Readings.com.au: New Politics

The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine

The Big Short tells a story of spectacular, epic folly.

It has taken the world's greatest financial meltdown to bring Michael Lewis back to the subject that made him famous. His international bestseller Liar's Poker exposed the greed and carnage of the City and Wall Street in the 1980s; he wrote it as a cautionary tale, but people seem to have read it as a how-to guide. Now, he wants to settle accounts.

In this visceral tour to the heart of the financial system, Michael Lewis takes us around the globe and back decades to trace the origins of the current crisis. He meets the people who saw it coming, the people who were asleep at the wheel and the people who were actively driving us all of a cliff. How could we have all been so deluded for quite so long? Where did it all start? Was it systemic? Was it avoidable? And who the hell can we blame? Michael Lewis has the answers.

No one is better qualified to get to the heart of this labyrinthine story. And no one can make it such an enjoyable ride along the way.

Quarterly Essay 37: On The Future Of Conservatism: Where The Right Went Wrong

What did George W. Bush and John Howard do to conservatism? In their wake, the conservative parties in the US and Australia seem to have lost their way – they no longer have a vision of the future. Their neoconservative foreign policies and neoliberal economics have been discredited, and they are split on climate change and much else. How did the Right in Australia end up in this place? How might it renew itself?

In this groundbreaking essay, Waleed Aly begins by unravelling the terms Right and Left, arguing that they have become meaningless – they only foster a political conversation that becomes more about “teams” than ideas. He discusses neoliberal economics and its corrosive effect on the social fabric, and how, in response, Howard-style conservatism was all too ready to dictate social values, even to the point of prescribing who or what is Australian.

Aly discusses what a better conservatism might look like. He argues that the political issues of the day, such as climate change and the financial crisis, mean a reactionary brand of politics is unlikely to work because public opinion is swiftly leaving it behind. He draws on the work of conservative thinkers such as John Gray, Owen Harries and even P.J. O’Rourke to sketch the kind of conservatism that seems scarce in Australia, but which would be a welcome presence.

Correspondence

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE36 Australian Story by Mungo MacCallum. Correspondence relating to QE37 The Future of Conservatism will appear in the next issue.

Waleed Aly is a lecturer in politics at Monash University. He is a regular commentator for the Guardian, the Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, as well as ABC Melbourne radio and SBS’s Salam Café. His first book is People Like Us: How Arrogance Is Dividing Islam and the West (2007).

The Good Soldiers

It was the last-chance moment of the war.

In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. It became known as ‘the surge’. ‘Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences’, he told a sceptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.

Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed.

What is the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. He was with Battalion 2-16 in Baghdad almost every gruelling step of the way.

Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, Finkel has also produced an eternal tale — not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.

Stripping Bare The Body: Politics, Violence, War

Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter-century, as told by one of the world’s leading writers.

A newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, “Violence strips bare a society’s body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.” This stark truth came to haunt Danner, especially after the president was overthrown in a bloody coup d’état.

Stripping Bare the Body moves from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo, to suicide bombings in the suburbs of Baghdad, to torture in the secret “black site” prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to political deal-making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington and New York and Langley. Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a “grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.”

“There’s probably no one alive who understands political conflict and upheaval better than Mark Danner, and there is almost certainly no one who writes more eloquently about it. Stripping Bare the Body is an unmitigated masterpiece of reporting and analysis.” —Dave Eggers

"No other writer combines brilliant and courageous reporting with brilliant and courageous political and moral thinking as Danner does. He is also, first and last, a breathtakingly good writer." —Michael Pollan

"Mark Danner is leading journalism’s improbable renaissance. This book is must-reading for anyone who hopes to understand our era of peril and possibility." —Ron Suskind

"With this vivid and deeply disturbing book, Mark Danner affirms his standing as our pre-eminent guide to the world’s broken places." —Andrew J Bacevich

Trouble: Evolution Of A Radical, Selected Writings 1970-2010

In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally into silence with a pull-no-punches speech calling for women’s empowerment. Brave, impassioned and searingly funny, it set the tone for an unconventional life. A few years later she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer, fall in love and, as a Wall Street speechwriter, enjoy ringside seats at some of the strangest events of our times.

Trouble collects Jennings’ best short work from the last four decades. She writes incisively about manners and morals, politics and economics, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider, and looks back at Australia with an expatriate’s frankness.

Trouble is both a fragmented autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street’s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts – seismic and subtle, personal and political – that brought us to where we are now.

Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs

Malcolm Fraser is one of the most interesting and possibly most misunderstood of Australia's Prime Ministers. In this part memoir and part authorised biography, Fraser at the age of 79 years talks about his time in public life.

From the Vietnam War to the Dismissal and his years as Prime Minister, through to his concern in recent times for breaches in the Rule of Law and harsh treatment of refugees, Fraser emerges as an enduring liberal, constantly reinterpreting core values to meet the needs of changing times.

Written in collaboration with journalist Margaret Simons, Malcolm Fraser's political memoirs trace the story of a shy boy who was raised to be seen and not heard, yet grew to become one of the most persistent, insistent and controversial political voices of our times.

The book offers insight into Malcolm Fraser's substantial achievements. He was the first Australian politician to describe Australia's future as multicultural, and his federal government was the first to pass Aboriginal Land Rights and Freedom of Information legislation, also establishing the Human Rights Commission.

After his parliamentary career, Fraser continued to be an important player in public life, playing a key role in persuading the USA Congress to impose sanctions on South Africa as part of the battle against apartheid. He was also the founding chair of CARE Australia, one of our largest aid agencies.

Malcolm Fraser was born in May 1930 and entered federal parliament in 1955 after graduating from Oxford University. He served first as Minister for Army and later as Minister for Defence, and Education and Science.

He became Prime Minister on 11 November 1975 following the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government. He resigned from parliament following the March 1983 election defeat after nearly 28 years as the Member for Wannon.

From 1989, Fraser played a key role in bringing an end to apartheid in South Africa as co-chairman of the Commonwealth appointed Committee of Eminent Persons. He was founding Chairman of CARE Australia from 1987 to December 2001, and also served as President of CARE International. He remains at the forefront of political and social debate.

Margaret Simons is a freelance journalist and writer, and also a senior lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology. She has written numerous books and essays, including The Meeting of the Waters, about the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair, and The Content Makers: Understanding the Australian Media. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children.

Reporting Conflict: New Directions In Peace Journalism

Introducing a compelling new series that offers leading international thinking on conflict and peacebuilding.

Journalists control our access to news. By pitching stories from particular angles, the media decides the issues for public debate. In Reporting Conflict, one of two inaugural titles in the New Approaches to Peace and Conflict series, Jake Lynch and Johan Galtung challenge reporters to tell the real story of conflicts around the world.

The dominant kind of conflict reporting is what Lynch and Galtung call war journalism: conflicts are seen as good versus evil, and the score is kept with body counts. The media's handling of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq highlight the one-sided reporting that war journalism creates. Peace journalism uses a broader lens: why not report what caused the conflict, and how it might be resolved? Lynch and Galtung show how journalists could have reported the Korean War, the NATO bombing in Kosovo and the first Gulf War, sparking a more informed discussion of these important issues.

This provocative book is essential reading for everyone who wants the media to tell the whole truth about conflict.

Nothing But The Truth: Selected Dispatches

A wide-ranging and lasting collection of writing by one of the most outstanding and courageous reporters of our era.

Until her murder in October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya wrote for the Russian newspaper Novaya gazeta. She won international fame for her reporting on the Chechen wars and, more generally, on Russian state corruption. Nothing but the Truth is a defining collection of Anna Politkovskaya’s best writing for Novaya gazeta, published between 1999 and 2006.

