Readings.com.au: March 2008 Books

A Fraction of the Whole

Meet the Deans.

Heroes or criminals? Crackpots of visionaries? Relatives or enemies?

It's a simple family story...

From the New South Wales bush to bohemian Paris, from sports fields to strip clubs, from the jungles of Thailand to a leaky boat in the Pacific, A Fraction of the Whole follows the Deans on their freewheeling, scathingly funny and finally deepy moving quest to leave their mark on the world.

The Clothes On Their Backs

In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival ? both banal and heroic ? and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.

Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.

Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity

What's it like being a young woman today? Feminists won the equal rights war back in the 70s, and young women today have it so much easier than their mothers, right? Wrong, argues Emily Maguire.

Society today is most comfortable to categorise women as Princesses (in need of protection) or Pornstars (peoples whose major duty is to be attractive and turn on men). This sharp, funny and insightful book reveals how the treatment of young women as fragile or in need of male assistance can be as objectifying and damaging to women as pornography and raunchy culture.

Maguire wants us to see men and women for their character first, rather than their sex and gender attributes. If they wash dishes, have children or wear make-up it should be because they want to not because society expects them to. Equally they should not be judged if they choose to engage in casual sex, pursue a fulfilling career or decide not to have children.

A mix of personal story, reportage, analysis and polemic, written in a bold, intimate style, containing interviews with porn aficionados, young brides and 'homemakers' Princesses and Pornstars is a gripping and essential snapshot of where female sexuality is today.

The Sorrows Of An American

After their father's funeral, Erik and Inga Davidsen find a cryptic letter from a woman among his papers, dating from his adolescence in rural Minnesota during the Depression. Returning to his psychiatric practice in New York City, Erik sets about reading his father's memoir, hoping to discover the man he never fully knew. At the same time, another woman enters Erik's lonely, divorced life - a beautiful Jamaican who moves into his garden flat with her small daughter. As Erik gets drawn into the cat and mouse tactics of someone who appears to be stalking her, he finds out that his sister Inga is also being threatened, by a journalist in possession of a wounding secret from her past. A multi-layered novel that probes the mysteries of the heart and mind, The Sorrows of an American is breathtaking in its range, richly thought-provoking and profoundly affecting - a novel that resonates long beyond the last page.

I Peed On Fellini

I Peed On Fellini, the long-awaited memoir from legendary film critic David Stratton, is an honest, funny and thoroughly entertaining journey through a remarkable life in film.

Passionate since boyhood about the cinema, Stratton has reviewed thousands of movies, directed and adjudicated at international film festivals, and lectured in film history at the University of Sydney. His best-known role, however, has been as the co-host, with Margaret Pomeranz, of The Movie Show on SBS and, more recently, At the Movies on the ABC.

A recipient of both the Longford and Chauvel Awards for his contribution to the Australian film industry, Stratton's hallmarks are his incredible depth of cinematic knowledge, his passionate opposition to censorship and his lifelong commitment to quality film. In this outstanding memoir, he tells his story with candour and verve.

Consumed

Amelia wants to be the best cook in the world. But being the best cook is not just about preparing the perfect bean dish or cooking a steak so that it melts in your mouth, it's about struggle and learning. Amelia befriends Katarina, a strange, old Eastern European woman who teaches Amelia about tea, bread, bottled tomatoes and the art of cooking. Katarina's mysterious death unleashes a passion within Amelia and she discovers an age-old secret that unlocks the power and magic of famous cooks throughout history. In trying to invent a new recipe, Amelia discovers that her beloved Katarina was murdered and Amelia knows who did it. She begins to plan the tastiest recipe of her life, her recipe for revenge.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Socialist Crosses the Line

Gang Leader for a Day is a gripping journey of discovery about life on the wrong side of the tracks.

When naïve sociology student Sudhir Venakatesh went to find out more about urban poverty in Chicago , the last thing he expected was to be held hostage by a gang. And he never guessed that, after being released, he'd want to return to find out more about them, ignoring everyone's advice and entering a dangerous world beyond anything he'd ever experienced.

