Non-Fiction 2013 — Readings Books

Cover image for Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

David Mikics

Reading, David Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere information-gathering or escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. Slow Reading in a Hurried…

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Cover image for The Beatles - All These Years: Volume One: Tune In

The Beatles - All These Years: Volume One: Tune In

Mark Lewisohn

The first part of the definitive three-volume biography of the Beatles

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Cover image for Dead Interviews: Living Writers Meet Dead Icons

Dead Interviews: Living Writers Meet Dead Icons

Dan Crowe

Veering from the intensely serious to the wildly silly, Dead Interviews grants writers the chance to sit down with their heroes and flex their cerebral muscles, or simply indulge in…

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Cover image for Born in a Tent: How camping makes us Australian

Born in a Tent: How camping makes us Australian

Bill Garner

Born in a Tent takes the story from the campfire to the gas bottle, from a tarp slung on saplings to polymer tents and aluminium poles. It reveals how deeply…

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Cover image for Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family

Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family

Gabrielle Carey

Two literary lives defined by storytelling and secrets As her mother Joan lies dying, Gabrielle Carey writes a letter to Joan’s childhood friend, the reclusive novelist Randolph Stow. This letter…

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Cover image for Twiggy: The High-Stakes Life of Andrew Forrest

Twiggy: The High-Stakes Life of Andrew Forrest

Burrell Andrew

Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest is the public face of Australia’s once-in-a-life time mining boom. A swashbuckling entrepreneur in the finest West Australian tradition, Twiggy took on mining giants BHP and Rio…

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Cover image for Autobiography

Autobiography

Morrissey

It has been said ‘Most pop stars have to be dead before they reach the iconic status that Morrissey has reached in his lifetime.

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Cover image for Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla

David Kilcullen

In his third book, David Kilcullen takes us out of the mountains: away from the remote, rural guerrilla warfare of Afghanistan, and into the marginalised slums and complex security threats…

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Cover image for A Story of Grief: Penguin Special

A Story of Grief: Penguin Special

Michaela McGuire

When Jill Meagher went missing and was then found murdered in 2012, the city of Melbourne was shaken to the core. Emotional responses ranged from grief to guilt to rage…

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Cover image for Thank You For Your Service

Thank You For Your Service

David Finkel

Suitable for bird-lovers, this book features humorous prose that reveals a man who loves words as well as birds.

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Cover image for Quarterly Essay 51 The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell

Quarterly Essay 51 The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell

David Marr

In Quarterly Essay 51, David Marr investigates the character and actions of Cardinal George Pell: how does he wield his authority? How did he rise to prominence? How has he…

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Cover image for Unnatural Selection: Why The Geeks Will Inherit The Earth

Unnatural Selection: Why The Geeks Will Inherit The Earth

Mark Roeder

A bold new theory that throws Darwin’s theory on its ear: it is no longer the survival of the fittest - - the geeks shall inherit the earth. Is Darwin’s…

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Cover image for The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience

The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience

Tim Dunlop

A provocative, timely account of the changing face of journalism from a pioneer of the new-media revolution

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Cover image for Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

Adam Phillips

We all have two lives - the life we live and the life of our fantasies. But it is the life unlived - the person we have failed to be…

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Cover image for A Spy in the Archives

A Spy in the Archives

Sheila Fitzpatrick

In 1968 historian Sheila Fitzpatrick was ‘outed’ by the Russian newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya as all but a spy for Western intelligence. She was in Moscow at the time, working in…

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Cover image for A History of Silence

A History of Silence

Lloyd Jones

A History of Silence is a book about a country and a broken landscape. It’s about the devastation in Christchurch, after the 2011 earthquake. It’s about how easily we erase…

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Cover image for Boom: The Underground History of Australia, from Gold Rush to GFC

Boom: The Underground History of Australia, from Gold Rush to GFC

Malcolm Knox

Even before the boom, Australia owed more to the shovel than the sheep. One of Australia’s best and most lively writers shows that the story of mining is the Australian…

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Cover image for The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

Hanna Rosin

Offers an explosive argument for why women are winning the battle of the sexes and why men are no longer top dog, for lovers of Caitlin Moran’s How to be…

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Cover image for Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace

Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace

Scott Thorson

Liberace’s lover tells all: the good, the bad, and the ugly truths about the legendary entertainer, who never publically admitted he was gay.

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Cover image for Tell My Sons

Tell My Sons

Mark Weber

In the bestselling tradition of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture, a dying father s deeply moving legacy for his sons is winning hearts and minds around the world.

…

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Cover image for The Long Road to Changi

The Long Road to Changi

Peter Ewer

How flawed planning, dysfunctional personalities and empirical arrogance took Australia down the long road to Changi. In the 1930s while war raged in Europe, Australians were assured by politicians that…

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Cover image for Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer

Thomas Quick: The Making of a Serial Killer

Hannes Rastam

In 1992, behind the barbed wire fence of a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, Thomas Quick confessed to the murder of an eleven-year-old boy who had been missing for…

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Cover image for His Stupid Boyhood: A Memoir

His Stupid Boyhood: A Memoir

Peter Goldsworthy

Few Australian writers have delved as deeply as Goldsworthy into the mysterious state of being that is childhood. Now he’s applied his fascination with that stage of life to his…

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Cover image for Big Coal

Big Coal

Guy Pearse,David McKnight,Bob Burton

Australia’s dirtiest habit is its addiction to coal. But is our dependence on it a road to prosperity or a dead end? Are we hooked for life? And who is…

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Cover image for Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia

Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia

David Hunt

Girt. No word could better capture the essence of Australia. In this hilarious history, David Hunt tells the real story of Australia’s past from megafauna to Macquarie, the cock-ups and…

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Cover image for Hearts & Minds: A Blueprint for Modern Labor

Hearts & Minds: A Blueprint for Modern Labor

Chris Bowen

Presents a manifesto to secure the Australian Labor Party’s position as the dominant force in Australian politics. It advocates for governing alone or not at all, opening up the election…

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Cover image for Glory Daze: How a world-beating nation got so down on itself

Glory Daze: How a world-beating nation got so down on itself

Jim Chalmers

The book asks how a nation with the developed world’s best economy has a dimmer view of its performance than some of the basket case economies of southern Europe have…

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Cover image for Reclaiming Epicurus: Penguin Special

Reclaiming Epicurus: Penguin Special

Luke Slattery

Epicureanism is not just for gourmands - journalist Luke Slattery argues that it can help us rethink out materialist ways and face the challenges of man-made climate change.

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Cover image for Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia: Redbacks

Battlers and Billionaires: The Story of Inequality in Australia: Redbacks

Andrew Leigh

Is Australia fair enough? And why does inequality matter anyway? In Battlers and Billionaires, Andrew Leigh weaves together vivid stories, interesting history and powerful statistics to discuss why inequality matters…

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Cover image for Forgotten War

Forgotten War

Henry Reynolds

Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between…

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Cover image for Downfall: How the Labor Party Ripped Itself Apart

Downfall: How the Labor Party Ripped Itself Apart

Aaron Patrick

Australian Financial Review journalist Aaron Patrick takes us behind the scenes of the dying ALP and charts the mistakes, scandals and PR disasters which characterize modern Labor and the simultaneous…

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Cover image for Quarterly Essay 50 Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny

Quarterly Essay 50 Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny

Anna Goldsworthy

In the fiftieth Quarterly Essay, Anna Goldsworthy examines life for women after the gains made by feminism. From Facebook to 50 Shades of Grey, from Girls to gonzo…

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Cover image for A Savage History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans

A Savage History: Whaling in the Pacific and Southern Oceans

John Newton

A Savage History tells the rich history of whales and whaling. We learn about these highly intelligent and magnificent creatures, and follow the stories of whalers from the eighteenth century…

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Cover image for Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

Justin Clemens

Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under the rubric of ‘antiphilosophy’ a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Drawing on the work of Badiou, Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben…

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Cover image for The Misogyny Factor

The Misogyny Factor

Anne Summers

In 2012, Anne Summers gave two landmark speeches about women in Australia, attracting more than 120,000 visits to her website. Within weeks of their delivery Prime Minister Julia Gillards own…

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Cover image for Life in Ten Houses: Penguin Special

Life in Ten Houses: Penguin Special

Sonya Hartnett

The internationally celebrated writer Sonya Hartnett is firmly Melburnian but has restlessly moved from suburb to suburb in her search for the ‘Last House’ - that special corner of the…

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Cover image for Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World

Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World

Jan Caro (Editor)

A fabulously provocative collection by women ready to destroy the joint.

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Cover image for All Good Things

All Good Things

Sarah Turnbull

For many people, finding the love of your life and moving to Paris would come pretty close to having it all. Having shared her story in the bestselling Almost French…

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Cover image for Pleasure and Pain

Pleasure and Pain

Chrissy Amphlett,Larry Writer

Chrissy Amphlett is a legend in the world of Australian music - and now she tells her own story; a unique account of a woman surviving in a male-dominated industry…

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Cover image for Fifty Shades of Feminism

Fifty Shades of Feminism

Lisa Appignanesi,Susie Orbach,Rachel Holmes

The antidote to the idea that being a woman is all about submitting to desire. There are many more shades than that and here are fifty women to explore them.

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Cover image for Mateship with Birds

Mateship with Birds

A.H. Chisholm

It’s a sweltering summer’s day, and Anja Aropalo is on her way home with two errands in mind: first, to water the roses, and then to commit suicide. She is…

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Cover image for This Will Make You Smarter

This Will Make You Smarter

John Brockman

Over 150 of the world’s leading scientists and thinkers offer their choice of the ideas, and arguments. Every year the author sets them a question, this year that question was…

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Cover image for 1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia

1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia

James Boyce

Winner of the 2012 Age Book of the Year Award In 1835 an illegal squatter camp was established on the banks of the Yarra River. In defiance of authorities in…

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Cover image for Political Animal

Political Animal

David Marr

Tony Abbott is poised to become the nation’s next prime minister and, more than ever, Australian’s are asking: what kind of man is he and how might he run the…

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Cover image for Welcome To Your New Life

Welcome To Your New Life

Anna Goldsworthy

When Anna Goldsworthy, pianist and perfectionist, falls pregnant with her first child, her excitement is tempered by the daunting journey ahead. In Welcome to Your New Life, she shares…

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Cover image for Glorious Days: Australia 1913

Glorious Days: Australia 1913

Stuart Macintyre,Peter Stanley,Tom Griffiths,' et al.

The year 1913 was a fascinating and important time for Australians, although the events of the following year have tended to cast a retrospective shadow over it. In places as…

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Cover image for Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future: Quarterly Essay 49

Not Dead Yet: Labor’s Post-Left Future: Quarterly Essay 49

Mark Latham

‘During the term of the Rudd and Gillard governments, criticism of the Labor Party became a national pastime.’ So writes Mark Latham, a one-time leader of the party and still…

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Cover image for Sex And The Citadel

Sex And The Citadel

Shereen El Feki

From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, this book looks at the sexual history of the Arab region, and brings voices to the debate over…

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