Beginning with a brief introduction by the author about her pariah status, Nothing but the Truth demonstrates the great breadth of her reportage, from the Chechen wars to domestic Russian affairs, the Moscow theatre hostage-taking in which she became involved, the Beslan school siege, and pieces about politicians, oligarchs and ordinary citizens.

Requiem For A Species: Why We Resist The Truth About Climate Change

We know how dire the future looks. We know how little time we have left to act. Yet we continue to ignore the warnings ... One of Australia's sharpest thinkers explores the reasons why and offers his vison of our new future.

Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. But around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming.

This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, so that now it is too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures, and what we can do now.

Because we don't have to take this lying down.

'Requiem for a Species magnificently captures the idea that by and large, none of us want to believe that climate change is real. It explains our inability to seriously weigh the evidence of climate change, and to take appropriate action to ensure our own survival.' - Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia

'Clive Hamilton, as usual, has courageously challenged the current nature of our society in this inspirational new book.' - Graeme Pearman, former head of the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research

Whoops! The Story Of Recent Foolproof Ways To Lose Money

There's probably a word in German for that feeling you get when you can understand something while it's being explained to you, but lose hold of the explanation as soon as it stops. A lot of writing about the credit crunch has that effect: you can grasp it while it's going on, and then as soon as it's over, you can no longer remember the difference between a CDO, a CDS, an MBS, and a toasted cheese sandwich. Whoops! makes it possible for all of us to grasp how we found ourselves in this predicament.

What went wrong? In 2000, the total GDP of Earth was $36 trillion. At the start of 2007 it was $70 trillion. Today that growth has gone suddenly and sharply into decline, with an effect roughly resembling that of putting a car into reverse while doing seventy down a motorway.

John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

A Wall In Palestine

The West Bank Barrier is expected to be completed in 2010. Declared illegal by the United Nations International Court of Justice, this network of concrete walls, trenches, and barbed-wire fences could permanently redraw one of the most disputed property lines in the Middle East – the Green Line that separates Israel and the West Bank. To Israel the security fence is intended to keep Palestinian terrorists from entering its territory. But to Palestinians the apartheid wall that sliced through orchards and houses, and cuts off family members from one another, is a land grab.

In this comprehensive book, Backmann not only addresses the barrier's impact on ordinary citizens, but how it will shape the future of the Middle East. Though it promises security to an Israeli population weary of terrorism, it also is responsible for the widespread destruction of Palestinian homes and farmland; with its Byzantine checkpoint regulations, it has also severely crippled the Palestinian economy; and, most urgent, the barrier often deviates from the Green Line, appropriating thousands of acres of land, effectively redrawing the boundary between the West Bank and Israel.

Backmann interviews Israeli policy makers, politicians, and military personnel, as well as Palestinians living throughout the West Bank, telling the stories not only of the barrier's architects, but also of those who must reckon with it on a day-to-day basis on the ground. Author Information

Rene Backmann is an international affairs columnist at Le Nouvel Observateur foreign desk. In 1991 he was awarded the Prix Mumm, France's highest honour for journalism.

Them And Us

The suddenness and depth of the recession has raised questions about the workability of capitalism not seen since the 1930s. One of the constraints on recovery is the growing belief that if the old model did not work there is no new one on offer. This book sets out to provide one, arguing that reconstructing a bust financial system is not just a technical question. It cannot be done without a wholescale revision of the wider system and values on which it is based. And fairness must be placed at the heart of the new capitalism if our society is to recover its values. Will Hutton's new book musters brilliant, convincing arguments which will lend favour on both right and left. It is set to be a book which captures the mood of the moment in the same way that THE STATE WE'RE IN did.

The Great Depression Ahead: How To Prosper In The Crash That Follows The Greatest Boom In History

The first and last economic depression of your lifetime is happening right now.

Did you know our stock market and economy have peaked every 40 years due to generational spending trends: in 1929, 1968 and 2009? Did you know that oil and commodity prices have peaked every 30 years: in 1920, 1951, 1980 and 2010? The three massive bubbles of recent decades – stocks, real estate and commodities – have all peaked and are now deflating simultaneously.

Harry S. Dent has observed these trends for decades and developed techniques to predict their impact. In The Great Depression Ahead, he identifies the following:

* The economy appears to recover before stock prices start to crash again in late 2010 and flatten around mid-2012
* Gold and precious metals will appear to be a hedge at first, but will ultimately collapse after mid- to late 2010
* A first major stock rally between mid-2012 and mid-2017 will be followed by a final setback in late 2019 and early 2020
* The next global bull market will be from 2020–2023

Despite the dire news, there are real new-wealth opportunities ahead. Harry Dent offers practical advice to allow families, businesses, investors and individuals to manage their assets correctly and come out on top.

Your life is changing for reasons outside of your control. You can’t change the direction of the winds, but you can reset your sails!

‘The world’s leading demographic economist and author’—The Sunday Telegraph

Invictus: Nelson Mandela And The Game That Made A Nation

Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game that made a Nation by John Carlin is now a major film, starring Morgan Freeman (as Nelson Mandela) and Matt Damon.

'[A] revelatory examination of Nelson Mandela's political genius . . . [A] tight, gripping and powerful book that shines a light on a moment of hope, not just for one nation but the whole world' Daily Express

The Rugby World Cup final of 1995 was the last act of the most improbable exercise in mass seduction ever seen: Nelson Mandela's conquest of the hearts of white South Africa. Invictus is the thrilling story of how the most charismatic political statesman of our time deployed political genius, charm and generous vision to pull off this most unlikely of miracles.

'The train of events leading up to what has been called South Africa's epiphany has long been crying out for a multilayered account and it is to John Carlin's eternal credit that he has written it. This is not so much a sporting volume as a wonderfully crafted and beautifully written work of modern political history.' Matthew Syed, The Times

'This outstanding book is not so much about rugby as about the ability of Mandela to harness the symbolic power of sport. It shows us that sport gains its power not only from the achievements of its players, but also from the dreams of those who watch them.' Daily Telegraph 'Books of the Year'

First published as Playing The Enemy

Race Of A Lifetime: How Obama Won The White House

Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House is Published in the USA as Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.

The American presidential election of 2008 was as riveting a spectacle as modern politics has ever produced.

The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton - and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama's partner and America's face to the world. The mercurial, at times erratic, performance of John McCain. The mesmerizing and bewildering emergence of Sarah Palin.

In 2008, the battle for the White House became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told.

Race of a Lifetime pulls back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns.

How did Obama convince himself that, against enormous odds, he should be, and could be, the nation's first African-American president? How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape - and warp Hillary's supposedly unstoppable bid to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? What drove her husband's loss of composure and devastating political miscalculations? Why did McCain put the unknown, untested governor of Alaska on the Republican ticket? And was Palin merely as out of her depth as she appeared - or troubled in more unsettling ways?

Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story and packed full of exclusive revelations, Race of a Lifetime answers those questions and more. Vivid and novelistic, fast-paced and character driven, this is a tour de force: an intimate, often hilarious, sometimes shocking portrait of the quest for power.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

Al Gore offers a visionary blueprint of the changes that we should make as a world community in order to prevent the climate crisis from threatening human civilisation.

Al Gore has been a passionate advocate of action to halt climate change for many years. In his best-selling book, An Inconvenient Truth, he wrote about the urgent need to address the problems of climate change, presenting comprehensive facts and information on all aspects of global warming in a direct, thoughtful and compelling way, using explanatory diagrams and dramatic photos to clarify and highlight key issues.

