Memoir of one of Australia's most loved economists

 

Excellent condition. PB. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia

For forty years Ross Gittins has had a ringside seat as the Australian economy has gone through radical change. He's covered forty budgets and sixteen elections, he's watched thirteen treasurers and eight prime ministers wrestle with boom and recession, debts and deficits. Few economic journalists have earned such respect for their views from participants and readers alike. His even-handedness and his clarity of vision have left countless readers better informed about how the complexities and contradictions of the modern economy affect our daily lives.

Thrown into the deep end as a cadet journalist, Ross covered his first mini-budget lockup in 1974, and was soon covering the financial roller coaster ridden by the Whitlam government. From then on, no government and no treasurer has escaped analysis - he anoints Keating, Costello, and Swan as his three best - and throughout the book he critiques without fear or favour the ministers and bureaucrats who have shaped our economic wellbeing.

This son of a Salvation Army major and one-time accountant is an old school journo through and through. With four decades of printers' ink in his veins, he dissects the newspaper game, remembers the great editors and journalists who have sharpened our minds and his, and lays down some hard facts about a hard future.

Honest, robust and intelligent, Gittins is as insightful and entertaining as the man himself.

About the author

Ross Gittins is the Economics Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and an economic columnist for The Age. He is a winner of the Citibank Pan Asia award for excellence in financial journalism and has been a Nuffield Press fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a journalist-in-residence at the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne. Ross is frequently called upon to comment on the economic issues of the day and has written and contributed to many books and periodicals. His most recent books are Gittins' Gospel, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.

A Dutchman and his dog travel across America

 

Rare book. Mint condition. PB. 560pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia

Following in Steinbeck's footsteps, half a century on from Travels With Charley

In 1960 John Steinbeck and his dog Charley set out in their green pickup truck to rediscover the soul of America, visiting small towns and cities from New York to New Orleans.The trip became Travels With Charley, one of his best-loved books.

Half a century on, Geert Mak sets off from Steinbeck’s home. Mile after mile, as he retraces Steinbeck’s footsteps through the potato fields of Maine to the endless prairies of the Midwest and stumbles across glistening suburbs and boarded-up stores, Mak searches for the roots of America and what remains of the world Steinbeck describes. How has America changed in the last fifty years; what remains of the American dream; and what do Europe and America now have in common?

About the author

Geert Mak is a journalist and historian, and the internationally acclaimed author of In Europe,In America, Amsterdam and The Bridge. He is one of the Netherlands’ bestselling authors, has twice been awarded Historian of the Year and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Tracking the Gobi Desert in the steps of Genghis Khan

 

Excellent condition. PB. 224pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia

The Gobi desert in Mongolia has long been considered a wasteland of searing heat, polar cold, and brutal sandstorms. For seventy years, it was all but barred to outsiders by Mongolia's position as a Soviet-dominated buffer state between Russia and China. 

The collapse of communism gave John Man a long-awaited chance to travel through the Gobi. Retracing the steps of early explorers, living with herdsmen, and drawing on the most recent scientific work, he has now created the first accessible portrait of this little-known wilderness.

Man describes the Gobi's national parks (one of which is the second largest in the world), its snowcapped mountains, sandstone canyons, towering dunes, and "singing sands." He tells us about its ephemeral snow leopards, its desert bears (only some of which survive), and the world's only species of wild horse. 

He relates exciting stories of earlier expeditions, many of them American-led. In the 1920s, American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews discovered the first known dinosaur eggs in the legendary Flaming Cliffs. 

And in the 1990s Michael Novacek, of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, led teams that discovered a treasure-trove of dinosaur fossils far exceeding Andrews' finds. 

In concluding chapters Man captures the ancient land of the Gobi on the brink of change, as research intensifies, the population increases, the herdsmen become owners of motorbikes -- and the pressure on wildlife grows.

About the author

John Anthony Garnet Man is a British historian and travel writer. His special interests are China, Mongolia and the history of written communication. He takes particular pleasure in combining historical narrative with personal experience.

He studied German and French at Keble College, Oxford, before doing two postgraduate courses, a diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, completing the latter in 1968. After working in journalism with Reuters and in publishing with Time-Life Books, he turned to writing, with occasional forays into film, TV and radio.

In the 1990s, he began a trilogy on the three major revolutions in writing: writing itself, the alphabet and printing with movable type. This has so far resulted in two books, Alpha Beta and The Gutenberg Revolution, both republished in 2009. The third, on the origin of writing, is on hold, because it depends on access to Iraq.

He returned to the subject of Mongolia with Gobi: Tracking the Desert, the first book on the region since the 1920s. Work in Mongolia led to Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, which has so far appeared in 18 languages. Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China completed a trilogy on Asian leaders. A revised edition of his book on Genghis Khan, with the results of an expedition up the mountain on which he is supposed to be buried, was upcoming in autumn 2010.

