Writers exploring the world

 

Mint condition. Rare book. PB. 384pp. Not available from Booktopia. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia. 

Featuring the work of more than 28 writers from upwards of 20 countries, this collection transports us to the frontiers of twenty-first century literature.

In these pages, some of the most accomplished writers in world literature&;among them Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Cynthia Ozick, Javier Marias, and Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka, Günter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, and Naguib Mahfouz&;have stepped forward to introduce us to dazzling literary talents virtually unknown to readers of English. Most of their work&;short stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from novels&;appears here in English for the first time.

The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman introduces us to a story of extraordinary poise and spiritual intelligence by the Argentinian writer Juan Forn. The Romanian writer Norman Manea shares with us the sexy, sinister, and thrillingly avant garde fiction of his homeland&;s leading female novelist. The Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri spotlights the Bengali writer Parashuram, whose hilarious comedy of manners imagines what might have happened if Britain had been colonized by Bengal. And Roberto Calasso writes admiringly of his fellow Italian Giorgio Manganelli, whose piece celebrates the Indian city of Madurai.

Every piece here&;be it from the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean&;is a discovery, a colorful thread in a global weave of literary exchange.

Edited by Samantha Schnee, Alane Salierno Mason, and Dedi Felman

Anxious travel

 

Mint condition. PB. Rare book. 280 pp. Amazon sells for over $50. Our price $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Journalist-about-town Phil Brown has travelled widely but always reluctantly. Whether pursuing a tailor-made suit in the back alleys of Hong Kong, souvenir hunting in Ubud or dodging potholes on the road to Kathmandu, he shoulders a veritable kitbag of travel phobias.

With his more adventurous wife Sandra, Phil worries his way around the world, seeking the comfort of cable TV and 24-hour room service. Against his better judgment, he tackles the rainswept peaks of Scotland, the icy alienation of the Rockies and even the high Himalayas.

Travels through Russia

 

PB. Mint condition. 352pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Road of Bones is the story of Russia's greatest road. For over 200 years, the route of the Vladimirka Road has been at the centre of the nation's history, having witnessed everything from the first human footsteps to the rise of Putin and his oil-rich oligarchy. Tsars, wars, famine and wealth: all have crossed and travelled this road, but no-one has ever told its story.

In pursuit of the sights, sounds and voices both past and present, Jeremy Poolman travels the Vladimirka. Both epic and intimate, The Road of Bones is a record of his travels - but much more. It looks into the hearts and reveals the histories of those whose lives have been changed by what is known by many as simply The Greatest of Roads.

This is a book about life and about death and about the strength of will it takes to celebrate the former while living in the shadow of the latter. Anecdotal and epic, The Road of Bones follows the author's journey along this road, into the past and back again. The book takes as its compass both the voices of history and those of today and draws a map of the cities and steppes of the Russian people's battered but ultimately indefatigable spirit.

Rare classic on Indian travels

 

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

From an award-winning author whose books have all become modern classics, "Indian Balm" is written beautifully - witty, poetic, informed, full of colour and insight. It is a fascinating journey through past and present India, explaining a region far off the beaten track. 

"Indian Balm" is the captivating account of a journey Paul Hyland made along the little-known course of the sacred Godavari river in Southern India: a pilgrimage through both his past and India's present. It is the story of the search for his ancestors, missionaries and traders, who settled in the region generations ago and of their Balm - a wonder cure for all sorts of ailments and afflictions. It is also a fascinating and enlightening journey through India today. 

Wading through the country's contradictions and irritations, its ugliness and its beauty, Hyland encounters both the exotic and the commonplace. He meets snake charmers and sadhus, bogi men and horn dancers, witnesses ancient rituals and observes the most simple aspects of daily life. Indian Balm is an extraordinary and, above all, unique journey - vivid, intimate and revealing - travel writing at its colourful best.