Adopting the same lucid technique in Our Choice, he proposes solutions at every level of our lives, from the personal and local to the national and political to the area of international policy and law.

Quarterly Essay 36: Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country

In Australian Story, Mungo MacCallum investigates the political success of Kevin Rudd. What does he know about Australia that his opponents don’t? This is a characteristically barbed and perceptive look at the challenges facing the government and the country. MacCallum argues that the things we used to rely on are not there anymore. On the Right, the blind faith in markets has recently collapsed. The Left lost its guiding light with the demise of the socialist dream.

In entertaining fashion, MacCallum dissects the myths that made Australia: the idea of the Lucky Country, with endless pastures, a workingman’s paradise, a new Britannia, and more. In newly uncertain times, MacCallum argues, Rudd has sought to tap into these myths, in the process reclaiming them from John Howard.

Australian Story is both a canny assessment of the Rudd government’s election-winning approach and a broader meditation on the nation’s core traditions at a time of major change and challenge.

“Rudd has made it clear that he is looking forward to a long time in office … If the polls are to be believed, he is still seen as the best man for the job by an overwhelming majority of Australians. But why? What is it about this repetitive, boring, God-bothering nerd that appeals to the proverbially laid-back, cynical, disengaged public?” MUNGO MACCALLUM, AUSTRALIAN STORY

This special Christmas issue also includes Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay Lecture, Is Neo-Liberalism Finished?

Mungo MacCallum is one of Australia’s most influential political journalists. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has worked for most of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines and been a journalist and broadcaster for the ABC and SBS. His books include Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, How To Be a Megalomaniac and Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election.

What The Dog Saw

From criminology to dog training to ketchup, Malcolm Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising new ways of looking at the world. What the Dog Saw is Gladwell at his very best – asking questions and seeking answers in his inimitable style. Sophisticated, surprising and always entertaining.

The Value Of Nothing

Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. Yet despite its failures, the same market-driven ideas are being applied to everything from the food crisis to climate change. It’s time to ask one of the most fundamental questions a society can address: why do things cost what they do?

Radical and original, The Value of Nothing uses basic but forgotten economics and cutting-edge neuroscience to show how the price we pay for everything, from burgers to ballistic missiles, is systematically distorted and to explore some rich alternatives to market fundamentalism.

“With great lucidity and confidence in a dazzling array of fields, Patel reveals how we inflate the cost of things we can (and often should) live without, while assigning absolutely no value to the resources we all need to survive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness – argued with so much humour and humanity that the enormous tasks ahead feel both doable and desirable. This is Raj Patel’s great gift: he makes even the most radical ideas seem not only reasonable, but inevitable. A brilliant book.”—Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine

“Bracingly written and full of surprises, The Value of Nothing is itself invaluable, showing us a path out of the darkness of the economics woods.”—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Raj Patel was educated at Oxford, London School of Economics and Cornell. A former fellow at Yale and Berkeley, he is now at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, consulted for the UN, and protested against them all. His first book was Stuffed & Starved. www.rajpatel.org

Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

Here at last is the long awaited sequel to the international bestselling phenomenon, Freakonomics. Steven Levitt, the original rogue economist, and Stephen Dubner have been working hard, uncovering the hidden side of even more controversial subjects, from charity to terrorism and prostitution. And with their inimitable style and wit, they will take us on another even more gripping journey of discovery.

Four years in the making, SUPERFREAKONOMICS will once again transform the way we look at the world. It reveals, among other things, why you are more likely to be killed walking drunk than driving drunk; how a prostitute is more likely to sleep with a policeman than be arrested by one; why terrorists might be easier to track down than you would imagine; how a sex change ould boost your salary; and how there really is a cheap fix for climate change.

The freakuel is even bolder, funnier and more surprising than its predecessor. With their unflinching analysis Levitt and Dubner overturn received wisdom: looking more deeply, asking more questions and, above all, thinking a little differently. Because sometimes the most superfreaky solution is the simplest.

The 700 Habits Of Highly Ineffective Parents

Following the success of his first book 'The 700 Habits of Highly Ineffective People', Jonathan Biggins explores the world of the ineffective parent, that dismal figure traditionally held responsible for all the sins, problems, hang-ups and disappointments of their ungrateful progeny. Yes, it is Mums and Dads who created history's long line of miscreants, from Caligula to Pol Pot, from Attila the Hun to Naomi Campbell. Who created those depressed lumps trapped in dead-end suburban lives, spending thousands on therapy, ambition thwarted? The ineffective parent.

Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents For The Holidays

""Scroogenomics" is a very well-written and entertaining read, and offers an extremely comprehensive overview of the economics of Christmas spending and gift giving."--Diane Coyle, author of "The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters"

Free To A Good Home

'Despite all the big talk and fancy press releases, let's face it, Swine Flu, you're more Babe than razorback. Twenty dead? Come on! More die choking on ham sandwiches every week. Sure, I won't be pashing any pigs for a while, but here's a tip from an old media hack: under-promise and over-deliver.'

Swine Flu. Financial meltdown. It's been a bad year for pigs and pigs in suits. The cure? A good stiff dose of Catherine Deveny, who each week in the Age puts everything in perspective with outrageous wit and disarming honesty.

Free to a Good Home includes her thoughts on gifted children and breakfast television, sexy billboards and the bill of rights. She reflects on her youngest child's first day at school, and on how to be happy in hard times.

Fearlessly funny and always provocative, Deveny is the perfect antidote to the modern world's ills.

Best Australian Political Cartoons 2009

Australia's funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists are already back on the job, pencils sharpened and eager to draw fresh blood.

The seventh edition of this best-selling series features the work of editorial cartoonists from all around Australia including: Alston, Brown, Davidson, Dyson, Katauskas, Knight, Kudelka, Leahy, Leak, Moir, Nicholson, O'Farrell, Petty, Pope, Rowe, Spooner, Tandberg, Weldon, and many more. Not just a collection, more a subversive first draft of history, Best Australian Political Cartoons 2009 is the essential guide to the new Labor era.

Bendable Learnings: The Wisdom Of Modern Management

Moving forward from DEATH SENTENCE and WEASEL WORDS with an enhanced world class third volume in this series - a benchmark in terms of funny word books.

Mission statements are everywhere: you have to have one, whether you're a Fortune 500 company, a hedge fund, a primary school, a church or a hockey club. Without a mission statement, who would know what your values are, or what your culture is? And how then, going forward, will you get buy-in on your strategy and uptake of your brand?

The language of modern management has triumphed, transforming clear, everyday communication into meaningless sludge. To sound professional, you must express everything in abstract nouns, and each noun in terms of another one; you must talk about synergy and strategy, uptake and outcomes and outputs and inputs, key performance indicators and drivers and customer experience - even if your 'customers' are in fact patients in your hospital. This language is deliberately obscure and falsely scientific; what is more worrying, those who use it have lost the very ability to think clearly.

From Don Watson, the author of Death Sentence and Weasel Words, comes this new assortment of noxious management drivel and financial market blather. Read them aloud - then try the exercises. The disease may not yet have run its course, but Watson's acerbic wit restores hope in the power of well-chosen words to entertain and to inspire.

Open Veins Of Latin America

Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.

