Edmund de Waal - The White Road Journey Into an Obsession

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Details
Hardback

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER
THE OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

THE INSIDE STORY ON PRESIDENT TRUMP, AS ONLY BOB WOODWARD CAN TELL IT.

'Fear is a meticulously researched account of a White House and a president in financial, legal and personal disorder...essential reading...' Daily Mail

'I think you've always been fair.' -- President Donald J. Trump, in a call to Bob Woodward, August 14, 2018

'The sheer weight of anecdotes depicts a man with no empathy and a pathological capacity for lying.' - The Financial Times

'Fuelling his narrative is an astonishing cast of rogues, ideologues, self-made millionaires and men in uniform who have spent the past two years in and out of Trump's administration.' - The Sunday Times

'Woodward's meticulous account of office intrigues, the president's men don't seem to be trembling with fright. What they mostly feel is contempt for Trump or pity for his ignorance and the "teenage logic" of his obsessively vented grievances.' - The Observer

'Horribly fascinating. Strongly recommended. If you can bear it.' Richard Dawkins

'To me the standout message from the book...is that the president is a bit clueless, a bit vain, a bit dangerous even; but his people are utterly at sea...' - Justin Webb, The Times

'He is the master and I'd trust him over politicians of either party any day of the week.' --Peter Baker, New York Times

'His work has been factually unassailable . . . In an age of 'alternative facts' and corrosive tweets about 'fake news,' Woodward is truth's gold standard.' - Jill Abramson, The Washington Post

'Fear depicts a White House awash in dysfunction, where the Lord of the Flies is the closest thing to an owner's manual.' The Guardian

'I wonder how many journalists have arrived in Washington over the years dreaming of becoming the next Bob Woodward . . . Though his books are often sensational, he is the opposite of sensationalist. He's diligent, rigorous, fastidious about the facts, and studiously ethical. There's something almost monastic about his method . . . He's Washington's chronicler in chief.' -- Nick Bryant, BBC

'I've been on the receiving end of a Bob Woodward book. There were quotes in it I didn't like. But never once--never--did I think Woodward made it up. Anonymous sources have looser lips and may take liberties. But Woodward always plays is straight. Someone told it to him.' -- Ari Fleisher, White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush

With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies from Nixon to Obama, author Bob Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside President Donald Trump's White House and precisely how he makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies. Woodward draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand sources, meeting notes, personal diaries, files and documents. The focus is on the explosive debates and the decision-making in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, Air Force One and the White House residence.

Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during the president's first years in office.

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All books are second hand. Prices are according to condition of the book which may vary from used to almost new. No books are sold in unacceptable conditions.

"For decades, the acclaimed potter and author Edmund de Waal has been captivated by porcelain -its fragility, lucidity, tactility, and whiteness. After a lifetime of making his own pots, he embarks on an unforgettable journey into the "white hills" of China, Germany, England, and America, where porcelain was "invented, or reinvented", out of a seemingly mystical longing. Setting out from his South London studio, de Waal travels first to Jingdezhen, "the fabled Ur" where the story of porcelain begins: Ït is the city of secrets, a millenium of skills, fifty generations of digging and cleaning and mixing white earth, making and knowing porcelain, full of workshops, potters, glazers and decorators, merchants, hustlers and spies." For five hundred years, no one in the West knew how porcelain was made. Yet the voracious demand for the alluring ceramics eventually spurred a feverish race among chemists, naturalists, Jesuits, philosophers, and kings to discover the secrets of this "white gold". As de Waal traces the connections between these early figures, he unearths a remarkable story of lust, luck, ingenuity, and arresting beauty. In Dresden, the "Second Porcelain City", he discovers the insipred collaboration between a mathematician and an alchemist who worked together under King Augustus II, the "emperor of white", whose insatiable craving for porcelain kept Chinese Kilns burning "day and night". In Versailles, Louis XIV nearly went mad for the "glorious secret" of the clay mixture and had a porcelain pavilion built for his mistress. In Plymouth, de Waal finds the first piece of porcelain ever made in England -a cider tankard- that still "rings clear", and tells of William Cookworthy, a Quaker apothecary who almost suffered a mental breakdown trying to outsmart the peg-legged Josiah Wedgwood in the search for the right fusion of white stones scattered across the Cornwall hills and ingredients coming in from the Carolinas across the Atlantic. At Dachau, de Waal ventures into the wretched place where the story of porcelain intersects with the dark currents of the twentieth century. "Only someone for whom onjects are as meaningful as they are for Edmund de Waal could have performed his quest", wrote Walter Kaiser in his reiew of de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes for The New York Review of Books. Önly someone with his intelligence and sensitivity could have written such a fascinating account of his journey". The same can be said of The White Road, another quest for the profound connection between material objects and human experience."

Disclaimer

All books are second hand. Prices are according to condition of the book which may vary from used to almost new. No books are sold in unacceptable conditions.