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"

The best Indian literature

Excellent condition. PB. 638pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is a definitive anthology that vividly reveals the greatest writers from the Indian continent.

Spanning 150 years, this collection of fiction and non-fiction shatters many contemporary illusions about Indian writing.

Translations sit alongside writing in English, bringing to light the most engaging writers from modern India, including R.K. Narayan, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie.

The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature is a wonderful collection of the best Indian writing comprising fiction and non-fiction.

A Guantanamo memoir from Britain

 

Mint condition. HB. 196pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is Ahmed's story. It will make you rethink what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will also make you look anew at courage, survival, justice and the War on Terror.

On 11 September 2001, in a cafe in London, Ahmed Errachidi watched as the twin towers collapsed. He was appalled by the loss of innocent life. But he couldn't possibly have predicted how much of his own life he too would lose because of that day.

In a series of terrible events, Ahmed was sold by the Pakistanis to the Americans in the diplomatic lounge at Islamabad airport and spent five and a half years in Guantanamo. There, he was beaten, tortured, humiliated, very nearly destroyed.

But Ahmed did not give in. This very ordinary, Moroccan-born London chef became a leader of men. Known by the authorities as The General, he devised protests and resistance by any means possible. As a result, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement. But then, after all those years, Ahmed was freed, his innocence admitted.

This is Ahmed's story. It will make you rethink what it means to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will also make you look anew at courage, survival, justice and the War on Terror.

SOLD The great battle for Australia

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 602pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In a unique and balanced portrayal, renowned journalist Paul Ham recounts both the Australian and Japanese perspectives of the events on the hellish Papuan jungle trail where thousands fought and died during World War II.

Based on extensive research in Australia and Japan, and including previously unpublished documents, Kokoda intimately relates the stories of ordinary soldiers in 'the world's worst killing field', and examines the role of commanders in sending ill-equipped, unqualified Australian troops into battles that resulted in near 100 per cent casualty rates.

It was a war without mercy, fought back and forth along 90 miles (145 km) of river crossings, steep inclines and precipitous descents, with both sides wracked by hunger and disease, and terrified of falling into enemy hands. Defeat was unthinkable: the Australian soldier was fighting for his homeland against an unyielding aggressor; the Japanese ordered to fight to the death in a bid to conquer 'Greater East Asia'.

Paul Ham captures the spirits of those soldiers and commanders who clashed in this war of exceptional savagery, and tells of the brave souls on both sides of the campaign whose courage and sacrifices must never be forgotten.

About the Author

Paul Ham is the author of the highly acclaimed Kokoda (HarperCollins, 2004) and the Australia correspondent of the London Sunday Times.

He was born and educated in Australia and lives in Sydney, having spent several years working in Britain as a journalist and publisher.

SOLD Indonesia, religion and politics in one volume

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 374pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Following the Bali bombings, Australia suddenly found itself in the middle of a war of terror that gripped the world. Worse still, it was a war with an enemy we never knew we had - an enemy we're still struggling to identify and understand. Even worse, we neglected to understand that this enemy was one we shared with Indonesia itself.

RESERVED The Indian History of Cricket

 

Excellent condition. PB. 496pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

C. K. Nayudu and Sachin Tendulkar naturally figure in this book, but so too, in arresting and unexpected ways, do Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The Indian careers of those great English cricketers, Lord Harris and D. R. Jardine, provide a window into the operations of Empire.

The extraordinary life of India's first great slow bowler, Palwankar Baloo, introduces the reader to the still-unfinished struggle against caste discrimination.

Later chapters explore the competition between Hindu and Muslim cricketers in colonial India and the extraordinary passions now provoked when India plays Pakistan.

An important, pioneering work, essential for anyone interested in cricket and India, A Corner of a Foreign Field is also a beautifully written meditation on the ramifications of sport in society at large, and how sport can influence both social and political history.

SOLD Encounters between the British Empire and its eastern subjects

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 404pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Talented historian Maya Jasonoff offers an alternative history of the British Empire. It is not about conquest -- but rather a collection of startling and fascinating personal accounts of cross-cultural exchange from those who found themselves on the edges of Empire.

A Palladian mansion filled with Western art in the centre of old Calcutta, the Mughal Emperor's letters in an archive in the French Alps, the names of Italian adventurers scratched into the walls of Egyptian temples: in this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff delves into the stories behind artefacts like these to uncover the lives of collectors in India and Egypt who lived on the frontiers of European empire.

Edge of Empire traces their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire tells a story about the making of European empires, ones that break away from the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance, to delve into the personal dimensions of imperialism.

She asks what people brought to imperial frontiers and what they took away, and what motives drove them, whether ambition, opportunism, curiosity or greed. This rich and compelling book enters a world where people lived, loved and died, and identified with each other across cultures much more than our prejudices about 'Empire' might suggest.

About the Author

Maya Jasanoff was born in 1974. She graduated from Harvard before earning her Masters degree at Cambridge University. Her PhD was completed at Yale. She is now Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. She is widely known for her pioneering work on the study of Empire.

SOLD Travels through Istanbul

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 396pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Istanbul: A Traveller's Reader is an wide-ranging and carefully chosen selection of writings, offering a richly layered view of Byzantine Constantinople and Turkish Istanbul. During the thousand-year Byzantine empire that followed its founding by Constantine the Great, Istanbul became a city of fabled riches; after falling to the Turks in 1453, its glories continued, maintained by the strength and wealth of the Ottomans.

