Coming of age in post-9/11 Afghanistan

 

Rare book. PB. 339pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Akbar recounts his pilgrimage to his home country with precocious wisdom and insight, taking readers from palaces to prisons and from Kabul to the borderlands in a revealing portrait of a country in the midst of a historic transition.

How occupation flooded Afghanistan with narcotics

 

Mint condition. PB. 464pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An in-depth investigation into the heroin trade in Afghanistan—including who runs it, who's profiting, and who's lives are caught in the balance
 
Afghanistan has become the world's largest producer of opium and its offshoot, heroin—all under the noses of Western civil and military stakeholders. 

At the nexus of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, truth is as elusive and fragile as the new democracy itself, now on the brink of being consumed by an expanding mire of chaos. 

Stranger in a strange land, Gregor Salmon entered the war-torn country alone and spent eight months investigating Afghanistan's dependence on poppy, investigating questions such as: Who depends on poppy profits? And who pays the ultimate cost? 

Along the way he encountered Afghans whose lives were intimately tied to the trade: farmers, harvesters, eradicators, smugglers, police, doctors, addicts, warlords, gun-runners, politicians—even a pop-song loving Taliban commander. 

The result is a tense, fascinating, and deeply moving journey along the narcotics trail, and a story about keeping your sanity in a senseless world.

What is it like to have a father who is a murderer?

 

Mint condition. Based on the award-winning podcast. PB. 272pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This was Nina Young’s shocking realisation in her mid-twenties, when she found out from online court records that her estranged father, Allan Ladd, had strangled a woman to death decades before. In prison he’d met Denise, Nina’s mother, who was his tutor. Although Denise didn’t know the extent of Allan’s crime when she fell in love with him, by the time she found out, she was in too deep. She had to flee from him before Nina turned two.

A decade after reading the court records, Nina, now a journalist, decided to release a podcast to tackle the questions she’d been asking herself ever since. How did her mother fall in love with a murderer? What happened to Conan, Nina’s estranged half-brother, who spent his formative years in Allan’s care? How much do your origins determine your destiny?

This is the story behind the podcast, taking Nina on a cross-country journey to retrace her steps. It is also Denise’s story, of falling in love with a charismatic, intelligent prisoner who turned out to be violent and callous. Unburdening herself of the stigma she carried with her for thirty years, Denise writes of what it took to leave and rebuild her life in the wake of the destruction Allan caused.

Young adult fiction from Australia

 

Mint condition. PB. 368pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Azra's dreams of finishing high school in Sydney and going to university are threatened by her uncle's plans to marry her off to an older cousin she has never met - will she have to choose between her family and her happiness?

'Reading Promising Azra prompted me to revisit stories I have heard too many times to count. Forced marriage is not bound to a certain culture or religion, it's an epidemic affecting children from many backgrounds. For real change to be possible, it’s important for us to hear these stories.’ Dr Eman Sharobeem Community Engagement Manager, SBS

Azra is sixteen, smart and knows how to get what she wants. She thinks. When she wins a place in a national science competition, she thinks her biggest problem is getting her parents' permission to go. But she doesn't know they're busy arranging her marriage to an older cousin she's never met. In Pakistan. In just three months' time.

Azra always thought she'd finish high school with her friends and then go on to study science, but now her dreams of university are suddenly overshadowed. Can she find a way to do what she wants, while keeping her parents happy?

Or does being a good daughter mean sacrificing her freedom?

Reportage from African war zones

 

Excellent condition. PB. 224pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

During 1991-95 James Schofield was the only Australian journalist based in Africa to report regularly on the major crises in Somalia, Rwanda, Goma and Zaire. In this book Schofield records his personal experience of the trauma and horror of events in modern Africa: famine and clan conflict in Somalia; genocide in Rwanda; cholera in Zaire; and civil war in the Sudan.

Biographies of the Australian generation lost in the Great War

 

Two copies, both in excellent condition. PB. 608pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing numbers of losses - on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return. 

That there must have been extraordinary individuals among them has been implicitly understood, but these special Australians are unknown today. This book seeks to retrieve their stories and to fill the gaps in our collective memory. 

Farewell, Dear People contains ten extended biographies of young men who exemplified Australia's gifted lost generation of World War I. Among them are accounts of an internationally acclaimed medical researcher; a military officer described by his brigadier as potentially an Australian Kitchener; a rugby international who became an esteemed administrator and a rising Labor star; an engineer who excelled on Mawson's Antarctic mission; a visionary vigneron and community leader who was renowned for successful winemaking at an unusually young age' a Western Australian Rhodes scholar assured of a shining future in the law and/or politics; a Tasmanian footballer who dazzled at the highest level; and a budding architect from Melbourne's best-known creative dynasty who combined an endearing personality with his family's flair for writing and drawing. This magisterial book tells their stories for the first time. In doing so, it enriches the story of Australia immeasurably. 

