SOLD The Greatest

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 481 pp. Heavy book - 1.07kg. $40 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Many regard Muhammad Ali simply as “The Greatest” heavyweight of all time.

Others admire his battles against racial injustice and religious intolerance.

A few just call him “Dad.”

They are all here in this book—fifty men and women of note coming together to celebrate the man Sports Illustrated crowned “Sportsman of the Century”: Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer; Billy Crystal, actor; Sir Henry Cooper, former British and European heavyweight champion; Bert Sugar, journalist and boxing historian; Hana Ali, Muhammad Ali’s daughter; Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s fight doctor; and more.

This book will be treasured by anyone who has ever been inspired by “The Greatest.”

A memoir of surviving the grief of a suicide

 

Mint condition. PB. 211pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A suicide loss survivor tells her story.

Tara Lal’s childhood was battered by her father’s mental illness and by her mother’s death when she was thirteen.

Caught up in grief and despair, she developed a deep, caring bond with her charismatic and kind older brother Adam, though he struggled silently with growing anxiety and depression.

Four years after their mother’s death, Adam committed suicide.

Grief and insecurity threatened to engulf Tara, but eventually she found, through a dialogue with the words her brother left behind in his diaries, her reason to live.

The book includes an Afterword on the possibilities for recovery and growth following a tragedy, written by Miriam Akhtar, author of Positive Psychology for Overcoming Depression.

About the Author

Tara J Lal was born in London and now lives in Sydney, Australia. A firefighter and Mental Health First Aid Instructor, she is trained in suicide prevention and researches suicide and mental health in firefighters, as well as speaking on behalf of leading charities to raise awareness of suicide and mental illness.

A comic tells about life and MS

 

Ex-library. Excellent condition. PB. 357pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The frank and fearless story of a man fighting MS with comedy.

Tim Ferguson was a star of the international comedy circuit. Along with Paul McDermott and Richard Fidler he was part of the edgy, provocative and very funny Doug Anthony All Stars (DAAS).

In 1994 they were at the height of their powers, performing in a season at the Criterion Theatre on Piccadilly Circus.

The three mates, who began busking on the streets of Canberra a decade earlier, had achieved their ambition to become the self-styled rock stars of comedy.

Then, all of a sudden, he woke up one morning and his whole left side wouldn't work. He'd had a lurking suspicion that something was wrong and after more episodes he went to a doctor thinking he'd be told to change his diet and get more sleep.

It wasn't so simple. An eventual diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) meant an end to the frenetic, high-energy life he was living.

Carry a Big Stick is a chance for Tim to tell his story. He wants to make people laugh but also give inspiration to all the people doing it hard.

A lot of people keep MS to themselves because it's invisible.

In Tim's case, he has the stick. 'It's such a visible sign that something's happened; it's just easier if people know.'

Carry a Big Stick meanders through Tim's life, and explains how the boy who went to nine schools in 13 years got used to saying, 'Hi, I'm the new kid'.

It will detail his ambitions to become an actor and how the Doug Anthony Allstars were born and went on to become what Rolling Stone called 'The 3 amigos from hell'.

Diagnosis changed a lot of things but Tim’s quick wit and sense of humour weren t affected.

This inspiring memoir shows us that you can laugh in the face of adversity.

About the Author

Tim Ferguson is a widely acclaimed comedian, writer and producer.

He s toured the world performing stand-up and musical comedy, co-writing dozens of live stage comedy shows and light entertainment programmes.

He has written and produced sitcoms, and is Australia’s foremost teacher of screen comedy.

Tim was a member of comedy trio Doug Anthony Allstars (DAAS) (with Paul McDermott and Richard Fidler).

Author of the bestselling comedy manual The Cheeky Monkey Writing Narrative Comedy, Tim consults for various production companies.

The definitive history for LGBTQI civil rights

 

Ex-library. Mint condition. HB. 794pp. $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights-based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day: "This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we've been waiting for" (The Washington Post).

The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights-the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers-is the most important civil rights issue of the present day.

In "the most comprehensive history to date of America's gay-rights movement" (The Economist), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling.

The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred.

Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond.

Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality.

"A compelling read of a little-known part of our nation's history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational" (Chicago Tribune),The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.

About the Author

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as ethnic history and literature.

Among her many honors are six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several lifetime achievement awards for scholarship.

She is the author of The Gay Revolution and the New York Times Notable Books, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.

SOLD The Ottoman wars come to Broken Hill

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 390pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Gool Mahommed worships Allah and Lifebuoy soap.

In 1914 he returns to Broken Hill, five years after he was sent back to his homeland by his mentor and benefactor, Abdullah.

A camel driver and mullah, Abdullah has learned through bitter experience that small-town Australia is not the place to be a Muslim immigrant.

But Mahommed is ready to embrace the Anglo-Australian lifestyle and has hopeful visions of himself as an assimilated citizen, a practitioner of the habits of English gentlemen, and eventually a prosperous owner of a submarine shipping line.