In the Robert Taylor Homes projects on Chicago 's South Side, Sudhir befriends J.T., a gang leader for the Black Kings . As their friendship grows, he slowly gains J.T.'s trust, until one day, in order to convince Sudhir of his own CEO-like qualities, J.T. makes him leader of the gang. Deciding who cleans up the buildings after a party gets out of hand is one thing, but what do you do when Billy says that Otis lied about how much crack he sold, and somebody needs to be punished? What's more, why does J.T. make his henchmen, the 'shorties', stay in school? When will T-Bone (in charge of gang security, takes his job very seriously) intervene in a mob lynching? Just who does C-Note have to pay if he wants to carry on washing cars? What is the difference between a 'regular' hustler and a 'hype' – and is Peanut telling him the truth about which she is? Why is Moochie sleeping with Ms Bailey, the all-powerful president of the building, thirty years his senior? And, when the FBI finally starts cracking down on the Black Kings, is it time to get out – or is it too late?

Incredibly funny, and heartbreaking, this is a story of one man's commitment really to cross the line, to understand how the people he is studying live day to day. What he doesn't expect is to become part of their lives.

Births Deaths Marriages

It wasn't until years later that I realized the obvious - the difference between us and the mythical normal family I was certain existed, was in fact the fiction. There is always so much more and it swims, shimmering beneath the surface, glittering with all the inherent contradictions of who we are, the changes that time brings and the very elusiveness of a life slipping through our fingers. BIRTHS DEATHS MARRIAGES is about life and how we really live it. These true tales move from visits to nudist communes, to losing your virginity; to going to couples' counseling and coping with death in the family. From a bohemian childhood in the seventies to becoming a mother and a writer, Georgia Blain explores a new land - true life in all its extraordinary richness - taking us deep into the heart of how we love, learn, fail, and try to learn again.

Holding Up The Sky: An African Life

This astonishing autobiographical work is the story of Australian woman Sandy Blackburn-Wright’s complex love affair with Africa and its people. Sandy lived in and worked in South Africa for 15 years. witnessing some of the most tumultuous and significant events in the history of the nation, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Through her community development work she met the man who was to become her husband, together seeking to contribute to the rebuilding and transformation of a post apartheid nation. Sandy tells her personal story with honesty, passion, intelligence and humour.

Desert Queen: The Many Lives And Loves Of Daisy Bates

In the 1890s, when most women were content to marry well and raise families, Daisy Bates, an Irish–born, former charity–case orphan, reinvented herself from governess to heiress to anthropologist. She would become one of the best known, and most controversial anthropologists in history, and one of the first people to put Aboriginal culture on the map with her study of language and kinship ties.

Born into tough circumstances, Daisy's widowed father was a drunk, her prospects dim. But through strength of will she became a teacher, copying the mannerisms of her privileged pupils – and when she migrated to Australia, she was able to pass herself off as an heiress who taught for fun. Marriage followed – first to the young Breaker Morant, then to two other husbands with whom she was guilty of bigamy. But her lack of convention went deeper than her private life; at a time when white Australia mostly turned its back on Aboriginal life, Daisy set out to live among West Australian tribes and document their culture.

While other biographies have presented Daisy Bates as a saint, historian Susanna de Vries gives readers a more complex portrait of the 'Queen of the Never Never' as a nuanced, fascinating figure ahead of her time.

Wartime Notebooks

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of post-war France. She owed her success to her obstinacy to be and remain herself, come what may and at whatever cost to her own person. This previously unpublished collection, retrieved from the papers she left at her death, offers a fascinating insight into Duras’ life and work. Her notebooks retrace the formative exeperiences in Duras’ life: her childhood in Indochina and, in wartime, her harrowing wait for her husband’s return from a concentration camp.