This classic is now further honoured by Isabel Allende’s inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

First as Tragedy, then as Farce

In this bravura analysis of the current global crisis-following on from his bestselling Welcome to the Desert of the Real - Slavoj Zizek argues that the liberal idea of the "end of history," declared by Francis Fukuyama during the 1990s, has had to die twice. After the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia, on the morning of 9/11, came the collapse of the economic utopia of global market capitalism at the end of 2008. Marx argued that history repeats itself-occuring first as tragedy, the second time as farce - and Zizek, following Herbert Marcuse, notes here that the repetition as farce can be even more terrifying than the original tragedy. The financial meltdown signals that the fantasy of globalization is over and as millions are put out of work it has become impossible to ignore the irrationality of global capitalism. Just a few months before the crash, the world's priorities seemed to be global warming, AIDS, and access to medicine, food and water-tasks labelled as urgent, but with any real action repeatedly postponed. Now, after the financial implosion, the urgent need to act seems to have become unconditional-with the result that undreamt of quantities of cash were immediately found and then poured into the financial sector without any regard for the old priorities. Do we need further proof, Zizek asks, that Capital is the Real of our lives: the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing problems of our natural and social world?

The Great Crash Of 2008

The great crash of 2008 was one that no one saw coming, or, if they did, they ignored the warning signs.

Ross Garnaut, respected economist and author of the Garnaut Climate Change Review, takes us through the recent boom and the global imbalances that led to the bust. He presents a whole-world view of reasons for the downturn, from good, old-fashioned greed and rampant speculation, to the imbalances in global capital flows.

Crucially, he sets out how we might seek order in the wreckage in a world forever changed. What are the geo-economic and geo-strategic implications of such a wide-ranging crash, and how do we restore development in this changed world? The book will also include the impact of the downturn on climate change, economic policy and ideology.

Ross Garnaut is a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce and a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He is a Distinguished Professor of the Australian National University and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. He is the only Australian to be appointed as an Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

For more than 30 years, Garnaut has frequently been consulted on economic and foreign policy at the ministerial (including prime ministerial), level in Australia and several other Asia Pacific countries. He presented the Garnaut Climate Change Review to the Australian Prime Minister in September 2008.

Listening To Grasshoppers: Field Notes On Democracy

This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy.

Beginning with the state-backed pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Arundhati Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu Nationalism and India's Neo-liberal economic reforms which began their journey together in the early 1990s are now turning India into a police state. She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities – Muslim, Christian, Adivasi and Dalit, the rise of terrorism and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. The collection ends with an account of the of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.

The Dark Side of Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.

The Capitalism Delusion

The collapse of capitalism in 2008 incensed Bob Ellis to write this book in a white heat in one month! He gives facts, figures, arguments and anecdotes to show the GFC was inevitable.

The Capitalism Delusion is sobering but compulsive readings for anyone who wants to know what went wrong with the world in the last two years.

Crunch Time

As the world struggles with the twin crises of economic catastrophe and rapidly accelerating climate disruption, a new urgency has entered into discussions of what needs to be done.

In America, President Obama has launched a massive series of government reforms and economic interventions, linking them with a serious environmental agenda. His inspired adoption of green Keynesianism stands in sharp contrast to Australia's pursuit of short-term economic fixes, and its continual downplaying of our environmental problems.

Kevin Rudd has announced that 'we are all Keynesians now', but this adoption of Richard Nixon's famous line is only true on the surface. Apart from embracing deficit-funded spending in search of infrastructure 'multipliers', our political elites refuse to make rational policy connections between the economy and the natural environment, and to think about these things in an integrated way. Instead, disruptive global warming has now been rolled into a policy siding, as the national policy train roars on in desperate pursuit of revived economic prosperity.

Tony Kevin argues that this approach is no longer defensible or practical. We have reached a crunch time, and we need to apply the genuine, profound insights of John Maynard Keynes to help feed and employ us while we reinvent Australia as a renewable energy-based economy that will sustain our children's and grandchildren's climate security.

The Making Of Julia Gillard

From prize-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent comes the first biography of the woman most likely to be Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

Including interviews with Gillard and those close to her, Kent reveals her rise from working class roots to Australia's most powerful woman.

Fit To Print: Misrepresenting The Middle East

WINNER OF THE 2007 NS PUBLIEKSPRIJS

'Luyendijk writes damn well and is a very honest journalist. Fit to Print is a very good book that examines the limitations of journalism, especially when it comes to the coverage of complex conflicts and regions. It sets out in clear and dramatic terms the key shortcoming of much reporting: the inability of journalists to express doubt and to admit that they don't know all that much, in many circumstances, about what is really happening in the countries they are covering. There is much in this book we should all be discussing and thinking about.'

Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, and director of Centre for Advanced Journalism, University of Melbourne

‘Written with great knowledge and humour. One hopes this will be read by everyone who has a fixed opinion or solution of the conflict in the Middle East. Rises high above the average correspondent book.’ Trouw

‘Luyendijk is a great observer, his style is flawless and fortunately he can laugh at himself, which makes this book all the more entertaining and attractive.’ HP/De Tijd

A young journalist’s foray down the rabbit hole of media-led reporting — a tale of disillusionment and self-examination set in the world’s most headline-grabbing regions.

In Fit to Print, a bestseller in Holland, Joris Luyendijk tells the story of his five years as a correspondent in the Middle East. Extremely young for a correspondent but fluent in Arabic, he speaks with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, and community leaders and families. Chronicling first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, terror, and war, his stories cast light on a number of major crises, from the Iraq War to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

But the more Luyendijk witnesses, the less he understands, and he becomes increasingly aware of the yawning gap between what he sees on the ground and what is later reported in the media. As a correspondent, he is privy to a multitude of narratives with conflicting implications, and he sees over and over again that the media favours the stories that will be sure to confirm the popularly held, oversimplified beliefs of westerners.

In Fit to Print, Luyendijk deploys powerful examples, leavened with humor, to demonstrate the ways in which the media gives us a filtered and manipulated image of reality in the Middle East.

Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia

In 1971 Richard Nixon installed a sophisticated voice-activated recording system in the White House. Three years later he became the first US president to resign, implicated in the Watergate cover-up by the evidence of his own tapes. In the spring of 1976, weeks after resigning as the British prime minister, Harold Wilson summoned two young BBC journalists whom he scarcely knew and asked them to investigate MI5b2s machinations. b2I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room,b2 he said. b2Sometimes I speak when Ib2m asleep. You should both listen.b2 STRANGE DAYS INDEED tells the story of how the paranoia exemplified by Wilson and Nixon became the defining characteristic of western politics and culture in the 1970s - a decade in which the leader of the British Liberal Party stood trial for conspiracy to murder and the West German chancellor discovered that his personal assistant was an East German agent. STRANGE DAYS INDEED will vividly evoke the characters, events and atmosphere of an era in which the truth was far stranger than even the most outlandish fiction.

To The Bitter End: The Dramatic Story Of The Fall Of John Howard And The Rise Of Kevin Rudd

On 24 November 2007 Australia resoundingly changed government. If you think you know what really happened during that tumultuous year behind the closed doors of the Liberal Party, in the back rooms of the ACTU and deep in the campaign war room of the Labor Party, think again.

2007 was a year to remember in Australian politics. It saw the dramatic fall of John Howard and the unexpected rise of Kevin Rudd. It saw the Liberal Party buckle under the inertia of incumbency and the Labor Party find new discipline and energy. It also saw the union movement at the centre of the most effective and powerful political campaign in years.

This is the story of that year. It is about faltering ambition, driving ego, confidences lost and gained. It is about friends and enemies, truth and deception, humiliation and triumph.

With unprecedented access to the key players and countless hours of confidential interviews Peter Hartcher's To the Bitter End is a penetrating, riveting and above all revealing exploration of a year when the political stakes had never been higher.

The Bin Ladens: Oil, Money, Terrorism And The Secret Saudi World

The Bin Ladens are shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most closed, unaccountable countries on earth. Little has been known about the world that created Osama - until now.