A Scotsman writes humorously about his dog

 

Mint condition. HB. 204 pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

It seems now like a different me, the years I spent with Martin, a Doberman dog, and before he came, another me; and it is a new me now, once again, writing this. I would have been dead long ago had I continued to live the way I had before he came.

I think someone would have murdered me, given how I drank and the dives that I drank in and that I was an aggressive, angry man. I had no money and no friends. I didn’t care, I couldn’t have. 

Thomas Healy was a drunk, a fighter, sometimes a writer, often unemployed, no stranger to the police. His life was going nowhere but downhill. Then one day he bought a pup—a Doberman. He called him Martin. 

Gradually man and dog became unshakable allies, the closest of comrades, the best of friends. They took long walks together, they vacationed together, they even went to church together. Martin, in more ways than one, saved Thomas Healy’s life. 

Written with unadulterated candor and profound love, this soulful memoir gets at the heart of the intense bond between people and dogs.

Stories from the Stolen Generation

 

Very good condition. 198pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Phillip Adams on India

 

Excellent condition. 222 pages. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A West Australian explores the world

 

Rare book. Mint condition. 182pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Scourfield is former travel editor of the West Australian newspaper.

From his most recent, travels, Stephen Scourfield brings together some of his most fascinating journeys and encounters in the book Travel Etcetera. From the giant tortoises of Mauritius to the carbon ledgers of India and mai tais of Hawaii. From the temples of Bangkok to the frigid history of the Yukon. The book looks at the world in a personal and often amused way. It is a literary journey that interprets the very nature of travel.

Travels in Spain

 

Mint condition. PB. 384pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This book takes the reader on a journey from the earliest settlements on the Iberian Peninsula, through the influences of the Romans, the Goths and the Muslims, the traumas of expansion and the end of the Empire, right up to the present.

Riding on a donkey across Spain

 

Very good condition. PB. 336pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn't really want to.

Being larger than a cat, the donkey is the kind of animal Tim Moore is slightly scared of. Yet intrigued by epic accounts of a pilgrimage undertaken by one in three medieval Europeans, and committed to historical authenticity, he finds himself leading a Pyrenean ass named Shinto into Spain, headed for Santiago de Compostela.

Over 500 miles of extreme weather and agonising bestial sloth, it becomes memorably apparent that for the multinational band of eccentrics who keep the Santiagan flame alive, the pilgrimage has evolved from a purely devotional undertaking into a mobile therapist's couch.

'Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he is in fact a writer of considerably more substance and the jokes come thick and fast' Irish Times

A Scotsman rides a motor bike across America.

 

Mint condition. PB. 303pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Follow much-loved Scottish comedian Billy Connolly across Route 66 on this unforgettable journey, filled with music, modern history and hilarious stories.

Billy Connolly first dreamed of taking a trip on the legendary Route 66 when he heard Chuck Berry belting out one of the greatest rock 'n' roll records of all time - and now he's finally had the chance to do it. Travelling every one of its 2,278 miles on his custom-make motorbike, Billy's journey takes him past many of the best-known icons in the US: the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon, and the funky neon-lit gas stations and diners that once lined the route.

Billy also has the chance to get to know the people who call it home, from Mervin the Amish carpenter, to fellow banjo enthusiast and obsessive instrument collector Rob, to Angel, one of the many people determined to keep the spirit of the Mother Road alive. Funny, touching and inspiring in equal measure, the tales he gathers on the way tell the story of modern America.

With his unrivalled instinct for a good story, and the gregariousness that has made him a comedy legend, Billy Connolly is the ultimate guide to the ultimate road trip.

The story oof one of Australia's most contentious religious discrimination case

 

PB. 300pp. Excellent condition. $15 including p9stage anywhere in Australia.

In March 2002, three Muslim converts attend an Evangelical Christian seminar promoted to reveal the inner secrets of ‘Holy Jihad’.