'Farewell, Dear People is a powerful revelation of the lasting cost of the Great War - a deeply felt engagement with lost lives, and a superb union of research and writing.' Peter Stanley, author of Men of Mont St Quentin

About the author

Ross McMullin is a historian and biographer whose main interests are Australian history, politics and sport. He has researched and written extensively about the impact on Australia of its involvement in World War I. His books include the ALP centenary history The Light on the Hill- The Australian Labor Party 1891 - 1991, the award-winning biography Pompey Elliott, and So Monstrous a Travesty- Chris Watson and the World's First National Labour Government. He has also contributed chapters to many other books.

India's unruly politics

 

Mint condition. PB. 448pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

10 years ago, India was an emerging world power being courted by the world's most powerful political and business leaders, an upbeat story of unparalleled economic growth. Since then, it has failed to account for the human capital at the heart of its effort to modernize: more than one billion people clamoring for what has become known as the “Indian Dream”-an education, a career, and an opportunity to pull one's family out of poverty and into prosperity. Today, India is suffering an immense crisis of confidence-crippling political corruption, politicians mired in the status quo, economic inequality, brutal violence against women, and rampant social injustice.

Hilarious travel anecdotes from a former Australian politician

 

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

A funny and charming account of life after politics by the retired Labor senator.

Button writes hilariously about everything under the sun, from Christmas shopping to minding the dog, from the rights of smokers to the joys of jogging-and muses on the republican debate, political correctness and parliamentary language. He globetrots to Hong Kong, Hanoi, New York and Ballarat, casting a keen eye over the locals wherever he goes.

Stories from Australia's top authors

 

Good condition. PB. 346pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

How blokes deal with grief

 

Very good condition. PB. 224pp. $18 postage anywhere in Australia.

Explores men's reactions to the death of a loved one, and offers suggestions for enhancing the healing process.

"Men and Grief" is an insightful and thought-provoking look at the problems men face as they experience the emotionally painful times of their lives.

A book about Bogans

 

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

Based on the popular website, Things Bogans Like is a revolutionary manifesto that lifts the lid on the secret sect of 'the bogan'. You don't have to come from QLD, WA or South Australia to understand this book.

The word bogan has a bad rap; first impressions are still associated with flannelette, VB, utes and mullets. But this would be wrong. The bogan has advanced and needs new explanation, evolution has cursed (or blessed, depending on your thinking) us with a modern version. The bogan with money. The bogan with aspirations. The bogan with Ed Hardy T-shirts. The new bogan will not rest until it owns a plasma TV so large that Rove McManus becomes six feet tall for the first time.

Today s bogan defies income, class, race, creed, gender, religion and logic. Now the bogan is defined by what it does, what it says and, most importantly, what it buys. Those who choose to deny the bogan on the basis of their North Shore home, their stockbroking career or their massive trust fund choose not to see the real bogan. Many bogans are affluent and perhaps are working in that same stockbroking firm and sharing a Corona with you over Friday night drinks. They set themselves apart by their efforts to stand out by conforming as furiously, and conspicuously, as possible.

The authors, six self-confessed snobs, have drawn on their friends, family, neighbours, workmates and that guy who always jumps the queue at the bar, to show the evolution of the much-loved Australian bogan, their modern desires, and how we can either join them or mock them.

This will be a groundbreaking sociological publication and, far more importantly, the perfect Christmas gift for anyone who has ever bought a Buddhist-themed water feature, Ed Hardy T-shirt or watched Today Tonight.

A book about the collective guilt of a nation

 

Excellent condition. PB. 156pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The six essays that make up this compelling book view the long shadow of past guilt both as a uniquely German experience and as a global one. 

Bernhard Schlink explores the phenomenon of guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. 

He considers how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behavior, how to reconcile a guilt-laden past, how the role of law functions in this process, and how the theme of guilt influences his own fiction. 

Based on the Weidenfeld Lectures he delivered at Oxford University, Guilt About the Past is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how events of the past can affect a nation's future. 

Written in Bernhard Schlink's eloquent but accessible style, it taps in to worldwide interest in the aftermath of war and how to forgive and reconcile the various legacies of the past.

A memoir of the famed city of Egypt

 

Excellent condition. PB. 276pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Victoria Thompson fuses history, mythology and autobiography to create a marvellous portrait of an unforgettable city and one of its rebellious daughters.

The scandals of a Tory businessman

 

Excellent condition. PB. 436pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This title tells the tale of how the wannabe aristo Conrad Black and his ambitious wife Barbara made their way into the City, the Tory party, Wall Street and High Society. This is an entertaining account of gullibility in high places.

Good health for blokes

 

Excellent condition. PB. 372pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This informed and sympathetic guide to men's health is a book that every man should own. It provides detailed information for on-site maintenance of the average four- to six-cylinder adult male- in bed, in the bathroom, at the table, at the doctor, in marriage, in crisis, in mid-life and after.

Learn Hindi the easy way

 

Ex-library. Mint condition. CD included. PB. 288pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Hindi for Beginners is a Hindi self-study guide and language learning package aimed at helping students learn Hindi in a natural manner.

It engages them to actively use the Hindi language in the real life situations. An accompanying audio CD with clearly annunciated dialogues spoken by native Hindi speakers ensures correct pronunciation and builds listening comprehension. Clear task-based instructions, concise and to the point explanation of grammatical structures and lesson plans help enhance student's understanding and speed up their ability to learn Hindi.

