ART OF FAIRNESS

Sub-titled 'The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean', more than a business book, this is the primer for anyone fed up with the meanness of much of society and looking for inspiration to do better. Bodanis makes chilling parallels between our era and the 1930s and chapters on the lives of contemporaries: Goebbels and F. D. Roosevelt are gripping to read or the example of Captain Bligh from Mutiny of the Bounty who was a model of good captaincy with excellent relations with his volunteer crew until he snapped when the pressure got too high. Bodanis reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year, and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter. The ten vivid profiles feature pilots, presidents, and even a producer of Game of Thrones - we see that you can succeed without being a bully and that simple fair decency can prevail. 321pp, illustrated paperback.