Shocked by what they hear, they convince the Islamic Council of Victoria to lodge a complaint against Catch the Fire Ministries, under a controversial new hate speech law. A case expected to be over in three days turns into an unholy war of words lasting five long years – freedom of speech versus freedom from vilification is under the spotlight.

Award-winning author Hanifa Deen follows this case from beginning to end, witnessing the religious impulse at its best – and worst. Her very human account focuses on the personalities and motives of the two religious tribes – Muslims and born-again Christians. Real people – on both sides of the courtroom – express their pain and their innocence at a hearing that turns into a nightmare.

Through Deen’s eyes we discover a wider meaning to this conflict, as we come to realise that religious vilification is only one strand of a more complex story with hidden agendas.

SOLD Classic historical fiction from Geraldine Brooks

 

SOLD

372 pp. PB. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The "complex and moving" (The New Yorker) novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks follows a rare manuscript through centuries of exile and war.

Inspired by a true story, "People of the Book" is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author.

Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain.

When it falls to Australian rare book expert Hanna Heath to conserve this priceless work, the tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—a butterfly wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock the book’s deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.

Australian cricket and cheating

 

Very god condition. 229pp. PB. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

He was top of the world, with numbers bettered only by Don Bradman – then captain Steve Smith led his Australian team into a cheating scandal that stunned cricket. Media exploded and million-dollar contracts were torn up. Australia’s prime minister expressed the public anger and disappointment: ‘Our cricketers are role models, and cricket is synonymous with fair play.’

But there was more to the story than the actions of a few young men. A tangle of personality, politics and culture had led them to this point.

Geoff Lemon witnessed that story from commentary boxes and press conferences, and was there in South Africa for its final act. This is a frank, fearless and often humorous account of the path from Ashes high to Cape Town low, from someone who watched it all unfold.

A primer on depression

 

Mint condition. PB. 190pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

These guides from People's Medical Society address the most common medical concerns in an accessible question-and-answer format. In a departure from conventional references, these books present both traditional and alternative methods of treatment, and offer pro and con points of view for each

All about kidney cancer

 

Ex-library. Mint condition. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Achieving balance in ,life

 

Mint condition. PB. 224pp. Booktopia is selling this for $47 plus postage. Our special price $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From Simon & Schuster, Lifebalance is Linda and Richard Eyre's guide on how to simplify and bring harmony to your everyday life.

Espousing an approach to living that emphasizes balance between personal and professional demands, a new guide shows readers how to make and stick to decisions that will help make sense of often contradictory demands on their time.

How we think and why it is important

 

Mint condition. PB. 288pp. Amazon is selling this book for $24 plus postage. Our special price is $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

What do layers of waste tell us about the history of civilisation? Is thinking itself determined by chromosomes? How does light illuminate the world?. 

Anthology of contemporary literature

 

Mint condition. PB. 496pp. Amazon retails at over $85plus postage. Our special price $40 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Despite war, repression and censorship, a renaissance has taken place in Iran over the last quarter-century. PEN have gathered selections that have lain completely unknown outside of Iran since 1979, from over 40 writers of three different generations. The first book of its kind to apear in English, this is a major anthology displaying the extraordinary scope and progress of Iranian literature.

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. 

Biography of a Jewish convert to Shi'ism in Azerbaijan during WWII

 

Mint condition. PB. 464pp. Amazon retails for $26 plus postage. Our special price $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

'Mixing memory with desire, this marvelous and original book once more reminds us of ways through which the imagination becomes a refuge from the uncontrollable cruelties of reality.'

Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.

Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino–a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust–is still in print today.

But Lev's life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity–until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck–also a friend of both Freud's and Einstein's–was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer–until the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book–discovered in a half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone–helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.

Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for The New Yorker, he pursued Lev's story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic and surreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject's life. Reiss's quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles.

As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum's deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds–of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists–that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century–of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, The Orientalist is an astonishing book.