The Landscape Of Desire

Several months have passed since the legendary explorers Burke and Wills disappeared into the desert and their whereabouts remain a mystery. Now, a search party has assembled to rescue them. Meanwhile, two other men are wandering lost in the outback: one on the verge of reaching safety; the other, broken and trapped at the heart of the continent with an Aboriginal tribe as his only hope of survival. And back in the city an actress, star of the stage in Melbourne and Sydney, longs for the return of Burke and Wills for personal reasons that will only gradually become apparent.

Loosely based on the ill-fated Burke and Wills Expedition, The Landscape of Desire re-imagines the lives of the key players in this historic event, and weaves them into a narrative that spans continents and decades. Written in mesmerizing prose, The Landscape of Desire slowly yields up its own secrets.

With echoes of Heart of Darkness and The English Patient, it is a stunning debut novel of love and identity, desire and death, set in rapidly changing yet still unknown Australia.

Murder On The Apricot Coast

After the murder, suspense and corruption that plagued the beginning of their relationship in The Apricot Colonel, Cassandra and the colonel are relieved to be happily ensconced in newly wedded bliss. Not for long though: their domestic idyll is suddenly shattered by the news that a friend's daughter has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose. A death which our two detectives aren't convinced was an accident.

As they dig deeper, they uncover a manuscript that is an explosive expose of the local child prostitution scene. Our detectives don't have far to look for a motive for murder . . .

With characteristic panache and a magnificent wardrobe of women's clothes (his), Cassandra and her colonel set out to find a killer, immersing themselves in the seedy side of our nation's capital. Along the way they also learn a great deal more about each other, revealing new depths to this delightfully unconventional relationship.

Tamarisk Row

Gerald Murnane is widely recognised as one of our country’s most significant literary figures – but only one of his novels, The Plains, is available. Until now. For the first time in 20 years, his masterful first novel is back in print. Based on Murnane’s own early years, Tamarisk Row is an unsparing evocation of a Catholic childhood of the 1940s. Clement Killeaton transforms his father's obsession with gambling, his mother's piety, the cruelty of his fellow pupils and the mysterious but forbidden attractions of sex, into an imagined world centred on horse-racing, played in the dusty backyard of his home, across the landscapes of the district, and the continent of Australia.

The Comfort Of Figs

As a burgeoning city emerges from its landscape, so too does a bridge that will transform it from a sleepy country town. Three young men work on the construction of this iconic steel bridge. Labouring high above the river in dangerous conditions, close bonds develop between them. But one slip can – and does – alter their lives forever. A generation later, Robbie, a young landscaper, grapples with his difficult relationship with his father whose past is inextricably linked with the famous cantilevered bridge. Robbie is also battling to save his future with his girlfriend Freya, after a violent assault by a stranger sends her spiralling into herself.

The Solemn Lantern Maker

Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines that he sees an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it’s only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global ‘war on terror’. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange of breaths.

Shades Of The Sublime And Beautiful

The new collection by acclaimed local poet John Kinsella contemplates the aesthetic and the transcendent, examining both the natural and the artificial. From the soothing aesthetics of shape and form through to what constitutes 'ugliness' or 'terror', it challenges our preconceptions and often finds the beautiful in the ugly, the ugly in the beautiful, or calm in the tempest, and tempest in the more benign moments.

Age Of Shiva

India, 1955: as the scars of Paritition are just beginning to heal, in Ramjas College, Delhi, seventeen-year-old Meera is enraptured. In a spotlight, a handsome young man, Dev, is singing a song that is redolent with a longing, a hunger - that is thrillingly new to her. Beside her sits her older sister Roopa: the favourite, the beauty, her fairness tonight enhanced by clusters of gold at her ears, and a glossy streak of forbidden lipstick.

Later, jilted by Roopa, it is to Meera that Dev turns for comfort. Though their hasty marriage enrages herfather, who has always been ambitious for his daughters, Meera takes on her new role without a murmur, suppressing her bitter regret, obedient to her new in-laws, fasting according to the Hindu ritual and tolerating Dev's drunken night-time fumblings.