In this gripping account prizewinning journalist Steve Coll has interviewed those closest to the family who rose from Yemeni peasants to jetsetting millionaires in two generations. In doing so, he reveals a Saudi Arabia torn between religious purity and the temptations of the West, telling a story of oil, money, power, patronage and dangerous cultural extremes.

The House Of Wisdom: How The Arabs Transformed Western Civilization

In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, whose learning laid the foundations of the Renaissance.

For centuries following the fall of Rome, Western Europe was backward and benighted, locked into the Dark Ages and barely able to tell the time of day. Augustine had decreed that belief not reason should be the guiding light of Christian thinking, and partially as a result its people lived in a world of nominal literacy and subsistence farming, where blind faith, superstition and sorcery took the place of medicine and the church harnessed nascent aggression among the kingdoms to its own ends in the pursuit of astonishingly violent and cruel holy wars - the First Crusades.

Arab culture, however, was thriving, and had become a powerhouse of intellectual exploration and discussion that dazzled the likes of Adelard of Bath who ventured in search of its scientific riches in cities like Antioch or Baghdad, whose House of Wisdom held four hundred thousand books at a time when the best European libraries housed at most several dozen. The Arabs could measure the earth's circumference, a feat not matched in the West for eight hundred years; they discovered algebra, sine and other trigonometric functions, and the use of zero; were adepts at astronomy and navigation, charted the constellations, made maps, accurately told the time, developed the astrolabe, translated all the Greek texts including, importantly, those of Aristotle; they made paper and lenses and mirrors. Without them, and the knowledge that travellers like Adelard brought back to the West, Europe would in all likelihood have been a very different place over the last millennium.

In this fascinating and thoughtful book Jonathan Lyons restores credit to the Arab thinkers of the past, explores and reveals the extent of their learning and describes the intrepid adventures of those who went in search of it and who, in doing so, laid the foundations of the Renaissance.

Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

Everyone knows that the poor in rich societies are more likely to have shorter, less healthy, lives, to do less well at school and to end up on the wrong side of the law. But The Spirit Level goes further than this, to demonstrate for the first time that a whole range of social problems – from poor health to educational failure, from mental illness to obesity, from drug addition to violence, from teenage births to the weakening of community life – share one overwhelming feature: they are all several times more common in more unequal societies. The evidence that bigger income differences create more problems is conclusive. And rather than affecting just the poor, inequality reduces the quality of life for everyone in less equal.

This groundbreaking work book, based on 30 years research by two of the UK's leading social epidemiologists, provides a powerful and fascinating new perspective on the social failings of rich societies. In light of their findings government policy will need serious rethinking.

In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History Of The Nuclear Age

In Mortal Hands is a nuclear history of our age - from the Manhattan Project to the present energy crisis and what it means for our future.

Drawing on unprecedented access to industry insiders and historical documents, Stephanie Cooke charts the intertwined histories of military and civilian nuclear programs. She describes the development of the first atom bomb, the decision to bomb Hiroshima and the race to develop nuclear programs during the Cold War, whether in the US, Russia or North Korea.

Along the way, she explores the untold human side of the nuclear story. In frank diaries and letters - many published here for the first time - scientists, policy-makers and civilians recorded their private responses to history as it was made. Their eyewitness accounts reveal the mixture of hope and trepidation with which the new technology was greeted.

Today, as Australians debate our role as a major exporter of uranium, and as we consider whether nuclear energy holds the answer to climate change, In Mortal Hands is timely and thought-provoking. Only once we understand the history of nuclear technology can we hope to make wise decisions about its future.

"essential reading" – Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil

"this thought-provoking history is deftly told ... much the best treatment of the question that I have seen" – Frank von Hippel, Princeton University

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives The Economy And Why It Matters For Global Capitalism

The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, "animal spirits" are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity.

Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government--simply allowing markets to work won't do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life--such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes--and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.

Animal Spirits offers a road map for reversing the financial misfortunes besetting us today. Read it and learn how leaders can channel animal spirits--the powerful forces of human psychology that are afoot in the world economy today.

George A. Akerlof is the Daniel E. Koshland Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. Robert J. Shiller is the best-selling author of Irrational Exuberance and The Subprime Solution (both Princeton). He is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University.

Reviews:

"In their new book, two of the most creative and respected economic thinkers currently at work, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, argue that the key is to recover Keynes's insight about 'animal spirits'--the attitudes and ideas that guide economic action. The orthodoxy needs to be rebuilt, and bringing these psychological factors into the core of economics is the way to do it. . . . The connections between their thinking on the limits to conventional economics and the issues thrown up by the breakdown are plain, even if they were unable to make every link explicit. Even more than Akerlof and Shiller could have hoped, therefore, it is a fine book at exactly the right time. . . . Animal Spirits carries its ambition lightly--but is ambitious nonetheless. Economists will see it as a kind of manifesto."--Clive Crook, Financial Times

"Animal Spirits is a welcome addition to our Hannitized national economic debate, in which anyone who advocates government spending risks being labeled a socialist. . . . Animal Spirits is most compelling when the authors summon all the key behavioral patterns to explain vast, complex phenomena such as the Great Depression. . . . Animal Spirits . . . [is] aimed squarely at the general reader, and rightly so: Macroeconomics is now everybody's business--the banks are playing with our money."--Andrew Rosenblum, New York Observer

The Statute Of Liberty: How Australians Can Take Back Their Rights

The Australian people emerged from a polyglot mixture of nationalities and other races: a kind of human minestrone. Not only a race, but a race apart, thanks to the kindness of distance. What distinctive moral vision have we attained from the struggles and sacrifices of our forebears? If we are to preserve the part of our heritage to do with freedom, we must write down the entitlement of every citizen in a way that politicians and public servants will respect. That means they must be turned into law. If they are not capable of legal enforcement then they are not 'rights', they are empty promises. The Australian Attorney General is expected to announce a commission to examine the case for an Australian Bill of Rights in December 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It will be next year's big controversy and a huge political decision for the Rudd government. This short book by Geoffrey Robertson QC is sure to become the primer for this debate. He puts the case for an Australian Bill of Rights cogently and dramatically, proving with evidence from other countries how a statute of liberty helps ordinary citizens and improves standards of governance and public services. He exposes the lies and urban myths the Australian people face from opponents of the bill, and shows how the charter he has drafted reflects the history and real contemporary values of Australians. This is a provocative argument for change, which explains that real democracy only exists if politicians give the courts power to defend citizens against abuses of their human rights by governments and public servants.

Dead Aid: Destroying The Biggest Global Myth Of Our Time

The well-documented horrors of extreme poverty around the world have created a moral imperative that people have responded to in their millions.

Yet the poverty persists. At a time of unprecedented global prosperity, children are starving to death. Are we not being generous enough? Or is the problem somehow insoluble, an inevitable outcome of historical circumstance?

In this provocative and compelling book, Dambisa Moyo argues that the most important challenge we face today is to destroy the myth that Aid actually works. In the modern globalised economy, simply handing out more money, however well intentioned, will not help the poorest nations achieve sustainable long-term growth. DEAD AID analyses the history of economic development over the last fifty years and shows how Aid crowds out financial and social capital and directly causes corruption; the countries that have 'caught up' did so despite rather than because of Aid.

There is, however, an alternative. Extreme poverty is not inevitable. Dambisa Moyo also shows how, with improved access to capital and markets and with the right policies, even the poorest nations could be allowed to prosper.

If we really do want to help, we have to do more than just appease our consciences, hoping for the best, expecting the worst. We need first to understand the problem.