Drawing on diaries, letters, biographies, travelogues and poems from the sixth century AD onwards, this evocative anthology recreates for contemporary visitors the vanished glories of Constantinople. It provides vivid eyewitness accounts of the coronation of a Byzantine emperor; the funeral of a sultan; the triumphal entry of Mehmet the Conqueror; the building of the Suleymaniye, the most magnificent of the city's mosques; and the death of Ataturk in 1938.

It also describes the rampant sexual exploits of the Byzantine empress-to-be Theodora; the public execution of a Turkish wife and her young, Christian lover; the near execution of an envoy given the unenviable task of transporting a large organ from England to Constantinople in 1599, a gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III, who was caught admiring the sultan's personal harem; and the unfortunate Frenchman caught drinking wine and eating a pork sausage while sketching in Hagia Sophia in the 1680s.

About the Author

Laurence Kelly is the editor of the Traveller's Reader series. Born in Brussels and educated at New College, Oxford, where he read history, he joined the Life Guards in 1950 and served in the Foreign Office. His interest in all things Turkish began in 1946 when he first visited Ankara and Istanbul whilst his father was in Turkey as British Ambassador.

Reporting from war zones across the world

 

Excellent condition. PB. 622pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

War is hell. It is also suffering, courage, fear, nobility, depravity, honor, death. War in all its aspects, from the tragic to the horrific to the heroic, is vividly depicted in this riveting volume of dispatches by established authors like Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, who turned their literary hand to, respectively, the Spanish-American War, Boer War, Spanish Civil War, and D-Day 1944, as well as professional news correspondents like Ernie Pyle, Alan Moorehead, Peter Arnett, and John Hersey, who made something like art out of war reportage.

Eyewitness accounts of other writers among the one hundred in this volume include William L. Shirer's on the surrender of the French in World War II, Edward R. Murrow's on the London Blitz, Alexander Werth's on the siege of Leningrad, and Martha Gellhorn's on the Battle of the Bulge.

Found here, too, are David Halberstrom's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece on the coup against Diem, Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre, and John Pilger on the last day in Saigon.

Not only did these men and women brave the dangers of war; they also combated often obstructive military officers and disingenuous politicians to get their story and to report the truth as they saw it.

Beginning with William Howard Russell's reports from Crimea, which mark the birth of war reportage, and ending on the battle lines in Bosnia, here is war -- what it looks like, what it means, and how it has been fought for 150 years.

The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing

 

Mint condition. HB. 449pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From the cliffs of Gallipoli, to the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, Australia's short history has been punctuated by war.

We define ourselves through our relationship to the battlefield - mateship, courage under fire, larrikinism - but few of us have been firsthand witnesses to these scenes.

Soldiers writing from the front and journalists on the ground have shaped the way we think about war, and thereby the way we think about ourselves.

In this remarkable collection from author and journalist Mark Dapin, the crackling immediacy of this war writing will command your attention and open your eyes.

SOLD A history of political violence

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 726pp. $28 including postage anywhere in Australia.

These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did.

The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'.

Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon.

In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.

Hilarious guide to surviving an apocalypse

 

Excellent condition. PB. 246pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Ultimate Fighter champ Forrest Griffin and Erich Krauss, who previously brought you the New York Times bestseller Got Fight, now offer a hilarious and very timely guide to surviving the coming apocalypse.

Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down provides everything an aspiring Mad Max needs to know about post-apocalyptic living.

Since it’s coming soon anyway, we might as well all Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down.

Married to the mafia

 

Very good condition. PB. 310pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

When Lynda Lustig met Louie Milito, she was a sixteen-year-old high-school dropout with a taste for adventure and an agonizing childhood.

When they were married two years later, he was not yet a "made man" in the powerful Gambino crime family. Louie was a hairdresser who dabbled in petty thievery.

But Lynda was so happy to be out of her domineering mother's loveless house. And over the years, she was willing to forgive her husband for anything: his violent rages, his frequent absences, his shady associates, and the blood on his hands.

For twenty-four years Lynda Milito remained loyal to this charming and dangerous criminal -- her children's father and close friend of crime boss John Gotti and underboss Sammy "the Bull" Gravano.

But in 1988, Louie Milito disappeared, murdered by the very people he had always trusted to protect him.

A crime story, a family story, a love story, "Mafia Wife" is the shockingly intimate, brutally honest tale of a survivor -- and of the life she lived in the dark bosom of the underworld.

Stories of Australian midwives

 

Excellent condition. PB. 245pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Funny one minute and heartbreaking the next, Aussie Midwives explores the joys, emotion and drama of childbirth and the lasting effect it has on the people who work in this extraordinary profession.

'Being present as the midwife at a baby's birth is one of life's glorious adventures.'

Nineteen Australian midwives share their incredible stories with passionate midwife and bestselling author Fiona McArthur.

Midwives play a vital role in supporting women through some of the most challenging and rewarding moments of their lives.

These remarkable professionals watch over births across Australia from the remote outback to busy urban hospitals.

Meet Annie, working on the tiny island of Saibai where mothers arrive by dinghy; Kate, a clinical midwifery consultant, who sees women with high-risk pregnancies; Priscilla and Jillian who fly thousands of miles to get mothers and babies to hospital safely with the Royal Flying Doctor Service; and Louise, who gives impromptu consultations in the aisles of the local supermarket.

Funny one minute and heartbreaking the next, Aussie Midwives explores the joys, emotion and drama of childbirth and the lasting effect it has on the people who work in this extraordinary profession.