Readings.com.au: Top Non-Fiction

Van Diemen's Land: A History

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen’s Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In this book James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen’s Land.

The New Rome: The Fall Of An Empire and the Fate Of America

The rise and fall of ancient Rome has been on American minds from the beginning of their republic. Today Americans focus less on the Roman Republic than on the empire that took its place. Depending on who's doing the talking, the history of Rome serves as either a triumphal call to action or dire warning of imminent collapse.

Griffith Review 19: Re-imagining Australia

Irrespective of the outcome of the election, Australia in 2008 will be a different place, more open to new ways of thinking. Essays in Reimagining Australia predict the big trends that will shape this country in the future and reflect on the way things have changed in the past. The lead essay by the most outstanding young legal thinker in Australia, George Williams, addresses the dynamic nature of the nation, its stories, history and legal framework, and considers how this could change. His expansive essay will set the big picture agenda for a new era. Ideas of nation are under challenge throughout the world, as globalisation blurs the boundaries of belonging and identity. Australia will change in the next year and the essays and stories will explore topics for the new century and the way things have changed in the past. The importance of the imagination in defining place will have a central place in the issue.

Quarterly Essay 28: Exit Right: The Unravelling of John Howard

In 'Exit Right', Judith Brett explains why the tide turned on John Howard. This is an essay about leadership, in particular Howard’s style of strong leadership which led him to dominate his party with such ultimately catastrophic results.

In this definitive account, Brett discusses how age became Howard’s Achilles heel, how he lost the youth vote, how he lost Bennelong, and how he waited too long to call the election. She looks at the government’s core failings – the policy vacuum, the blindness to climate change, the disastrous misjudgment of WorkChoices – and shows how Howard and his team came more and more to insulate themselves from reality.

With drama and insight, Judith Brett traces the key moments when John Howard stared defeat in the face, and explains why, after the Keating–Howard years, the ascendancy of Kevin Rudd marks a new phase in the nation’s political life.

An Exacting Heart: The Story Of Hephzibah Menuhin

Hephzibah Menuhin had a musical gift most people only dream of. Her refusal to be defined by it led her to reinvent herself not once, but twice in her remarkable life.

Born in 1920 in San Francisco she was, like her world-renowned brother Yehudi, a child prodigy, simultaneously thrown into the spotlight at an early age and closeted by a dominating, controlling mother.

In the brief spring between the world wars, the Menuhin family travelled extensively, driven by the demands of Yehudi's career. Then Hephzibah, aged seventeen, celebrated as her brother's musical partner and on the brink of greatness in her own right, turned her back on performing. She married Lindsay Nicholas, the Melbourne-born heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and moved to his sheep property in western Victoria.

Far from playing the conventional wife of a wealthy grazier, Hephzibah threw herself into humanitarian projects in her adopted country. She raised two sons and eventually resumed performing, both solo and with Yehudi, to international acclaim. But after sixteen years that seemed from the outside happy and fulfilled, she met a man who drew her to question what she thought she knew - and to abandon her established life a second time.

What makes a woman walk out on her children? What makes her turn her back on a brilliant artistic career? An Exacting Heart reveals the complex and contradictory nature of Hephzibah Menuhin: warm-hearted, humorous, astute, generous, occasionally ruthless and wrong-headed. In portraying the life and times of this fascinating and mercurial woman. Jacqueline Kent examines not only the consequences of possessing great talent, but the costs and rewards of gambling for high emotional stakes.

True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality

In 1999 Dr Inga Clendinnen delivered six lectures as part of the Boyer Lectures, a series broadcast nationally on ABC radio. True Stories is those lectures in essay form, released by Text for the first time since Inga was recognised with the title Officer in the Order of Australia in 2006.

In True Stories, Inga declares her belief that democratic peoples need true stories about their past and urged responsiveness to a multiplicity of stories catching the experiences of different individuals in different situations.

The reader catches the experience of individuals through fragments – a woman being manhandled on a beach, an old man remembering the hard lessons of his boyhood in a Jesuit mission, an old woman urgently dancing the history of her country – and is given a frank and challenging review of race relations in Australia. True Stories allows us to better understand how this nation has come to be what it is today.

The Battle For Bennelong

The battle for the seat of Bennelong in the 2007 federal election is shaping up as one of the more interesting contests the political landscape has witnessed in a while. In one corner is the rookie candidate, respected former ABC journalist Maxine McKew. In the other is John Howard, the most experienced politician in the country.

Marley And Me

The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family in the making and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life.

John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.

Marley quickly grew into a barreling, 97-pound streamroller of a Labrador Retriever, a dog like no other. He crashed through screen doors, gouged into drywall, flung drool on guests, stole women’s undergarments, and ate nearly everything he could get his mouth around, including couches and fine jewelry. Obedience school did no good -- Marley was expelled. Neither did the tranquilizers the veterinarian prescribed for him with the admonishment, “Don’t hesitate to use these.”

And yet, his heart was pure. Just as Marley joyfully refused any limits on his behavior, his love and loyalty were boundless, too. He shared the couple’s joy at first pregnancy, and their heartbreak over miscarriage. He was there when babies finally arrived and when the screams of a 17-year-old stabbing victim pierced the night. Marley shut down a public beach and managed to land a role in a feature-length movie, always winning hearts as he made a mess of things. Through it all, he remained steadfast, a model of devotion, even when his family was at wit’s end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms.

Is it possible for humans to discover the key to happiness through a bigger-than-life, bad-boy dog? Just ask the Grogans.

A Man's Got To Have A Hobby

A tail-end baby boomer, William McInnes recalls summer holidays that seemed to go on forever, when he and his mates would walk down to fish in the bay, a time when the Aussie battler stood as the local Labor candidate and watched out for his mates, and a time when the whole family would rush into the lounge room to watch a new commercial on TV.

He writes about his father—a strong character who talks to the furniture, dances with William’s mother in the kitchen, and spends his free time fixing up the house and doing the best for his family. In William’s writing you can hear his father speaking, listen to his mother singing, and his sisters and brothers talking in the yard.

This is a book about people who aren’t famous but should be. It’s about cane toads and families, love and hope and fear, laughter, death and life. Most of all, it is a realistic, down-to-earth book by a man who had a great time growing up. His warmth and humour come through on every page.