A move to Bombay, so Dev can chase his dream of success as a Bollywood singer, seems at first like a fresh new start, but as that dream - and their marriage - turns to ashes, he is more often to be found gazing into the bottom of a glass at Auntie's Place than in a recording studio. But when their son Ashvin is born, everything changes.

A sweeping epic that follows the fortunes of one family as it follows the fortunes of India in the violent aftermath of Partition, The Age of Shiva is the powerful story of a country in turmoil and an extraordinary portrait of maternal love.

The Cellist Of Sarajevo

Sarajevo: a city under siege. As the mortars fall and the snipers conduct their deadly chess manoeuvres, a cellist sits at his window. The piece he plays, Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, is all that restores his hope, at least for a time. On this day a bomb falls on the street below him, killing twenty-two people waiting in line to buy bread. For the next twenty-two days he will carry his cello into the cratered street at four each afternoon and play the Adagio in memory of the dead.

The Cellist of Sarajevo imagines those twenty-two days through the eyes of three of its citizens.

Kenan èimunović, who sets out every few days to fill containers with water for his family, with no idea whether he will return home.

Dragan Isović, who longs to be reunited with the wife and son he smuggled out of the city months earlier.

Arrow, a crack 'counter-sniper' too nimble and skilful to be killed by the besiegers in the hills, who is assigned the job of keeping the cellist alive.

Exquisite and profoundly moving, The Cellist of Sarajevo gives life to the suffering, cruelty, courage and endurance of a broken city. It is a story about survival in a time of war, about honouring the dead while struggling to stay alive, about the temptation to hate and the refusal to do so, about the power of music to shape our humanity.

A Partisan's Daughter

Set in North London during the Winter of Discontent, A Partisan's Daughter features the relationship between Chris, an unhappily-married, middle-aged Englishman and Roza, a young Serbian woman who has recently moved to London.While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures an invitation to return one day for a coffee.His visits become more frequent and Roza starts to tell him the story of her life, drawing him increasingly into her world - from her childhood as a daughter of one of Tito's partisans, through her journey to England and on to her more recent colourful and dangerous past in London.

*A Partisan's Daughter is about the power of storytelling. It is also a beautifully wrought and unlikely love story which is both compelling and moving to read. Here is another wonderful novel from the author of the bestselling Birds Without Wings and Captain Correlli's Mandolin.

The Australian Game Of Football

The Australian Game Of Football is a book to enjoy and share with all lovers of Australian history and sport. The birth of the game we know as Australian Rules took place through the middle months of 1858. Produced to mark the 150th anniversary of this event, The Australian Game Of Football will serve as a definitive resource, encapsulating not just the complete history of the game, but everything it means to play, support and nurture the world’s first codified game of football. The Australian Game of Football will provide a complete account of the game’s haphazard early years and bring to life the influential figures who not only had the vision for a game of our own, but the passion and commitment to drive its growth. The Australian Game of Football is a book to be picked up time and time again, and shared with family, friends and peers. Few sports in the world have the rich documented history as that of Australian Rules.

Now You See Him

In this suspenseful and beautifully written novel, the deaths of Rob and his girlfriend unleash a series of unexpected revelations in the lives of those around them, an unravelling that drives the narrative of Now You See Him.

At its centre is Rob's childhood best friend, Nick Framingham, whose ten-year marriage to his college sweetheart is faltering. Shocked by Rob's death, Nick begins to re-evaluate his own life and his past, and as he does so, a fault line opens up beneath him, leading him all the way to the novel's startling conclusion.

Eli Gottlieb is a revelation-a writer who combines a masterly command of storytelling with the sharpest and most piercing insight into contours of celebrity, the comfort and sadness of family life, and the unexpected things that can happen in any community.

