A reader on South East Asian Islam

 

Mint condition. PB. 389pp. Amazon selling this for over $40 plus postage. Our special price is $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Islam is a major religion in Southeast Asia, with Indonesian Muslims comprising the largest Muslim population in the world. Events and developments since 11 September 2001 have added greater attention to Islam and its adherents in this part of the world.

This general survey of Islam in Southeast Asia is intended to inform, explain and update readers about the more significant aspects of Islam in Southeast Asia, then and now. These include the following: the geographical origins and sources by which the faith spread in this region; the social, economic and political profiles of the Muslim communities; relations between Muslims and non-Muslims and between Muslims and the State; the strands and trends that shapes the role of Islam and the Muslims in the national body politic; and the challenges confronting Muslims in confronting the vicissitudes of their lives in this era of rapid change, characterized by modernization, capitalism, secularization and globalization.          

The discussion will begin with an overview of the broad picture of Islam and the Muslims in the region as a whole, covering both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. This will be followed by case-study analysis of Islam and the Muslims in individual countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.           

Given the difficulty of writing on such a complex and contentious topic, this book attempts to present the subject matter in a manner that is sufficiently objective to scholars and yet simple and accessible enough to be readily understood by ordinary readers. 

Andalusian scholar writes on Muslim interfaith relations

 

Rare book. PB. Mint condition. 231pp. Amazon sells this for over $40. Our price $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A study of excerpts from the classical Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm on Islamic theology as it pertains to other religions in the context of the unique convivencia experiment in multiculturalism of medieval Islamic Spain.

Can Australia look beyond the two party system?

 

Mint condition. PB. 424pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia

Also available here and here.

The demands placed on western governments have increased exponentially in recent years, but the fundamental structure of most of these governments - the two party system - has not. Governments are now not only required to be competitive in the global economy, but the societies they represent have changed, becoming culturally and ethnically diverse. 

Ian Marsh's challenging book suggests that the two party regime cannot accommodate these changing needs. It outlines the ways in which politics might change to meet these new demands and achieve genuine participatory democracy. The book explores the nature of citizenship from a historical perspective, proposing a new definition of citizenship for the future. 

Ian Marsh argues that political learning will be central to the development of this new citizen, so that they, and not only the leadership elite, have genuine political input.

SOLD The definitive history of Australian Jews

 

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Mint condition. Rare book. HB. 616pp. $35 including postage anywhere in Australia

SOLD A comprehensive study of the Indian diaspora

 

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Mint condition. HB. 416pp. $100 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora Book Description Brij V Lal has contributed to The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora as an editor.Brij V. Lal is professor of Pacific and Asian history at the Australian National University.

About the author:

Brij V. Lal AM, FAHA is an Indo-Fijian historian. He was born in Labasa, on the northern island of Vanua Levu. He was educated at the University of the South Pacific, the University of British Columbia and the Australian National University. A harsh critic of the Bainimarama government, which originated in the military coup of 2006 and retained power in the 2014 elections, he is currently living in exile in Australia.

"I am currently working on a large scale project about Australia's engagement with the South Pacific from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Vanuatu. My research on Fiji continues with a historical dictionary and a general interpretative volume for the University of Hawaii currently in preparation, along with a series of essays on the politics and culture of the Indian indentured diaspora. On the side, I continue to wrestle with the problems of writing about societies with unwritten pasts."

SOLD A book about witchcraft

 

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Mint condition. PB. 470pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Witchcraft Reader offers a wide range of historical perspectives on the subject of witchcraft in a single, accessible volume, exploring the enduring hold that it has on human imagination.

The witch trials of the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have inspired a huge and expanding scholarly literature, as well as an outpouring of popular representations. This fully revised and enlarged third edition brings together many of the best and most important works in the field. It explores the origins of witchcraft prosecutions in learned and popular culture, fears of an imaginary witch cult, the role of religious division and ideas about the Devil, the gendering of suspects, the making of confessions, and the decline of witch beliefs. An expanded final section explores the various "revivals" and images of witchcraft that continue to flourish in contemporary western culture.

Equipped with an extensive introduction that foregrounds significant debates and themes in the study of witchcraft, providing the extracts with a critical context, The Witchcraft Reader is essential reading for anyone with an interest in this fascinating subject.

A century of advertising in Australia

 

Mint condition. PB. 312pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

But Wait,There's More ... provides a unique insight into the place of advertising in Australian society.

Catchy phrases, chants at cricket matches and jingles which consumers just can't get out of their heads-the best advertising stands out because it is creative, clever and, most importantly, funny.

Advertising in Australia can be traced back to the early 1900s, when spruikers wooed the public with appeals to vanity, health and patriotism. By the time Australia had endured two World Wars, the Depression, economic downturns, political upheavals and direct confrontations, the advertising industry had not only survived, but had become a multi-billion dollar industry, with an enormous influence over people's everyday lives and their spending habits.

But Wait, There's More. is the first detailed history of the Australian advertising industry, exploring its development over the course of the twentieth century from a disorganised group of individuals selling newspaper space to a multi-billion dollar enterprise run by giant transnationals. It follows the admen and adwomen who worked to convert their audiences into consumers and examines their ongoing quest for legitimacy in the face of new technologies and an increasingly sophisticated and media-savvy audience.