The Chechen war and Putin's slaughterhouse

 Rare book. Very good condition. PB. 576pp. Amazon selling this edition for $127. plus postage. Our special price is $40 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Written in passionate prose, this is the story of the one million Chechens who, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, found themselves cast as the enemy of the new Russian state. Compelled to assert their freedom and individualism, they faced the huge Russian army in a one-sided war which destroyed their land, their homes, and their families. This updated account also covers the role of Vladimir Putin in the continuing struggle.

A guide to managing depression

 

Rare book. Good condition. PB. 256pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia

... the book is also stacked with advice for the friends and family of the sufferers, and there’s information about every type of depression imaginable, from manic depression and anxiety disorders to postnatal depression and the reactive depression that’s common amongst people undergoing a traumatic event, like the death of a spouse or a parent.

So despite its age, I’d still recommend this book if you want to learn more about depression, whether it’s for yourself or for a loved one. In fact, it’s the best overall guide to the condition that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few of them.

Travels in Mongolia 1902

 

Mint condition. PB. 170pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In the years following the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 British diplomats undertook several consular missions to remote areas of China and Mongolia. On the journey described here, Consul C.W. Campbell travels north from Peking across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. On his route he describes the history, landscape and the way of life of those he meets. Uncovered Editions are historic official papers now available in popular form.

Gideon Haigh on the changing media landscape

 Ex-library. Mint condition. PB. 112pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Veteran journalist Gideon Haigh assesses the future of news media in light of the internet's effects on traditional forms of publishing and broadcasting.

Veteran journalist Gideon Haigh assesses the future of news media in light of the internet's effects on traditional forms of publishing and broadcasting.

In the last decade, customary news media have crumbled before the effects of the internet on advertising, circulation and viewership. In the next decade, they will be supplemented, if not supplanted, by new news media. In this insightful, informative and candid survey of possible futures, veteran journalist Gideon Haigh considers the options for his industry and his craft. Who wins? Who loses? What are the implications for practitioners, professionals, politicians and the public?

Gideon Haigh is the author of twenty-six books. The five sections that comprise The Deserted Newsroom first appeared as individual pieces in Crikey's Brave News World series.

A classic work on Palestinian experience

 

Mint condition. PN. 160pp. Booktopia is selling this for over $26 plus postage. Our special price is $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Israeli army invaded Ramallah in March 2002. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; Israeli soldiers patrolled from the rooftops. Four soldiers took over his brother's apartment and then used him as a human shield as they went through the building, while his wife tried to keep her composure for the sake of their frightened children, ages four and six. 

This book is an account of what it is like to be under siege: the terror, the frustrations, the humiliations, and the rage of civilians becoming trapped in their own homes and at the mercy of young soldiers who have been ordered to set aside their own sense of human decency in order to bully, harass and in some cases brutalize an unarmed population. 

How do you pass your time when you are imprisoned in your own home? 

What do you do when you cannot cross the neighborhood to help your sick mother? 

And what does it feel like when occupier and occupied, who are supposed to be enemies?

Japan's early modern history

 

Mint condition. HB. 208pp. Booktopia is selling this book for over $33. Our special price is $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In a single short book as elegant as it is wise, Ian Buruma makes sense of the most fateful span of Japan's history, the period that saw as dramatic a transformation as any country has ever known. 

In the course of little more than a hundred years from the day Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in his black ships, this insular, preindustrial realm mutated into an expansive military dictatorship that essentially supplanted the British, French, Dutch, and American empires in Asia before plunging to utter ruin, eventually emerging under American tutelage as a pseudo-Western-style democracy and economic dynamo.

What explains the seismic changes that thrust this small island nation so violently onto the world stage? In part, Ian Buruma argues, the story is one of a newly united nation that felt it must play catch-up to the established Western powers, just as Germany and Italy did, a process that involved, in addition to outward colonial expansion, internal cultural consolidation and the manufacturing of a shared heritage. But Japan has always been both particularly open to the importation of good ideas and particularly prickly about keeping their influence quarantined, a bipolar disorder that would have dramatic consequences and that continues to this day. 