Alice Mercer yearns for a life in a place where the streets aren’t named after the poisons that spew out of the smoke stacks - Sulphide, Oxide, Chloride - and when she encounters Mahommed on the train, she is immediately drawn to him.

But this is outback Australia in 1914, and the prejudices of others prove an obstacle in their fledgling relationship, not to mention the outbreak of World War I.

And there’s Broken Hill’s other residents: Alice’s friend Irma, conservative and disapproving of Alice’s interest in Mahommed yet longing for a marriage proposal from the town’s Chief Sanitary Officer, Robert; Alice’s brother, Lewis, who is looking for the adventure of a lifetime by enlisting in the Imperial Forces; and Adrian Kadran, boarding-house proprietor and town quack, who is administering a stupefying tonic to his patients.

When a series of cruel acts against Abdullah drive him to despair, and, finally, revenge, what follows is unthinkable.

Based on a disturbing true story, this beautifully crafted story has a deeply affecting fable-like quality that provides a startling insight into how the seeds of terrorism are sown.

About the Author

Chris McCourt was born and educated in Sydney. After a brief career as an actress, she joined Crawford Productions in Melbourne as a trainee script editor, and has since written for many celebrated Australian television dramas. The Cleansing of Mahommed is her first novel. She lives in Balmain.

Australia's best writers praise the bottle

 

Very good condition. PB. 520pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

... and it comes to us, out of the blue.

Why not a collection of great Australian drinking stories from great Australian writers?

Not just your average tales from braggarts, your volume-of-alcohol yarns, but something more. Something about the plains we all ride across after a few too many.

The different landscapes we visit whilst drunk. the ones we pass through whilst getting drunk.

The ones we find ourselves stuck in when we can't take another drop ...

I'm a teetotaller and I found this collection hilarious.

Travels across Pakistan's wild frontier

 

Excellent condition. PB. 334pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Australian Benjamin Gilmour travelled to Pakistan determined to shoot a film on its wild frontier.

He had never made a movie before and it was illegal and extremely dangerous for him to do so in the region.

But Ben was driven by his passion for the Pashtun people of the North West Frontier Province and for the remarkable gun-making town of Darra Adam Khel.

This book is the behind-the-scenes account of the highly-acclaimed film, Son of a Lion.

But it is more than just a 'making-of'. Ben tells the story of a country with an amazing and rich culture, and of the proud and loyal people who befriended him.

Memoir and travels in space

 

Excellent condition. PB. 478pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In July 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins piloted the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon.

Fifty years later, it is still one of the greatest achievements in human history.

In this remarkable memoir, a defining classic, Michael Collins conveys, in a very personal way, the drama, beauty, and humour of that adventure. He also traces his development from his first flight experiences in the air force, through his days as a test pilot, to his involvement in Project Gemini and his first spaceflight on Gemini 10. He presents an evocative picture of the famous Apollo 11 spacewalk, detailing the joys of flight and a new perspective on time, light, and movement from someone who has seen the fragile Earth from the other side of the moon.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon-landing, Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins is the utterly absorbing and truly compelling classic account of what it was like to be a member of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

About the Author

Michael Collins was born in Rome in 1930. After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy, he entered the newly independent Air Force, becoming a fighter pilot and experimental test pilot.

He was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in 1963. On his first mission, Gemini 10, he set a world altitude record and became the nation's third spacewalker. His second flight was as command module pilot of the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon in July 1969.

He is retired major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and has received numerous decorations and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Collier Trophy. He is now retired and lives in South Florida. Carrying the Fire is his memoir.

History and memoir of the Chernobyl disaster

 

Excellent condition. PB. 404pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A dramatic, minute-by-minute account of one of the most shattering events of the Cold War, from an award-winning historian.

On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine.

The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.

In Chernobyl , Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep.

While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry.

A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster.

A poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

About the Author

Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and a leading authority on Eastern Europe whose previous books include Lost Kingdom, The Gates of Europe and The Last Empire.

At the time of the Chernobyl explosion he lived behind the Iron Curtain less than 500 kilometres downstream of the damaged reactor

Across Vietnam on a bike

 

Good condition. PB. 344pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

“Catfish and Mandala" is the story of an American odyssey--a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam--made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people."

Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness."

In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American.

A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, "Catfish and Mandala" is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967 and moved to California with his family after the war. "Catfish and Mandala" was the winner of the 1999 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. Pham lives in Portland, Oregon.

Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize

A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year

Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award

"An engaging and vigorously told story . . . a fresh and original look at how proud Vietnamese on the war's losing side reconciled having their identity abruptly hyphenated to Vietnamese-American."--Gavin Scott, "Chicago Tribune"

“Thoreau, Theroux, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and William Least Heat-Moon--the roster of those who have turned to their travels for inspiration includes some of America's most noted scribes. Now add Andrew X. Pham to the list . . . "Catfish and Mandala" records a remarkable odyssey across landscape and into memory."--"The Seattle Times"