Outstanding Australians on Hard Lessons Learned at School
edited by Fiona Scott-Norman
One of the most difficult things about being bullied is
the feeling that nobody else knows what it’s like.
Twenty-two of Australia’s most talented and successful people know exactly what it’s like.
In candid and entertaining interviews, leading lights
from across Australian life recount how they were bullied and shunned at school just for being different. Not only did they survive the ordeal but their experiences
helped shape them into the remarkable individuals they are today.
Contributors include:
Missy Higgins (musician), Hazem El Masri (NRL),Christos Tsiolkas (writer), Tiffiny Hall (TV), Alice Pung (writer), Sam Bramham (paralympian), Stella Young (disability advocate), Eddie Perfect (actor),Megan Washington (musician), Brendan Cowell(actor), Marieke Hardy (writer), Adam Goodes (AFL),Adam Boland (TV), Bindi Cole (artist), Charlie Pickering (TV), Kate Miller-Heidke (musician), Tim Ferguson (comedian), Penny Wong (politician),Benjamin Law (writer), Judith Lucy (comedian), Paul Capsis (musician) and Wendy Harmer (TV).
About the author
Fiona Scott-Norman is a Melbourne-based comedian, writer and broadcaster. She writes for The Big Issue and is a regular on ABC Radio.
South Australia, 1875: Twelve-year-old Taj and his camel Mustara are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. They are joining explorer Ernest Giles on his second attempt to cross the Australian desert where wild dogs, scorpions, poisonous snakes and a constant shortage of water mean they are never far from disaster.
As if things weren’t tough enough, Taj, raised in the ways of the Afghan people, is struggling to find his place in this new and exciting land.
About the author
Rosanne Hawke is a South Australian author of over thirty books. She lived in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates as an aid worker for ten years. Her books include Kelsey and the Quest of the Porcelain Doll, a CBCA Notable Book, and Taj and the Great Camel Trek, winner of the 2012 Adelaide Festival Awards for Children’s Literature and shortlisted for the 2012 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She is the 2015 recipient of the Nance Donkin Award; an Asialink, Carclew, Varuna and May Gibbs Fellow; and a Bard of Cornwall. She has taught creative writing at Tabor Adelaide and writes in an old Cornish farmhouse with underground rooms, near Kapunda.
From the first publisher granted access to Stalin's personal archive, a provocative and insightful portrait of modern Russia—the most compelling since David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb.
To most Americans, Russia remains as enigmatic today as it was during the Iron Curtain era. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country had an opportunity to face its tortured past. In Inside the Stalin Archives, Jonathan Brent asks, why didn't this happen? Why are the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion sold openly in the lobby of the State Duma? Why are archivists under surveillance and phones still tapped? Why does Stalin, a man responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people, remain popular enough to appear on boxes of chocolate sold in Moscow's airport?
Reversing his parents’ immigrant path, a young writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new.
Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, “We’re all trying to go that way,” pointing to the rear. “You, you’re going this way?”
Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors amid an unlikely economic boom. Yet he was interested less in the gold rush than in the cultural upheaval – what would happen when old traditions met new ambitions?
In India Calling, Giridharadas blends the objectivity of the outsider with the intimacy of the insider; the result is India seen at once from within and without. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself.
About the author
Anand Giridharadas is a columnist for the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune. A native of Cleveland, he worked in Bombay as a management consultant before joining the Times in 2005 as its first Bombay-based correspondent in the modern era. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the book that created the field of economics, is transformed into a page-turner of global significance by America's sharpest political commentator.