Great American travel writing

 

Rare book. Mint condition. HB. 320pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In this arresting book, Larzer Ziff traces the history of distinctively American travel writing through the stories of five great representatives. John Ledyard (1752–1789) sailed with Captain Cook, walked across the Russian empire, and attempted to find a transcontinental route across North America. John Lloyd Stephens (1805–1852), who today is recognized as the father of Maya archaeology, uncovered hundreds of ruins in two expeditions to the Yucatan and Central America, and he also was one of the first Americans to reach the Arabia Petrae. Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) invented travel writing as a profession. The only writer on Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan, he traveled also to Europe, Africa, India, and the Arctic Circle solely for the purpose of producing books about these journeys. Finally, in Mark Twain’s unabashed concentration on the haps and mishaps of the tourist and Henry James’s strikingly different cosmopolitan accounts of European sites and societies, travel writing conclusively emerged as great art.

Ziff explains the ways in which the American background of these writers informed their impressions of foreign scenes and shows how America served always as the final object of the critical scrutiny they brought to bear on other people and their lands.

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.)

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.

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

SOLD Diaries of an Indian official in the British Raj

 

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Mint condition. HB. 656pp. $50 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An engrossing narrative of a colonial subjects life contemplating his Imperial masters at the height of colonialism in India; based upon the first eight years of his life-long diary. 

Amar Singh, a Rajput nobleman and officer in the Indian Army, kept a diary for 44 years from 1898, when he was twenty, until his death in 1942. 

In it he writes about the Jodhpur court, the Imperial Cadet Corps, and the British Expeditionary Force in China during the Boxer rebellion. 

A century before hybridity, he constructs a hybrid self, an Edwardian officer cum gentleman and a martial Rajput cum manor lord. 

With the diary acting as alter ego and best friend, Amar Singh resists becoming a coolie for the raj when he finds the British to be racist masters as well as friends. 

He writes and reads extensively to keep himself amused, he says, and to avoid the boredom of princedom and raj philistinism. 

Here the authors focus on the first eight years of Amar Singhs diary (1898-1905), offering a rare and intimate glimpse into British colonialism from the point of view of a colonial subject. Illustrated with fifty photographs and facsimiles from Amar Singhs readings.

SOLD Life in an Iraqi village

 

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Very good condition. PB. 368pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Fernea's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. This volume gives a unique insight into a part of the Midddle Eastern life seldom seen by the West.

"A most enjoyable book abouut [Muslim women]--simple, dignified, human, colorful, sad and humble as the life they lead." --Muhsin Mahdi, Jewett Professor of Arabic Literature, Harvard Unversity. 

SOLD Magical Mathematics

 

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Mint condition. PB. 321pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The world's greatest mental mathematical magician takes us on a spellbinding journey through the wonders of numbers (and more)

"Arthur Benjamin ... joyfully shows you how to make nature's numbers dance."--Bill Nye (the science guy)

The Magic of Math is the math book you wish you had in school. Using a delightful assortment of examples-from ice-cream scoops and poker hands to measuring mountains and making magic squares-this book revels in key mathematical fields including arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus, plus Fibonacci numbers, infinity, and, of course, mathematical magic tricks.

Known throughout the world as the "mathemagician," Arthur Benjamin mixes mathematics and magic to make the subject fun, attractive, and easy to understand for math fan and math-phobic alike.

"A positively joyful exploration of mathematics."

-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Each [trick] is more dazzling than the last."

-Physics World

SOLD Essays on Irish history in one volume

 

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Rare book. Ex-library. Immaculate condition. PB. 248pp. $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Was there an Irish Revolution, and - if so - what kind of revolution was it? What motivated revolutionaries and those who supported them? How was the war fought and ended? What have been the repercussions for unionists, women and modern Irish politics?

These questions are here addressed by leading historians of the period through both detailed assessments of specific incidents and wide-ranging analysis of key themes. The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923 provides the most up-to-date answers to, and debate on, the fundamental questions relating to this formative period in Irish history.

Clear coverage of the historiography and a detailed chronology make this book ideal for classroom use. The Irish Revolution is essential reading for students and scholars of modern Ireland, and for all those interested in the study of revolution.

A primer on Islam and modernity

 

Rare book. Slightly damaged. PB. 309pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Most of the problems visible in the Muslim world stem from the gap created by a commitment to tradition and a wariness of modernity.

This book outlines the defining beliefs of Islam and the devotional practices of Muslims. It explains how and why the Islamic mood and the Muslim mind competes and, at times, conflicts with the promotion of modern popular culture and the propagation of contemporary liberal values.

The author, well-known Muslim theologian and writer Mehmet Özalp, is adamant that constructive and respectful dialogue across religious traditions is possible and that a clash of civilisations can be avoided.

He writes with sensitivity and insight about Islamic theology, history and social engagement, seeking to identify the major fault lines in relations between the Muslim World and the West while offering creative suggestions to relieve tension and restore goodwill.

This book will educate and enlighten a very broad readership and will help to fashion a future that neither rejects tradition nor resists modernity.