According to Moyo the best way to help is through micro-finance and recommends www.kiva.org

Arabian Plights: The Future Middle East

The Arab footprint on our world is profound — from Islam to astronomy, from oil to Osama bin Laden. But can the threads of a shared language, a mostly shared religion, and overlapping historical experience equip Arab states to the meet the intense pressures of the twenty-first century? The demand for food, water, education, and jobs — all driven by huge population growth – plus the big-picture issues of global warming and national and regional security are the stuff of nightmares. Osama bin Laden’s attacks on America made him popular on the Arab street, but it was an admiration of despair.

Former Australian diplomat Peter Rodgers argues that the most direct way of cleaning up the mess that is today’s Middle East is to remove the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as the prop both for Arab illiberalism and for foreign meddling. He challenges those who baulk at the idea of putting serious pressure on Israel, of dealing with Hamas, or talking to Iran under the mullahtocracy, to explain how they see the Middle East in 20 years’ time. The region’s problems, he says, will continue to stain the wider world. The West will continue to guzzle Arab oil at an ever-increasing rate, to wring its hands over the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict, to fret about Iran, and to decry the shortcomings of the Arab world, while ensuring that no arms sales goes unclosed. Perhaps the real problem of the Arab world, Rodgers concludes, is that it too closely mirrors the hypocrisies of our own.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

War in the post-9/11 world is far different from what we expected it be. Counterinsurgency and protracted guerrilla warfare, not shock and awe, are the order of the day. David Kilcullen is the world’s foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to the Pentagon and architect of ‘the Surge’, surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world.

Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East and the horn of Africa, The Accidental Guerrilla will, quite simply, change the way we think about war.

While conventional warfare has obvious limits, Kilcullen also stresses that neither counterterrorism nor traditional counterinsurgency is the appropriate framework to fight the enemy we now face. Certainly, traditional counterinsurgency is more effective than counterterrorism when it comes to entities like Al Qaeda, but as Kilcullen contends, our current focus is far too narrow, for it tends to emphasise one geographical region and one state. The current war presents a much different situation: stateless insurgents and terrorists operating across large number of countries and only loosely affiliated with each other. Just as importantly, the US had done a poor job of applying different tactics to different situations, continually misidentifying insurgents with limited aims and legitimate grievances as part of a coordinated worldwide network.

Given the incremental — yet remarkable — success of Kilcullen’s strategy in Iraq, what Kilcullen has to say will be widely anticipated. His vision of war has changed American policy, and this comprehensive account will help shape policy for years to come.

David Kilcullen is a former Australian army officer, guerrilla warfare expert, and nowadays a highly influential ‘warrior intellectual’ who has been seconded as senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, the commanding general of the US multinational task force in Iraq. Kilcullen was profiled in the New Yorker by George Packer in 2006, and in the UK’s Sunday Times in March 2007

Quarterly Essay 33: Quarry Vision Coal Climate Change and the Resources Boom

This is an essay about 'quarry vision', the mindset that sees Australia's greatest asset as its mineral resources - coal especially. How has this distorted our national politics and our response to climate change? What will happen if the resources boom goes bust?

In this powerful essay about the national interest, Guy Pearse discusses the future of the coal industry and argues with the economic pragmatists. He exposes the shadowy world of greenhouse lobbyists; how they think, operate and skin cats. Quarry vision, he argues, is a trap and a blind faith and a mentality we can no longer afford.

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast For The 21st Century

'Predictions have made George Friedman a hot property these days.' - The Wall Street Journal

In The Next 100 Years, George Friedman offers a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.

Drawing on history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years, Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new era - with changes in store, including:

The US-Jihadist war will conclude - replaced by a second full-blown cold war with Russia.
China will undergo a major extended internal crisis, and Mexico will emerge as an important world power.
A new global war will unfold toward the middle of the century between the United States and an unexpected coalition from Eastern Europe, Eurasia and the Far East; but armies will be much smaller and wars will be less deadly.
Technology will focus on space - both for major military uses and for a dramatic new energy resource that will have radical environmental implications.

Written with the keen insight and thoughtful analysis that has made George Friedman a renowned expert in geopolitics and forecasting, The Next 100 Years presents a fascinating picture of what lies ahead.

Filthy Lucre: Economics For Those Who Hate Capitalism

A dozen times every day, individuals and organisations use economic claims to support social and political points of view. Those on the left tend to distrust economists, seeing them as friends of the right. There is something to this skepticism, since professional economists are almost all keen supporters of the free market. Yet while factions on the right naturally embrace economists, they also tend to overestimate the effect of their support on free-market policies. The result is widespread confusion. In fact, virtually all commonly held beliefs about economics-whether espoused by political activists, politicians, journalists or taxpayers-are just plain wrong.

Joseph Heath, co-author of the international bestseller The Rebel Sell, wants to improve our economic literacy and empower us with new ideas. In Filthy Lucre, he draws on everyday examples to skewer the six favourite economic fallacies of the right, before impaling the six favourite fallacies of the left. Heath leaves no sacred cows untipped as he breaks down complex arguments and shows how the monetary world really works. The popularity of such books as Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational demonstrates that people want a better understanding of the financial forces that affect them. Highly readable, flawlessly argued and certain to raise ire along all points of the socio-political spectrum, Filthy Lucre is a must-read for anyone wanting to engage in clear debate on social and political issues.

Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story

Despite declarations made by some in power, the war in Afghanistan is far from over — in fact, the turbulence is escalating. Seven years after 9/11, the Taliban continue to regroup, attack, and claim influence over most of the region.

Invisible History presents a fresh, comprehensive analysis of Afghanistan's political history that begins at the roots of tribal leadership and ultimately emphasizes our current political moment and the impact of ongoing U.S. military intervention. Fitzgerald and Gould tell the real story of how the U.S. came to be in Afghanistan and what we can expect next.

PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They have continued to research, write and lecture about Afghanistan history and U.S. foreign policy since.

Visit www.invisiblehistory.com for more information.

Praise for Invisible History:

"A serious, sobering study, Invisible History illuminates a critical point of view rarely discussed by our media. The results of this willful ignorance have been disastrous to our national well-being." –Oliver Stone

"Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story is a much-needed corrective to five decades of biased journalistic and academic writing about Afghanistan that has covered up the destructive and self-defeating U.S. role there. Backed by prodigious research, it shows that successive U.S. administrations deserve much of the blame for the rise of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and that the increasingly unpopular American military presence in Afghanistan today is likely to prove unsustainable." –Selig S. Harrison, former South Asia Bureau Chief, Washington Post, and author of Out of Afghanistan

"In this penetrating inquiry, based on careful study of an intricate web of political, cultural, and historical factors that lie in the immediate background, and enriched by unique direct observation at crucial moments, Fitzgerald and Gould tell 'the real story of how they came to be there and what we can expect next.' With skill and care, they unravel the roots of Afghanistan's terrible travail, and lay bare its awesome significance for the world at large. Invocation of Armageddon is no mere literary device. The threat is all too real as the political leadership of a superpower with few external constraints charges forward on a course that is fraught with peril. Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story is a critically important contribution to our understanding of some of the most dramatic and significant developments of current history." –Noam Chomsky

"A revealing and commanding exposé of the imperial history, official skulduggery, and media manipulation that have enveloped Afghanistan; a story that Americans need to know." —Michael Parenti, author of Contrary Notions and Against Empire

