Love Clancy: A Dog's Letters Home, Edited and Debated by Richard Glover by Richard Glover

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

Heartfelt and hilarious, this is a book for anyone who has tried to imagine what their dog was thinking. Human beings often write about their dogs, but the dogs don't usually get a right of reply.  In Love, Clancy, Richard Glover has collated the letters sent by Clancy to his parents in the bush. They a re full of a young dog's musings about the oddities of human behaviour, life in the big city, and his own attempts to fit in. You'll meet Clancy as a puppy, making his first attempt to train his humans, then see him grow into a mature activist, demanding more attention be paid to a dog's view of the world. Along the way, there are adventures aplenty, involving robotic vacuum cleaners, songs about cheese, trips to the country and stolen legs of ham - all told with a dog's deep wisdom when it comes to what's important in life. With delightful illustrations by cartoonist Cathy Wilcox. PRAISE FOR RICHARD GLOVER The Land Before Avocado 'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay 'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review Flesh Wounds 'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times 'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The Australian ...Show more

My Salinger Year by Joanna Smith Rakoff

$19.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in the plush, wood-panelled agency, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reig n and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches, and at night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Brooklyn apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities and struggling to trust her own artistic sense, Joanna is given the task of answering Salinger's voluminous fan mail. But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agency's decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger's devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back...Poignant, keenly observed and irresistibly funny, My Salinger Year is a memoir about literary New York in the late 1990s, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself swept into one of the last great stories and entangled with one of the last great figures of the century. Above all, it is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer and a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives. ...Show more

Greenlights (PB) by Matthew McConaughey

$32.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

From the Academy Award-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction. 'I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clue s to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call 'catching greenlights.' So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It's a love letter. To life. It's also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.'         ...Show more

Sunshine - The Diary of a Lap Dancer by Samantha C. Ross

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

There are a lot of Ambers in the stripping world. And Aprils and Summers, and Skys and Rains. There are quite a few gems: Sapphires, Diamonds, Rubies and even an Amethyst. And exotic creatures: Tigers, Cheetahs, Phoenixes and Kitties. Plenty of weather conditions, like Misty, Stormy and Cloudy. There ar e, of course, a selection of fruits: Cherry, Berry, Peaches and Apple. And confectionery to go with it, like Candy, Lolly and Caramel. And then there are the generic hot-girl/sexy names: Lolita, Tiffany, Chanel, Lulu, Sasha and Brigitte. Meet Sunshine. That's her stage name. Follow her downstairs into the shadowy underworld of the so-called Gentlemen's Clubs, where men hide in dark corners and pay gorgeous women like Sunshine to take their clothes off. Follow her to the private rooms where the lap dances happen, the hustle plays out and the real money flows. Sit with her in the back room with the other dancers, her friends and colleagues, who laugh and cry and rake in the dollars and party as though a zombie apocalypse is on the horizon. Sunshine tells us in her own brutally honest and audacious words what it's like to work as a stripper, both in Australia and overseas. Confessional, confronting, revealing, wildly entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny, Sunshine: The diary of a lap dancer will take you into a world that some of us can only imagine and that others know all too well. But only the dancers know what really goes on - and this book shows you their world stripped bare. ...Show more

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

$24.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography | Reading Level: very good

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Am ericans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country. ...Show more

Lowitja: The Authorised Biography of Lowitja O'Donoghue by Stuart Rintoul; Lowitja O'Donoghue

$39.99 AUD

$45.00 (11% off)

