Non Fiction
Empire of Things: How we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first by Frank Trentmann
If there is a single event that marks the maturity of a new field of study, it may well be the appearance of a sprawling monograph from a trade publisher ...
... (read more)ADHD Nation: The disorder. The drugs. The inside story by Alan Schwarz
The spectrum of opinion on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD in the acronym-crazed world of psychiatry – runs from the firiest red to the deepest purple ...
... (read more)Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils by Roger Neill
Finding the right teacher is always a challenge for young singers, and the relationship between student and teacher can see the formation of a lifelong bond. By the same ...
... (read more)Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glenormiston, 1839–1880 by Maggie Black
At the launch of Up Came a Squatter, Geoffrey Blainey reflected on how important the wool industry was to Australia for more than a hundred years ...
... (read more)From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories by Mark McKenna
There is a well-meaning musician who performs intermittently in Central Australia. When he plays his hit song, he tries to augment the lyrics by chanting the ...
... (read more)Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann by Frederic Spotts
In ‘The Art of Biography’, Virginia Woolf insists that this ‘is the most restricted of all the arts’ and that even if many biographies are written, few survive. But somehow ...
... (read more)A Single Tree: Voices from the bush by Don Watson
In The Bush (2014), Don Watson explored notions of what that most variegated of terms, ‘the bush’, meant to earlier generations, including his own family. In ...
... (read more)Three years ago, Australia was supposedly being overrun by asylum seekers arriving by boat. The situation was considered grave and dominated public debate and the ...
... (read more)Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar by Greg De Moore and Ann Westmore
Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not ...
... (read more)Bob Ellis: In his own words by Bob Ellis, compiled by Anne Brooksbank
In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation ...
... (read more)