The Terracotta Army coincided with the British Museum exhibition (September 2007- April 2008). This was followed by The Great Wall. The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan combines history and leadership theory. Xanadu: Marco Polo and the Discovery of the East was published in autumn 2009, and Samurai: The Last Warrior, the story of Saigō Takamori's doomed 1877 rebellion against the Japanese emperor, was published in February 2011.

In 2007 John Man was awarded Mongolia's Friendship Medal for his contributions to UK-Mongolian relations.

SOLD A lone Kiwi travels across Mongolia

 

SOLD

Rare book. Good condition. PB. 176pp. $20 including postage across Australia

While Ian Robinson was born and raised in rural New Zealand, he's covered a lot of ground since then. He's done it the hard way too - backpacking through South America, China, Tibet, Nepal and India. 

In 1992 he was living in London, and was seized with the idea of travelling across Mongolia, and despite opposition from friends, family and so-called 'experts' who claimed it was impossible, he went on to became the first westerner to cross Mongolia alone on horseback. 

His battle to find guides, horses and a safe place to sleep in some of the world's wildest and most inhospitable surroundings is an extraordinary testament to his courage, ingenuity and determination. 

Gantsara - alone across Mongolia tells the fascinating, sometimes frightening and often hilarious story of his amazing journey. 

From falling in love with an enchanting girl in Ulan Bator to being chased across the steppes by drunken bandits, his story is never dull and is full of the affection and respect he developed for the warm and vital people he came to know and love along the way

Travels through China's places of pilgrimage

 

Good condition. PB. 339pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

To walk through China is to walk on holy ground. Travels Through Sacred China is a guide to the soul of China. It is also a guidebook which enters into the spirit of Tao.

A revealing guide to China's guide to the vast religious and spiritual heritage

This book explains why to understand the soul of China you must see the sacred in China, which is there in the designs of the buildings, the street plans of the cities, in the household shrines at the back of shops, and in the concept that the very land of China itself is sacred. It presents the fundamental sacred ideas that lie at the heart of this ancient land, and is also a guidebook which enters into the spirit of the Dao, through which the culture and traditions of China are brought to life.

About the author

Martin Palmer is a regular contributor to the BBC on religious, ethical, and historical issues, and appears regularly on both BBC radio and TV, including the World Service. He is also a well-known translator of Chinese classical texts such as the Dao De Jing and the Shang Shu, and is an advisor to the China Taoist Association, the Mongolian Buddhist Sangha, and the World Council of Churches as well as heading the Alliance of Religions and Conservation.

SOLD Hanif Kureishi writes about his father

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 256pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Following the discovery of an unfinished manuscript written by his father, Kureishi looks back on his own development as a writer in the light of his father s unrealised literary ambitions

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer, and the moving discovery of family secrets.

When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition. This is a book about his father's failed career as a writer and the beginnings of Kureishi's successful career as one - as his father looks on with pride and perhaps envy.

A powerful work on religion and justice

 

Very good condition. PB. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From the bestselling author of God’s Politics, a seminal call to reintegrate politics and spirituality

“A tremendous and timely book . . . just what the doctor ordered for a hardened, cynical, and disheartened and disillusioned world.” —Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Jim Wallis’s classic The Soul of Politics, originally published by The New Press in 1994 and now available in a new hardcover edition, has sold 60,000 copies to date and has been widely praised for its prescience and passion. In fact, no issue has become more topical or polarizing in the United States than the intersection of religion and politics, with the country seemingly irreconcilably split between the “religious right” and the “secular left.”

In this “dynamic, hopeful” (The Nation) book, Wallis, the nationally known activist, preacher, and editor of Sojourners magazine, shows why both the traditional liberal and conservative visions are inadequate to the challenge before us, and outlines instead a new political morality combining social justice with individual responsibility. 

Arguing that we need to look beyond the traditional corridors of power to find the resources for a political movement that will foster true democracy—emphasizing compassion, community, racial reconciliation, gender equality, justice, imagination, and joy—The Soul of Politics “speaks to how all Americans—not just churchgoers—need to take personal responsibility for change rather than rely on politicians” (Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Reviving faith in politics without theocratic BS

 

Excellent condition. PB. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The book is as passionate, engaging, and emotionally moving as readers have come to expect from Wallis.--Publishers Weekly

...a timely, powerful, persuasive book which richly deserves a wide hearing....--Christian Ethics Today 

Offers insight into religious activism and the possibilities for a more progressive approach to religious engagement in the public square--In These Times 

"This is a must-read for anyone concerned about the staggering problems that America faces today. Before you vote, read THE GREAT AWAKENING."--FaithfulReader.com 

Laden with anecdotes, Wallis' book claims a groundswell of progressive believers could accomplish social transformation that mere politics cannot deliver.--USA Today 

This call to arms is approachable and inspiring . . . Wallis's analysis of the role of faith, especially Christian faith, in embracing progressive 'common good' politics is highly astute and, overall, very compelling.--Library Journal

SOLD Travels through wild Indonesia

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 266pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

My Friend the Fanatic is a portrait of the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, a land once synonymous with tolerance that the author claims finds itself in the midst of a profound shift toward radical Islam. 