Geared towards all learning styles, the subject matter is organized around day today conversations such as:

• Self- introduction
• Pleasantries
• Describing home
• Hiring transportation
• Hotel booking
• Reporting a theft
• Shopping
• And many more

Hindi for Beginners can be used for instruction purposes in a classroom setting or to maintain individual linguistic capabilities such as reading, listening, speaking and writing through wide array of activities. This book also includes the Romanization of vocabulary and dialogues as they are pronounced, to help learners pronounce them correctly and clearly in the absence of a Hindi speaker or a teacher, without any difficulty.

SOLD From the author who brought you Rumpole of the Bailey ...

 

SOLD

Excellent condition. PB. 372pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The creator of the irrepressible barrister-sleuth, Rumpole of the Old Bailey, presents a superb collection of classic tales of mystery and suspense. With stories by such authors as P.D. James and Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe and John Mortimer himself, this anthology explores new dimensions in crime writing.

Hilarious and wise short stories from the Middle East

 

Mint condition. PB. 208pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Classic warped and wonderful stories from a genius (The New York Times) and master storyteller.

Brief, intense, painfully funny, and shockingly honest, Etgar Keret's stories are snapshots that illuminate with intelligence and wit the hidden truths of life. As with the best writers of fiction, hilarity and anguish are the twin pillars of his work. Keret covers a remarkable emotional and narrative terrain - from a father's first lesson to his boy to a standoff between soldiers caught up in the Middle East conflict to a slice of life where nothing much happens.

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.

Memoirs of a fat bastard

 

Mint condition. PB. 281pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Chris Gibson, is one fat, drunk, angry bastard.

He's tried every diet: Atkins, South Beach, Pritikin... Problem is he still can't get his pants on in the morning. And he got none of the genes of his movie star brother Mel. In his early 40s with a job he hates and a lifestyle that is killing him, Chris is having more than a mid-life crisis. He's having a life and death crisis..

Memoirs of a Fat Bastard is a bittersweet account of how a middle-aged man on the road to destruction turned his life and health around on his own terms. It's a telling and frequently hilarious story of the ways in which some men can lose their way, and the way back to finding meaning and happiness amid the competing pressures of being provider, family man, and all-round good Aussie bloke.

SOLD Niki Savva's political memoir

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 305pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

From one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery comes a rare account of life as a political insider.

Born in a small village in Cyprus, Niki Savva spent her childhood in Melbourne's working-class suburbs ­— frontiers where locals were suspicious of olive oil, and Greek kids spoke Gringlish to their parents.

Only a few decades later, despite all the challenges of being a migrant woman in Australia, Savva had risen through the ranks of political journalism at The Australian, and had gone on to head the Canberra bureaus of both the Melbourne Herald Sun and The Age.

Then in 1997, family tragedy struck, and she was forced to reassess her career. In spite of her own Labor convictions, she became Liberal treasurer Peter Costello's press secretary, a role that she kept for six years before moving on to join John Howard's staff.

This is one of the few books about Australian political life written by an insider with decades of exposure to its major players. Hilarious, moving, and endlessly fascinating, Savva's is a story that moves between countries, cultures, careers and, ultimately, political convictions.

Japan - history in a nutshell

 

Mint condition. HB. 208pp. $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.

SOLD Dumbing down Australian democracy

 

SOLD

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

'After spending much of my life dedicated to the serious craft of politics, I have to admit that I am distressed by what it is becoming. Under siege from commercial pressures and technological innovation, the media are retreating into an entertainment frame that has little tolerance for complex social and economic issues. In turn, politicians and parties are adapting their behaviour to suit the new rules of the game -- to such an extent that the contest of ideas is being supplanted by the contest for laughs.'

'The two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics are: (1) Look like you're doing something; and (2) Don't offend anyone who matters. These imperatives are a direct consequence of the interaction between media coverage and political activity -- the aggregated outcome of countless individuals acting rationally in pursuit of their own interests. The sideshow syndrome, the overall result of these actions, is a direct threat to the nation's well-being.'

When Lindsay Tanner resigned in 2010 as the ALP's federal minister for finance and member for Melbourne, having had an 18-year career as an MP, he notably managed to retire with his reputation for integrity intact. In Sideshow, he lays bare the relentless decline of political reporting and political behaviour that occurred during his career. Part memoir, part analysis, and part critique, Sideshow is a unique book that tackles the rot which has set in at the heart of Australian public life.

Opus Dei

 

Mint condition. PB. 416pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Opus Dei is one of the most talked about but least known religious organizations of our time. For years no one has been allowed access to its secrets. Until now . . .

Here, Vatican insider John Allen uncovers its true nature. Granted unlimited access to those within its ranks, gaining a wealth of interviews with the heads of Opus Dei around the world, Allen finally separates the myths from the facts: the actual use of whips and the cilice; the true extent of Opus Dei's funds; the identities of its influential members in politics, banking and high office; and how much power this shadowy group really has.