finance-by-liaquat-ahamed

2009 Shortlist
How do we know if a treatment works, or if something causes cancer? Can the claims of homeopaths ever be as true - or as interesting - as the improbable research into the placebo effect? Do journalists understand science? Why do we seek scientific explanations for social, personal and political problems? Are alternative therapists and pharmaceutical companies really so different, or do they just use the same old tricks to sell different types of pill? We are obsessed with our health and we are constantly bombarded with inaccurate, contradictory and sometimes even misleading information. Until now. Writer, broadcaster and medical doctor Ben Goldacre dismantles the dodgy science behind some of the great drug trials, court cases and missed opportunities of our time, but he also goes further by showing us the fascinating story of how we know what we know, and gives us the tools to uncover the bad science for ourselves.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/bad-science-by-ben-goldacre

2009 Shortlist
Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was the last of a breed of great British explorers who ventured into ‘blank spots’ on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an unwavering sense of purpose. In 1925, one of the few remaining blank spots in the world was the Amazon. Fawcett believed the impenetrable jungle held a secret to a large, complex civilization like El Dorado, which he christened ‘City of Z’. When he and his son set out to find it, hoping to make one of the most important archaeological discoveries in history, they warned that none should follow them in the event that they did not return. They vanished without a trace. In The Lost City of Z, David Grann ventures into the hazardous world of the Amazon to retrace the footsteps of Colonel Fawcett and his followers, in a bracing attempt to solve one of the greatest mysteries. It is an irresistibly readable adventure story, a subtle examination of the strange and often violent encounters between Europeans and Amazonian tribes and a tale of lethal obsession.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-lost-city-of-z-by-david-grann

2009 Shortlist
The Age of Wonder is Holmes's first major biography in over a decade and explores the scientific ferment that swept across Britain at the end of the 18th century. Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. Holmes shows how great ideas and experiments are born out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense relationships are forged and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. The result is breathtaking in its originality, its story-telling energy, and not least, in its intellectual significance.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-age-of-wonder-by-richard-holmes

2009 Shortlist
For most people, quantum theory is a byword for mysterious, impenetrable science. And yet for many years it was equally baffling for scientists themselves. Manjit Kumar gives a dramatic and superbly-written history of this fundamental scientific revolution, and the divisive debate at its core. Quantum theory looks at the very building blocks of our world, the particles and processes without which it could not exist. Yet for 60 years most physicists believed that quantum theory denied the very existence of reality itself. In this tour de force of science history, Manjit Kumar shows how the golden age of physics ignited the greatest intellectual debate of the twentieth century.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/quantum-by-manjit-kumar

2010 Winner
Through extensive interviews with defectors, Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick shows in a compelling and unforgettable way that this hermetic country is Orwell’s 1984 made reality. Demick follows the stories of six North Korean citizens; two lovers who dated secretly for a decade and feared to criticise the regime to each other; a young homeless boy; an idealistic woman doctor; a factory worker who loves Kim Il Sung more than her own family; and her rebellious daughter. In the totalitarian regime where they lived, all radio and television broadcasts are government sponsored; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book and during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. It is the only country in the world not connected to the internet.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/nothing-to-envy-by-barbara-demick

2010 Shortlist
In this entertaining and accessible book, Alex Bellos explodes the myth that maths is best left to the geeks. Covering subjects from adding to algebra, from set theory to statistics, and from logarithms to logical paradoxes, he explains how mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives. Bellos explains the surprising geometry of the 50p piece, and the strategy of how best to gamble it in a casino. He shines a light on the mathematical patterns in nature, and on the peculiar predictability of random behaviour. He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy. An unlikely but exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs, Alex's dispatches from ‘Numberland’ show the world of maths to be a much friendlier and more colourful place than you might have imagined.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/alexs-adventures-in-numberland-by-alex-bellos

2010 Shortlist
As a child in the 1960s, Luke Jennings was fascinated by the rivers and lakes around his Sussex home. With library books as his guide, he applied himself to the task of learning to fish. So began an enlightening but often dark-shadowed journey of discovery. Blood Knots is about angling, but it is also about friendship, honour and coming of age. As an adult, Jennings has sought out lost and secretive waterways, probing waters ‘as deep as England’ at dead of night in search of giant pike. The quest, as always, is for more than the living quarry. For only by searching far beneath the surface, Jennings suggests in this most moving and thought-provoking of memoirs, can you connect with your own deep history.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/blood-knots-by-luke-jennings

2010 Shortlist
Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers a behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment, account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami. From inside the corner office at Lehman Brothers to secret meetings in South Korea, Russia and the corridors of Washington, Too Big to Fail is the definitive story of the most powerful men and women in finance and politics grappling with success and failure, ego, greed, and, ultimately, the fate of the world's economy. Through unprecedented access to the players involved, Too Big to Fail recreates all the drama and turmoil, revealing never-disclosed details and elucidating how decisions made on Wall Street over the past decade sowed the seeds of the debacle.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/too-big-to-fail-by-andrew-ross-sorkin

2010 Shortlist
Charles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in May, 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no going back, no way he could ‘restore’ the old and so began a decade of experiment, from the rise of science and credit to the shocking licence of the Court and the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years – and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/a-gambling-man-by-jenny-uglow

2010 Shortlist
Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies the groundbreaking new theory that the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food made us human. More than language, emotional intelligence, or the opposable thumb, the mastery of fire created us. Once our ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract began to shrink and the brain to grow. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household and even led to a sexual division of labour.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/catching-fire-by-richard-wrangham

2011 Winner
Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up and overtake Britain in less than 15 years. The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives. Dikötter shows that instead of lifting the country to superpower status and proving the power of communism, as Mao had imagined, in reality the Great Leap Forward was a giant - and disastrous - step in the opposite direction. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Frank Dikötter is one of a small number of historians to have been given access into the Chinese archives since they were re-opened. Mao’s Great Famine reveals exclusive new detail of shocking period, providing fresh historical perspectives for the first time.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/maos-great-famine-by-frank-dik%C3%B6tter