This portrait is painted through the travels of a pair of unlikely protagonists. Sadanand Dhume, the author, is a foreign correspondent, an Indian atheist with a fondness for literary fiction and an interest in economic development. His companion, Herry Nurdi, is a young Islamist who hero-worships Osama bin Laden.

Judith Lucy's hilarious family memoir

 

Signed by the author. Excellent condition. PB. 304pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia

Judith Lucy has been cracking jokes about her parents for years. But when a birth relative's casual comment implied that she despised them, Judith was shocked. Sure, she had been talking about Ann and Tony Lucy like they were one-dimensional Irish nut bags who had ruined her life for years, but there was always more to them and her own feelings than that.

So Judith decided it was time to write the full story of her parents and her childhood.

Judith Lucy is one of Australia's best-known comedians; this is her first work.

Australian history and futures

 

Mint condition. PB. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The bestselling author of The Australian Moment asks the most important question confronting the country right now – how do we maintain our winning streak?

Most nations don't get a first chance to prosper. Australia is on its second. For the best part of the nineteenth century, Australia was the world's richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants. Yet our last big boom was followed by a fifty-year bust as we lost our luck, our riches and our nerve, and shut our doors on the world. Now we're back on top, in the position where history tells us we made our biggest mistakes. Can we learn from our past and cement our place as one of the world's great nations?

Showing that our future is in our foundation, Australia's Second Chance goes back to 1788, the first contact between locals and migrants, to bring us a unique and fascinating view of the key events of our past right through to the present day. With newly available economic data and fresh interviews with former leaders (including the last major interview with Malcolm Fraser), George Megalogenis crunches the numbers and weaves our history into a compelling thesis, brilliantly chronicling our dialogue with the world and bringing fresh insight into the urgent question of who we are, and what we can become.

'Megalogenis has emerged as something of a polymath. He slaps history and politics and culture like mortar in and around his knowledge of economics and numbers to build compelling, even thrilling, theses about the country of his birth and where it stands in the world.' Tony Wright, Saturday Age

Mafia in the Australian outback

 

Mint condition. PB. 312pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The story behind the murder that shocked a nation.

'Donald Mackay was not just an innocent victim tragically struck down by a criminal act. He was a casualty of the actual fight against organised crime ... killed on active service, as it were ... His name should never be forgotten, his passing must not be allowed to be in vain.'

The assassination of Donald Mackay was meant to solve a problem for the mafia. Instead it roused the law-abiding citizens of Griffith to fight against the powerful criminal elements who had made their town synonymous with drugs and murder.

Drawing on the personal diaries and memories of Terry Jones - who, as the editor of the local newspaper, knew everyone and heard everything - The Griffith Wars reveals startling new evidence about one of Australia's most notorious unsolved murders. It also powerfully recounts the struggle for the soul of a country town still battling to shake off its criminal past.

About the authors

Tom Gilling's acclaimed novels, The Sooterkin, Miles McGinty and Dreamland have all been published in Australia, as well as in London and New York. His is co-author with Clive Small of the highly successful Smack Express, Blood Money, Evil Life and The Dark Side.

Terry Jones was a friend of Donald Mackay, a long-time resident of Griffith and editor of The Area News and The Griffith Times. His diaries form the basis of this book.

PJ O'Rourke pokes fun at himself and the world in this collection of his early journalism

 

Mint condition. PB. 368pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

P.J. O’Rourke celebrates his first twenty-five years of journalism with ‘a quarter of a century of previously uncollected fulminations, diatribes, philippics, animadversions, bullyrags, readings of the riot act, middle-finger flag-downs, scoffings, slander, calumnies and licks of the rough side of the tongue’. 