Twenty Fragments Of A Ravenous Youth

So I was the 6787th person in Beijing wanting to act in the film and TV industry. There were 6786 young and beautiful, or ugly and old people before me trying to get a role. I felt the competition, but compared with 1.6 billion people in China, 6786 was only the population of my village. I felt an urge to conquer this new village.' Life as a film extra in Beijing might seem hard, but Fenfang - the spirited heroine of Xiaolu Guo's new novel - won't be defeated. She has travelled 1800 miles to seek her fortune in the city, and has no desire to return to the never-ending sweet potato fields back home. Determined to live a modern life, Fenfang works as a cleaner in the Young Pioneer's movie theatre, falls in love with unsuitable men and keeps her kitchen cupboard stocked with UFO instant noodles. As Fenfang might say, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn t it about time I got my lucky break?

The Postman: A Novel

Reissue of the 1985 novel, made it a hit film in 1994

Brick Lane

Monica Ali caused a worldwide literary sensation with her debut novel, Brick Lane, now a major film. Nineteen-year-old Nazneen exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London’s East End following her arranged marriage to a man twenty years older than her. She struggles to adjust to this new world, where poor people are fat and dogs go on diets – and to do her duty to her infuriating husband, a man of inflated ideas (and stomach). She submits to this unsatisfactory life, as she must, raising children and slapping down her demons of discontent, until Karim, a young radical, enters her life. Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they begin an affair that changes everything.

Day

In 1949 Alfred Day returns to the war he fought in as a young gunner. He returns as an extra in a movie about a German POW camp; to relive his own experiences as a prisoner of war but his perspicacity is dimming. Alfred is displaced without the war, the first thing he ever belonged to, he has lost his crew and the woman he loved. Day is an extraordinary portrait of a man among men whose limited and incoherent world has almost disintegrated.

Justine Douglas is from Readings Port Melbourne

Tree Of Smoke

This extraordinary Vietnam war novel is something like Apocalypse Now on paper – sometimes taut, sometimes rambling, often unhinged. The characters include novice CIA man Skip Sands; his Kurtz-like uncle; two brothers who serve their country then wander back home to Arizona, angry and bored; two Vietnamese soldiers, one from the north, one from the south; an intelligence officer named Storm; and a Canadian Seventh-Day Adventist aid worker. An astounding vision of human folly amidst the chaos of war; delivering gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God.

A Convergence Of Birds

Jonathan Safran Foer has long had a passion for the work of the twentieth-century American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Inspired by Cornell s avian-themed boxes, and suspecting that they would be similarly inspiring to others, Foer began to write letters.

The responses he received from luminaries of American writing were nothing short of astounding. Twenty writers generously contributed pieces of prose and poetry that are as eclectic as they are imaginative, and the result is a unique collaborative project and one of the most significant engagements of literature with art for many years.

The Natural Disorder Of Things

This is a literary thriller torn from grief and vengeance, a tale of an all-consuming erotic obsession and a mediation on fathers and the traces they leave on their children. Claudio Fratta is a garden designer and a naturally solitary man. He is obsessed with determination to exact vengeance on the loan shark who bankrupted his father and with the pursuit of an enigmatic, alluring woman who is one of his clients. Set in an Italian landscape in part unchanged, yet deeply marked by the twentieth century, The Natural Disorder of Things is peopled with an authentic cast of contemporary Italy, from wealthy dilettantes to ex-convicts.

October

Jim Hillyer is 74, a retired Canadian professor of Victorian literature. His eldest daughter, Susan, has just been diagnosed with cancer. Her mother died of the disease, and father and daughter both know too well what a diagnosis of "aggressive" means.

As he ponders his daughter's fate, and her suggestion that she might forego treatment, a chance encounter in a London street brings Jim face to face with the companion of a summer sixty years ago.

Gabriel Fontaine had wealthy parents, a glamorous mother, movie–star good looks – and legs paralysed by polio. It was wartime, and Jim had been packed off to his uncle's on the coast. And so the sulky 14 year old Jim and the sophisticated 16 year old Gabriel were thrown together for the summer.