"From the dawn of the Cold War onward, generations of conservative strategists have eyed Afghanistan as a launching pad first for the subversion of the Soviet Union and then to checkmate Russia in central Asia. To that end, as Gould and Fitzgerald show, since the 1950s the CIA has played games with both reactionary, feudal landlords and wild-eyed Muslim fundamentalists. In their exhaustively documented book, Gould and Fitzgerald reveal how that sort of gamesmanship played havoc with a battered nation of twenty-five million souls—helping to spawn, in the process, the virulent strain of violent Islamism that reaches far beyond the remote and landlocked territory of that war-torn country." —Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam

"[A] phenomenal compendium of history, research and critical analysis. . . Invisible History is filled with ground-breaking analysis, not only for those interested in the more recent politics of Afghanistan, but also for those wanting the larger historical context." —Sima Wali, President of Refugee Women in Development, from the introduction

"Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story is a defining work of great wisdom and depth in which the authors get to the bottom of the cauldron that is Afghanistan. We cannot fully understand today's Afghanistan without reading this insightful book. Afghanistan was the first war in the US war on terror. Understanding Afghanistan is the key to the current war. You could not start at a better place than this book. To understand why eight years later it is still being fought, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story is a must read." —Ahmed Rashid author of Taliban, Jihad, and Descent into Chaos

My Israel Question (Revised Edition)

The undeclared war in the Middle East is the abiding conflict of our era, with little apparent hope of resolution despite years of peace talks. On one side of the conflict, in the face of suicide bombings and international criticism over its military aggression, Israel asserts the right of the Jewish state to exist in Palestine. On the other, the Palestinian people struggle, some peacefully, some violently, for survival. Far beyond Israel's disputed borders, the conflict is replayed in passionate public debate by Holocaust survivors, Zionist organisations, Arab advocates, the anti-war movement, newspaper columnists, presidents and prime ministers, and politicians and activists of all shades.

In My Israel Question, a young Australian Jew, Antony Loewenstein, asks how much Zionism – the ideology of Jewish nationalism – is to blame for this intractable conflict. He fearlessly investigates the ways in which the Jewish diaspora in Australia and elsewhere have campaigned on Israel's behalf, in the media and in political and business spheres. He also considers the historical rationale for Zionism – including the centuries of virulent European anti-Semitism from which it grew – and asks how relevant and sustainable 20th-century Zionism is today.

America Between The Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed, taking the Cold War down with it. The next 12 years passed in a haze of self-congratulation, Republican confusion, and angst, and economic prosperity — until the stunning catastrophe of September 11, 2001. America Between The Wars blends deep expertise with broad access to both parties’ political and policy establishments to find out how — and why — when America became the sole superpower with responsibility for the world’s oversight, it overlooked how the new world actually worked.

Gough Whitlam: A Moment In History

This moment was not his alone, nor could it ever have come about without him…Gough Whitlam turned to Graham Freudenberg, touched him lightly on the shoulder, saying, 'It's been a long road, Comrade, but we're there', and walked out to meet the spotlight

Acclaimed biographer Jenny Hocking's Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is the first contemporary and definitive biographical study of the former Labor Prime Minister.

From his childhood in the fledging city of Canberra to his first appearance as Prime Minister (playing Neville Chamberlain), to his extensive war service in the Pacific and marriage to Margaret, the champion swimmer and daughter of Justice Wilfred Dovey, the biography draws on previously unseen archival material, extensive interviews with family and colleagues, and exclusive interviews with Gough Whitlam himself.

Hocking's narrative skill and scrupulous research reveals an extraordinary and complex man, whose life is, in every way, formed by the remarkable events of previous generations of his family, and who would, in turn, change Australian political and cultural developments in the twentieth century.

Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History is a magnificent biography that illuminates the path that took one man to power.

Apply Within: Stories of Career Sabotage

When Michaela McGuire was hired by a federal MP eight months before the 2007 election, she didn't know exactly what to expect. She probably should have, because before that she had worked in the highrollers' room of a casino and had overseen lap dances in a strip club. It would become another novelty job to add to her brief but colourful résumé.

She has advised a Liberal MP to campaign for his seat rather than get a haircut, cleaned ashtrays and helped organise a senior partner's stamp collection at a prestigious law firm. Whatever the contributing factors to her brilliant career, foresight was not one of them.

Michaela McGuire is a columnist for the Sunday Age and writes a blog called Swings and Roundabouts. Originally from Brisbane, she now lives in Melbourne. This is her first book.

The Costello Memoirs

Last year's bestseller now in paperback, with a new chapter on the Global Financial Crisis and beyond.

The Costello Memoirs is a frank and fearless look inside the engine-room of the Liberal Party and the Howard Government.

In a political career spanning more than eighteen years, Peter Costello, Australia's longest serving Treasurer, steered the Government through some of its greatest economic and political challenges, paying off Government debt, introducing the GST and fighting five elections.

The Costello Memoirs charts the victories and defeats in one man's very public life.

Peter Costello was Australia's longest serving Treasurer, and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 1994 to 2007.

Peter Coleman has been a member of the Federal Parliament (1981-87) and the New South Wales Parliament (1968-78). He is a writer/journalist and has been editor of The Bulletin and Quadrant. His many books include a study of the intellectuals in the Cold War, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, and the autobiographical Memoirs of a Slow Learner.

He was a foundation member of the Australian Council for the Arts (1968-73) and Chairman of the Australian Film and Television School (1971-73). He was Administrator of Norfolk Island (1979-81.) He is Peter Costello's father-in-law.

Battlelines

What's next for the conservative side of politics? Where are new battlelines to be drawn?

Parliamentary pugilist and senior Liberal party figure Tony Abbott offers a lively and frank examination of the way forward for the Liberal party. Here he reveals insider moments and draws lessons from the dying days of the Howard Government, and offers colourful insights about his contemporaries on both sides of politics.

In Battlelines, Abbott looks at the values and instincts that drive the Liberal Party and maps in detail key policy directions that the party might adopt. This is also the often-humorous story of his own political development. How a would-be priest fathered an unknown son; the truth about politicians' lives; his 'days from hell'; and his personal dispatches from the halls of power.

Battlelines outlines a state of play for the Liberal Party, cementing Tony Abbott's reputation as one of the firmament's most interesting thinkers.

Tony Abbott is the current Federal Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. From 2004 to 2007 he was Minister for Health and Ageing in the Howard Government and Leader of the House of Representatives in the Federal Parliament. Since 1994 he has been the Member for Warringah, New South Wales, in the House of Representatives. He has written two books in defence of Australia's existing constitutional system, The Minimal Monarchy and How to Win the Constitutional War.

The March Of Patriots: The Struggle For Modern Australia

The March of Patriots looks at the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of Paul Keating and John Howard.

Keating and Howard were the first two Australian prime ministers of the globalised age. They were raised together, fashioned by the same forces with careers that paralleled each other. They sought to create a new set of faiths for their parties, Labor and Liberal, in an age where the old beliefs were obsolete. In this sense they were prophets for their tribes offering a fresh interpretation of Labor and Liberal ideology for a new century.

Keating and Howard are best understood as change agents, adapting their parties and their nation to a new course. This is the story of two experiments in prime ministerial power and of two leaders divided by temperament, cultural outlook and perceptions of national identity, yet united in much of their economic and social policy. It describes their efforts to devise a fresh policy framework for Australia and to invest their decaying parties with new faiths.

Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large of The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of The Australian (1991–1996). He is the author of The Unmaking of Gough (1976), later titled The Dismissal (1982), The Hawke Ascendancy (1984), The End of Certainty (1992), November 1975 (1995) and Paradise Divided (2000).