‘This career-spanning anthology condenses one of the most provocative and entertaining careers in twentieth-century journalism . . . P.J. O’Rourke remains the funniest man in print. This book confirms that he has been much longer than we thought’ Ikon 

‘P.J. O’Rourke is routinely billed as “American’s premier political humorist” and, for once, it is a claim that is difficult to dispute . . . few other humorists rival O’Rourke for simple comic density’ Guardian 

‘It is not fanciful to think of him as the heir to Swift and Orwell . . . journalism as relentlessly funny as it is deceptively shrewd’ Melody Maker ‘Age and Guile contains enough firecracker wit to uphold his reputation as America’s greatest prose comedian’ Financial Times 

‘O’Rourke remains the wittiest member of the herd’ Daily Telegraph

The history of immersion journalism

 

Very rare book. Very good condition. PB. 336pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

New Journalism ... burst on to the American print media scene in the mid-'60s before withering slowly as the 1970s mired itself in detente, oversized clothing and stagflation. In the end, New Journalism vanished - a victim of tighter economic times, the relentless onslaught of television, the VCR and the stylistic excesses of the form itself.

For those unfamiliar with New Journalism, the rubric came to be applied to pieces of writing in popular magazines such as and that ran at great length, packed with detail, the writer's subjective observations and even - in the case of the man who came to be seen as the avatar of the form, Tom Wolfe - extended applications of onomatopoeia.

As Marc Weingarten shows in this thorough and highly readable history of long-form "immersion" journalism, what came to be known as New Journalism had in fact been around well before the 1960s (the term was invented by Wolfe, ever the self-promoter, in 1973). He nominates Jonathan Swift's satirical assault on Britain's occupation of Ireland, , written in 1729, as perhaps the first example of the Gonzo style later associated with Hunter S. Thompson.

(taken from a review published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 January 2006. You can read more here.)

Embarrassing tyrannies

 

Mint condition. PB. 346pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Collected here are sixty-two powerful and often terrifying pieces selected from Index on Censorship's twenty-five years' worth of issues documenting and condemning tyranny.

The writings, many by such renowned authors as Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, and Julio Cortazar, cover the issues with careful even-handedness. Ariel Dorfman writes from the experience of the Chilean dictatorship and imagines a training course for salesmen of torture equipment; Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a fragment of poetry recalling his own period in a labour camp in Kazakhstan; Wale Soginka writes powerfully in defense of Salman Rushdie―a truly disturbing piece.

A great tribute to Index's achievements, this collection celebrates without being self-congratulatory. Its contributors provide elegant testimony to the human spirit's capacity for survival and its continuing struggle for freedom.

A collection of ancient and modern journalism

 

Good condition. PB. 752pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

What was it like to be caught in the firestorm that destroyed Pompeii? To have dinner with Attila the Hun? To watch the charge of the Light Brigade? To see the Titanic slide beneath the waves? John Carey's best-selling Faber Book of Reportage draws its eyewitness account from memoirs, travel books and newspapers. This is history with the varnish removed.

'A quite stunning collection. There are descriptions in this book so fresh that they sear themselves into the imagination.' Jeremy Paxman

About the author

John Carey is Emeritus Professor at Oxford University. His books include studies of John Donne, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as The Intellectuals and the Masses, What Good Are the Arts? and a life of William Golding. His memoir, The Unexpected Professor, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Memoir of avoiding South Asian marriage

 

Excellent condition. PB. 304pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An affectionate, often hilarious, memoir of growing up in London in the 1970s in an Indian household, and avoiding an arranged marriage.

‘From the age of fourteen, I was aware my parents expected me to have an arranged marriage, a big Bollywood wedding. There was just one hitch: nobody asked me.’

For Sushi Das, growing up in 1970s London was a culturally messed-up time. Feminists were telling women they could be whatever they wanted, skinheads were yelling at dark-skinned foreigners to go home and The Boomtown Rats were singing about ‘Lookin’ after Number 1.’

While Sushi was fabricating intricate lies and plotting harebrained schemes to get to the pub and meet ‘undesirable elements’ – boys – her parents were on the hunt for a respectable Indian doctor for her to marry. But how do you turn your back on centuries of tradition without trashing your family’s honour? How do you break free of your parents’ stranglehold without casting off their embrace? And how do you explain to your strict dad why there’s a boy smoking in his living room and another one lurking in his garden?

Breaking free meant migrating to the other side of the world, only to find that life in Australia had unexpected consequences. This is an intelligent, often hilarious memoir and a fascinating look at one of the oldest traditions of Eastern culture, which aims to join two families in economic prosperity, but whose reality is not always so blissful.

About the author

Sushi Das is an award-winning British/Australian journalist of Indian origin who worked for The Age newspaper for 22 years. She held various roles including news editor, columnist and opinion editor. Educated and raised in London, she migrated to Australia in 1991 and began her career as a news reporter at Australian Associated Press. Her work, which often focuses on race relations, culture clash and equality for women, has been recognised with two Melbourne Press Club Quill awards, including Best Columnist. She is an experienced public speaker and currently works as a freelance columnist and writing consultant and as a researcher for RMIT ABC Fact Check. Her memoir Deranged Marriage has been taught as a school text at Victorian secondary schools.