If one book is to be read in order to understand why the Japanese seem so impossibly strange to many Americans, "Inventing Japan" is surely it.

Tagore writes of his childhood

 

Very good condition. PB. 200pp. Amazon is selling an edition of this for over $30 plus postage. Our special price is $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali polymath who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was a poet, visual artist, playwright, novelist, educationist, social reformer, nationalist, business-manager and composer. These memory paintings show the author's maturity in language and in his soul. Tagore writes about important matters with a lightness that belies their importance. "I know not who paints the pictures on memory's canvas; but whoever he may be, what he is painting are pictures; by which I mean that he is not there with his brush simply to make a faithful copy of all that is happening. He takes in and leaves out according to his taste. He makes many a big thing small and small thing big. He has no compunction in putting into the background that which was to the fore, or bringing to the front that which was behind. In short he is painting pictures, and not writing history." This is more than an autobiography; it is a look into a man's soul.

Memoir of a survivor of the Darfur genocide

 

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

The young life of Daoud Hari–his friends call him David–has been one of bravery and mesmerizing adventure. The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world, an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time: the brutal genocide under way in Darfur.

In 2003, Daoud Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman, was among the hundreds of thousands of villagers attacked and driven from their homes by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups. Though Hari’s village was burned to the ground, his family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped, eventually finding safety across the border. With his high school knowledge of languages, Hari offered his services as a translator and guide. In doing so, however, he had to return to the heart of darkness–and he has risked his life again and again to help ensure that the story of his people is told while there is still time to save them.

SOLD Australia's WWII experience

 

SOLD

Mint condition. Rare book. PB. 324pp. Available second hand on ebay for over $40 with postage. Our special price $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

World War II was the most defining moment in Australia's history. More than a million Australians served in campaigns against Germany and Italy in Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East, and against Japan in southeast Asia and other parts of the Pacific. 

On All Fronts looks at the key milestones of Australia's participation in the major theatres of World War II, from the tenacity of the Rats of Tobruk to the bitter battles of Greece and Crete, and the Allied triumph at El Alamein. Once Japan entered the war, the Australians were called to serve in the Pacific, bravely doing their duty when Singapore fell and struggling against a fierce and unrelenting enemy on the notorious Kokoda Track. 

The realities of war finally came to our own shores in 1942, when Japanese aircraft bombed towns in northwest Australia and Sydney Harbour came under attack from Japanese midget submarines. Jim Haynes presents little known accounts of the battles that Australians troops were called to, giving a glimpse into the human and social impact on Australians. 

On All Fronts celebrates the strength and determination of Australians who rose up to meet the extraordinary challenges faced on the frontline and back on the home front.

The stories of Australian troops in Vietnam

 

 Mint condition. PB. 320pp. Booktopia are selling this for $24 plus postage. Our special price is $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Muslim women tell stories of rights, abuse, love and loss

 

Mint condition. PB. 402pp. Booktopia are selling this for $27.50 plus postage. Our special price including postage to anywhere in Australia is $25.

SOLD Biography of former PM John Howard

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 458pp. Amazon sells new copies for over $100. Our special price $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

John Howard has an image problem. He isn't the strong-willed man of principle his supporters like to imagine. Neither is he the rat-cunning opportunist feared and loathed by his opponents. Most importantly, for a man often accused of zealotry of various types, he's not much into political ideas. With a few exceptions borne out of his suburban middle-class upbringing, policies are just part of his armoury. Howard is both more mundane and more complex than his public persona. He enjoys family, cricket, and running the country. But while the image of the ordinary bloke has been helpful to his enduring popularity, Howard possesses a number of uncommon strengths that have helped him reach the top, most important of these being the rare tenacity that saw him through the lean years of opposition, and through the tumultuous first two terms as prime minister.