Spectre At The Feast: Capitalist Crisis And The Politics Of Recession

After a long feast of prosperity in the western world, the crisis in the financial markets has conjured up an old spectre – the spectre of capitalist crisis, which many thought had been finally exorcised. On past experience, a full-blown capitalist crisis would bring with it the threat of slump, collapse, polarisation, conflict, and even war, spreading to all parts of the global economy - hence the great efforts being made to contain the present downturn. This important new book by a leading authority sets the financial crisis of 2007/8 in historical context and assesses its global consequences, how far it might go, and what is to be done.

Balibo

'Jolliffe has a long association with East Timor and the independence movement. She was in East Timor when the Balibo incident occured, and met the Balibo Five. Their deaths deeply affected her. Over the years, she has maintained an unwavering commitment to bringing out the truth about what happened to them on that mid-October morning.

'Ever since the invasion of Dili on December 7, 1975, when she was the last journalist to leave, Jolliffe has been meticulously assembling evidence of how the newsmen met their end, and who was responsible.

'This book brings all her evidence together. The centrepiece is the most comprehensive collection so far of interviews of East Timorese with links to the Balibo incident, which highlights the abundance of evidence available for the prosecution of those responsible, among them Captain Yunus Yosfiah (now a retired lieutenant-general), and a Kopassus (special forces) sergeant, Christoforus da Silva. Interwoven with this extraordinarily detailed work are strands of a personal memoir.' Jim Dunn (Sydney Morning Herald)

In October 1975, during the decolonisation of Portuguese Timor, five young television reporters travelled from Australia to report on the brewing unrest in the region. It was a journey that would be their last: Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, and Tony Stewart of Channel Seven, and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie of Channel Nine, were killed by the Indonesian military as they filmed the infantry troops advancing into the border town of Balibo. In the months that followed, a sixth man who went to investigate their fate, freelance journalist Roger East, was also executed.

In this revised edition of the book that was originally published as Cover-Up, on which the film Balibo is based, Jill Jolliffe reveals previously hidden details of one of the most shameful episodes in Australia’s history. In doing so, she brings to light new material about Roger East, and details the 2007 Glebe inquest into the death of Brian Peters.

The result of over 30 years of personal investigations and tireless research, Balibo provides a unique first-hand account of the deaths of the five journalists and of Roger East. Jolliffe argues that the Australian government and its Western allies were always aware of the circumstances of the killings of the Balibo Five, as they came to be known, and that their cover-up of those details was a key factor in Indonesia’s decision to invade and occupy East Timor.

Part memoir, part history, this searing book is as much an indictment of the Balibo killers as it is of Australia’s role in East Timor’s recent tragic history.

Jill Jolliffe has been following the Balibo Five story for 34 years. She witnessed the first incursions of Indonesian regular troops into East Timor in September 1975, reported on the death of her five colleagues at Balibo in October, and was evacuated from Dili by the International Red Cross four days before Indonesian paratroopers attacked the capital on 7 December 1975.

In 1978 Jolliffe moved to Portugal, where she continued to follow the East Timor story and to work as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the BBC, among others. She now lives in Darwin and reports regularly from East Timor.

Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor

In 1975, journalist Tony Maniaty flew to the Portuguese colony of East Timor looking for a war to film. He found it at a dusty outpost called Balibo.

Maniaty and his ABC News crew were shelled and five other television newsmen who followed were murdered by Indonesian troops. Maniaty reported the Balibo Five story, faced death threats and fled before the Indonesian forces invaded. The only foreign journalist left in the country was executed in cold blood. The generation-long nightmare of the East Timorese had begun.

In Shooting Balibo he teams up with the cast and crew of the feature film Balibo, retraces his days of danger, and dines with Jose Ramos-Horta as the independence fighter-turned-President recovers from an assassination attempt.

But Maniaty's real purpose is to visit Balibo for the first time since 1975. When he steps into the burned-out house where his colleagues were slaughtered thirty-three years ago, past and present collide before his eyes.

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

This is a profound exploration of the current wars, looking at violence, gender and different forms of resistance. In "Frames of War", Judith Butler explores the media's portrayal of state violence, a process integral to the way in which the West wages modern war. This portrayal has saturated our understanding of human life, and has led to the exploitation and abandonment of whole peoples, who are cast as existential threats rather than as living populations in need of protection. These people are framed as already lost, to imprisonment, unemployment and starvation, and can easily be dismissed. In the twisted logic that rationalizes their deaths, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of 'the living'. This disparity, Butler argues, has profound implications for why and when we feel horror, guilt, loss and indifference, both in the context of war and, increasingly, everyday life. In this urgent response to increasingly dominant methods of coercion, violence and racism, Butler calls for a reconceptualization of the Left, one united in opposition and resistance to the illegitimate and arbitrary effects of state violence.

Courage, Survival And Greed: Sydney PEN Voices: The Three Writers Project

'You don't have to be a writer to speak the truth as you see it, but you can't be a good writer without doing so. It is not, in the first instance, the painters and sculptors and bakers locked up or killed in China or Russia or the Third Reich: it is the writers. It is generally the writers, relying on empathy, reason and very sharp tools, who plant the stake first.' Anna Funder, from 'Courage'

'Now that we all face the possible catastrophe of climate change, the Murri man's simple assurance - the country will teach you - has come to seem more like a curse than anything else.' Melissa Lucashenko on 'Survival'

'There's an old saying on stock and financial markets. When there is more greed than fear, the market rises. When fear outweighs greed, the market falls.' Christopher Kremmer on 'Greed'

Anna Funder examines the nature of courage in a powerful and moving essay, commemorating the life and work of the 'bravest of the brave', murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and other remarkable women who have stood up to totalitarian regimes at unthinkable cost to themselves.

Australian history is full of images of ingenious settlers battling against the harsh, unforgiving land in order to survive. But is the European notion of 'survival' different from the indigenous one? Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko argues eloquently and passionately that it is.

Did the notion that 'Greed is Good' die out with the 1980s? Perhaps at no other moment in living memory has greed played such a defining - and damning - role. At once clear-eyed and coruscating, Christopher Kremmer contemplates greed from all angles: social, historical, economic and cultural.

Three brilliant essays written by leading and acclaimed Australian writers, commissioned by Sydney PEN, unflinchingly show us our world as never before.

Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland, which was shortlisted for many prizes in Australia and Britain and in 2004 received the world's largest non-fiction award, the BBC 4 Samuel Johnson Prize.

Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning novelist and essayist. Her novels, including Steam Pigs, Killing Darcy and Hard Yards have won or been short-listed for numerous awards, including the Dobbie, Kibble, Courier Mail Book of the Year, and NSW Premier's and Commonwealth Writer's awards. Melissa works for the prisoner support organisation Sisters Inside, which she helped found in the 1990s.

Christopher Kremmer is the best-selling author of The Carpet Wars, Bamboo Palace and Inhaling the Mahatma. His books have been shortlisted for The Age and Courier Mail Book of the Year awards, the New South Wales and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and the Australian Book Industry Awards. Christopher has also penned prize-winning short-fiction

Power Plays

Laurie Oakes is the most influential political journalist in Australia - if he says something has happened, the rest of the media (especially the Canberra Press Gallery) believe him and report it as news. He is respected by both political insiders and the wider public. He has worked in Canberra as a political reporter for 39 years and reported on 19 federal elections. He regularly finds the big story way ahead of everyone else. Currently the national political editor for the Nine Network he is the man who interviews all the big names. From 1987 to December 2007 he wrote a weekly column for the Bulletin and since its demise he has been writing a column for the Saturday Daily Telegraph in Sydney and the Herald Sun in Melbourne. POWER PLAYS is a selection of 150 of the very best and most timeless of Laurie Oakes' columns.