Now exhausted by illness, Gabriel is delighted to renew the acquaintance, and makes a very unusual request: would Jim accompany him and his nurse to Switzerland?

As their journey unfolds, so too do Jim's memories of that summer so many years ago –– memories of the glamorous yet crippled boy and his stories, who won the heart of Odette – the same Odette Jim obsessively desired.

Entwining these two stories spanning past and present, cruelty and desire, Richard B. Wright weaves a memorable meditation on life and memory, love and death.

I Am America And So Can You

From Stephen Colbert, the host of television’s highest-rated punditry show The Colbert Report, comes the book I Am America (And So Can You!) which contains all of the opinions that Stephen doesn’t have time to shoehorn into his nightly broadcast.

Dictated directly into a microcassette recorder over a three-day weekend, this book contains Stephen’s most deeply held knee-jerk beliefs on The American Family, Race, Religion, Sex, Sports, and many more topics, conveniently arranged in chapter form.

Always controversial and outspoken, Stephen addresses why Hollywood is destroying America by inches, why evolution is a fraud, and why the elderly should be harnessed to millstones.

You may not agree with everything Stephen says, but at the very least, you’ll understand that your differing opinion is wrong.

I Am America (And So Can You!) showcases Stephen Colbert at his most eloquent and impassioned. He is an unrelenting fighter for the soul of America, and in this book he fights the good fight for the traditional values that have served America so well for so long.

The Brain That Changes Itself

An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age.

Psychiatrist and rersearcher Norman Doidge, M.D., travelled around the United States to meet the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity, and the people whose lives they’ve transformed — people whose mental limitations or brain damage were previously seen as unalterable, and whose conditions had long been dismissed as hopeless.

We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole; a woman labeled retarded who cured her deficits with brain exercises and now cures those of others; blind people who learn to see; learning disorders cured; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; stroke patients recovering their faculties; children with cerebral palsy learning to move more gracefully; entrenched depression and anxiety disappearing; and lifelong character traits changed.

Doidge takes us onto terrain that might seem fantastic. We learn that our thoughts can switch our genes on and off, altering our brain anatomy. We learn how people of average intelligence can, with brain exercises, improve their cognition and perception, develop muscle strength, or learn to play a musical instrument — simply by imagining doing so.

Using personal stories from the heart of this neuroplasticity revolution, Dr Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.

Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Dread of Death

Written in Irvin Yalom’s inimitable story-telling style, Staring at the Sun is a profoundly encouraging approach to the universal issue of mortality.

In this magisterial opus, capping a lifetime of work and personal experience, Dr Yalom helps us recognise that the fear of death is at the heart of much of our day-to-day anxiety. This reality is often brought to the surface by an ‘awakening experience’ — a dream, a loss (such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the loss of a job or home), illness, trauma, or ageing.

Once we confront our own mortality, Dr Yalom writes, we are inspired to rearrange our priorities, communicate more deeply with those we love, appreciate more keenly the beauty of life, and increase our willingness to take the risks necessary for personal fulfillment.

This is a book with tremendous utility, including the provision of techniques for dealing with the most prevalent kinds of fears of death — especially by living in the here and now, and by embracing what Dr Yalom calls ‘rippling’, the influence and impact we all have that has a life beyond our own.

Syrup

Scat is young, confused, underemployed, and in Los Angeles. So when he comes up with the idea for the hottest new cola ever, he’s sure he’ll retire as the next overnight sensation. But in the treacherous waters of corporate America there is no sure thing — and suddenly Scat has to save not only his idea but his yet-to-be-realised career. With the help of scarily beautiful and brainy 6 — who has all the angles Scat so desperately desires — he sets out on a mission to reclaim the fame and fortune that, time and again, elude him. This brilliant debut is a hilarious send-up of celebrity, sexual politics, and the lengths to which a young man will go to get ahead and get a date.