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

The profoundly moving biography of a truly great Australian who, against the greatest of odds, became one of Australia's most respected and recognisable Indigenous leaders. 'I am sometimes identified as one of the "success stories" of the policies of removal of Aboriginal children. But for much of my ch ildhood I was deeply unhappy. I feel I had been deprived of love and the ability to love in return. Like Lily, my mother, I felt totally powerless. And I think this is where the seeds of my commitment to human rights and social justice were sown.' - Lowitja O'Donoghue Lowitja O'Donoghue is a truly great Australian. She is arguably our nation's most recognised Indigenous woman. A powerful and unrelenting advocate for her people, an inspiration for many, a former Australian of the Year, she sat opposite Prime Minister Paul Keating in the first negotiations between an Australian government and Aboriginal people and changed the course of the nation. But when Lowitja was born in 1932 to an Aboriginal mother and a white father in the harsh and uncompromising landscape of Central Australia the expectations for her life could not have been more different. At the age of two, she was handed over to the missionaries of the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children and cut off completely from her people and her culture. She would not see her mother again for another thirty years and would have no memory of her father. In 2001 a bitter controversy arose over whether Lowitja was 'stolen' as a child. In search of a past she did not remember, Lowitja went back to Central Australia accompanied by journalist Stuart Rintoul. This ground-breaking and long-awaited biography completes that journey into Lowitja's life and the challenging history of her times. It is a remarkable work about an extraordinary woman. 'A remarkable Australian leader. A leader whose unfailing instinct for enlargement marks her out as unique.' - Paul Keating 'If there is one woman that you would identify as being someone that inspires you, that terrifies you, that is a symbol of possibility, it would be Lowitja. The dignity, I think, is the thing that you remember the most.' - Linda Burney, first Aboriginal woman to be elected to the House of Representatives 'The greatest Aboriginal leader of the modern era . . . the rock who steadied us in the storm. Resolute, scolding, warm and generous, courageous, steely, gracious and fair. She held the hardest leadership brief in the nation and performed it bravely and with distinction.' - Noel Pearson 'She changed the course of Australian history. She literally seized the day.' - Robert Tickner, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 1990-96 ...Show more

Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood by Christa Parravani

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

A harrowing account of one woman's reckoning with life, death and choice. For readers of Educated, Hillbilly Elegy and Three Women.

Christmas Tales by William McInnes

$32.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

 'Tis the season to be jolly! One of Australia's favourite storytellers is back with a collection of stories about everyone's favourite family holiday. I can't help it if I'm a boring conservative dag, but I love Christmas, always have and hopefully always will. Whatever brand of faith you fly under, ev en if you proclaim you don't have one, Christmas is a time of generosity, good citizenship and decency. It's the holiday where shopping centres become a sea of dazed shoppers bearing checklists as long as your arm, lunch is a neverending buffet of prawns and ham and your electricity bill is doubly struck by having to run the fan all day and keep those decorative lights blinking through the night. William McInnes, bestselling author of FATHERHOOD, WORSE THINGS HAPPEN AT SEA, and A MAN'S GOT TO HAVE A HOBBY tackles the silly season in a way only he can - telling stories brimming with good humour and nostalgia, to remind us what Christmas is all about: family.   ...Show more

Max by Alex Miller

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity. 'This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception…As readers of Alex Mill er, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a great heart and a penetrating sensibility, and in the thrall of one of our nation's most beloved writers.' Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, ANU 'Max tells of Alex Miller's search - in turns fearful and elated - for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree. You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity. Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked.  'A wonderful book. It is a story that needs to be heard.' Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University ...Show more

Soar: A Life Freed by Dance (HB) by David McAllister with Amanda Dunn

$34.99 AUD

$39.99 (12% off)

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

   From the backblocks of Perth to international stardom, this is a story of courage to fight against the odds for your passion and succeed. David McAllister has always belonged onstage. As the middle child in a Catholic family who knew nothing about dance, he watched himself twirl in the reflective gl ass of the TV and dreamed about becoming the next Rudolf Nureyev. As a little boy taking ballet lessons, he was mercilessly bullied. As a young man joining the ranks of The Australian Ballet, he worried that he would never play the prince because he lacked the height and lean limbs of a classical dancer. Every time he heard 'no', he simply did what he loved - danced.Sure enough, curtains rose for the unlikely prince: he represented Australia on the world stage; he became a principal dancer and performed his dream roles; he fell in love, onstage and off; and he enjoyed a twenty-year tenure as artistic director of The Australian Ballet, transforming it into one of the top flagship dance companies in the world. Fifty years since he stepped into his first ballet class, McAllister reflects on his dance journey, his relationships, embracing his sexuality, and the combination of talent, timing and sheer perseverance that gave rise to his transformative career.Includes 16 pages of colour photos from McAllister's life and career. ...Show more

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

$19.99 AUD

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography

THE NEW YORK TIMESNUMBER ONE BESTSELLERTHESUNDAY TIMESNUMBER ONE BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2017 'Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option...Unmissable' New York TimesAt the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade?s training as a neur osurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi?s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father.What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away? Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Airis a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. ...Show more

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

$54.99 AUD

$65.00 (15% off)

Category: Biography, Memoir & Autobiography | Reading Level: near fine

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of th e first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorises Operation Neptune Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective — the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organiser tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of hope and change and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.       ...Show more