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

Troy by Stephen Fry

$29.99 AUD

$35.00 (14% off)

Category: History | Series: Stephen Fry's Greek Myths | Reading Level: near fine

Following Top Ten bestsellers Mythos and Heroes, this third volume retells the epic tale of Troy The story of Troy speaks to all of us - the kidnapping of Helen, a queen celebrated for her beauty, sees the Greeks launch a thousand ships against the city of Troy, to which they will lay siege for ten whol e years. It is a terrible war with casualties on all sides as well as strained relations between allies, whose consequences become tragedies. In Troy you will find heroism and hatred, love and loss, revenge and regret, desire and despair. It is these human passions, written bloodily in the sands of a distant shore, that still speak to us today. ...Show more

Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us by Paddy Manning

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

'Our house is on fire,' 16-year-old Swedish school strike activist Greta Thunberg told world leaders in 2019. Across an angry year of weather, Australians watched it in real-time: record heatwaves and worsening drought, unprecedented fish kills in the Murray-Darling Basin and devastating wildfires acros s Queensland and NSW - this is climate change, a terrifying portent for the most arid continent on earth. But most shocking of all is the untold human toll - escalating human deaths in Australia and beyond. The climate crisis is now a health emergency, with extreme weather events, disease, mental illness and infrastructure collapse killing what the WHO predicts will be millions around the world over the next decade. Shocking and undeniable, Manning reveals what climate change really looks like, telling the moving stories of victims, their families and doctors - putting names and faces to the people who have already paid the ultimate price for inaction on the biggest moral challenge of our century. ...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

North Creek to Lennox Head

$10.00 AUD

Category: australian history

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

Let Love Rule by Lenny Kravitz

$32.99 AUD

Category: Music Biography

"I see my story as a suite of songs that have a magical connection. I never understood that connection until I sat down to write. It was then that the magic started to flow." Let Love Rule is a work of deep reflection. Lenny Kravitz looks back at his life with candor, self-scrutiny, and humor.   "My lif e is all about opposites," he writes. "Black and white. Jewish and Christian. The Jackson 5 and Led Zeppelin. I accepted my Gemini soul. I owned it. I adored it. Yins and yangs mingled in various parts of my heart and mind, giving me balance and fueling my curiosity and comfort."   Let Love Rule covers a vast canvas stretching from Manhattan's Upper East Side, Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, Los Angeles's Baldwin Hills, Beverly Hills, and finally to France, England and Germany.   It's the story of a wildly creative kid who, despite tough struggles at school and extreme tension at home, finds salvation in music.   We see him grow as a musician and ultimately a master songwriter, producer, and performer. We also see Lenny's spiritual growth--and the powerful way in which spirit informs his music.   The cast of characters surrounding Lenny is extraordinary: his father, Sy, a high-powered news executive; his mother, Roxie Roker, a television star; and Lisa Bonet, the young actress who becomes his muse.   The central character, of course, is Lenny, who, despite his great aspirational energy, turns down record deal after record deal until he finds his true voice.   The creation of that voice, the same voice that is able to declare "Let Love Rule" to an international audience, is the very heart of this story.   "Whether recording, performing, or writing a book," says Lenny, "my art is about listening to the inspiration inside and then sharing it with people. Art must bring the world closer together."    ...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

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

Quarterly Essay 80: The High Road: What Australia Can Learn From New Zealand by Laura Tingle

$24.99 AUD

Category: Essays & Letters

In a tumultuous year, Australia and New Zealand have never been closer, as we move towards a shared travel zone. But why, despite being so close, do we seem to know so little about each other? And is there such a thing as national character? In this wise and illuminating essay, Laura Tingle looks at lea dership, economics, history and more. Competitiveness has marked our relationship from its earliest days. In the past half-century, both countries have been compelled to remake themselves amid shifting economic fortunes. New Zealand has been held up as a model for everything from tax reform to the way we conduct our politics. What have been the outcomes? How do they compare to ours? Tingle considers everything from Morrison and Ardern as national leaders to the different ways each country has dealt with its colonial legacy. What could we learn from New Zealand? And it from us? This is a perceptive, often amusing introduction to a country just like ours in some ways, but quite different in others.   ...Show more

Byron Bay: The History, Beauty and Spirit by Peter Duke

$59.95 AUD

Category: History

Byron Bay: The History, Beauty and Spirit is a beautiful hard cover coffee table book that offers a unique glimpse of Byron Bay and the surrounding region. It provides a visual feast and remarkable insight into the people and landscapes of the unique community that is Byron Bay. This stunning collection of 150 photographs, narratives, artwork and poetry chronicles the dynamic human history of the eastern most point on Australia's mainland. The contemporary design of this delightful book features the work of some of Byron Bay's most renowned photographers and story tellers including, Di Morrissey (Forward), Grace Knight, Bob McTavish and a host of other local identities. Educational, fun and laced with love, Byron Bay: The History, Beauty and Spirit also pays tribute to the exceptional people who have made Byron Bay such a special place. ...Show more