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This is the book the late Clive James (1939 - 2019) always wanted to write: an almanac combining a comprehensive survey of modern culture with an annotated index of who-was-who and what-was-what. It is his always-unique take on the places and the faces that shaped the twentieth-century. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Wittgenstein, Tacitus to Thatcher, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record – and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now. Not to be read at one sitting! -
Walter Matthau: Allan Hunter
$25.00Walter Matthau (1920 - 2000) was once described as 'about as likely a candidate for stardom as the neighbourhood delicatessen man' Walter Matthau worked long and hard to achieve public recognition. AT the age of 45 he found the perfect role in The Odd Couple and became the oldest overnight success in the business. He quickly established himself as a top box-office attraction, won an Oscar for the conniving shyster lawyer in The Fortune Cookie and continued to delight audiences with a string of movie hits: The Sunshine Boys, Kotch, Charley Varrick, The Front Page, The Bad News Bears, Pete 'n' Tillie and House Calls. Hunter chronicles Matthau's tough childhood in New York, his early jobs as boxing instructor, basketball coach and filing clerk; his lifelong (and expensive) addiction to gambling; his distinguished Air Force service record; the years as a villain in films like King Creole; his doctor's prediction on his heart: 'My Doctor gave me six months to live; when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more'; the disastrous making of Hello, Dolly with Barbra Streisand and happier partnerships with Jack Lemmon, Neil Simon, George Burns and Glenda Jackson. -
Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen; Margaret Beaufort, The Red Queen; and Jacquetta, Lady Rivers, The Rivers Woman are the subjects of the first three novels in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series and of the three biographical essays in this book. Philippa Gregory, together with historians David Baldwin and Michael Jones, both leading experts in their field, helped Philippa to research the novels, tell the extraordinary 'true' stories of the life of these women who until now have been largely forgotten by history, their background and times, highlighting questions which are raised in the fiction and illuminating the novels. With a foreword by Philippa Gregory - in which Philippa writes revealingly about the differences between history and fiction and examines the gaps in the historical record - and beautifully illustrated with rare portraits. -
The first - at time of publication, 1977 - Marxist analysis of the history and situation of the Australian Aborigines and presents the balanced and co-operative nature of traditional Aboriginal society, the brutal and tragic story of white colonisation and the growth of indigenous resistance to discrimination and exploitation. Also demonstrated is the minimalising of the Aboriginal in the Australian nation and the role of the capitalist establishment, the media and the racial ideology that destroyed the crucial land rights campaign. The author concludes with an assessment of the future for the indigenous people and an appeal for unity in the struggle for their rights. -
Published in 1978, this is the book that tells Australians who they really are via the controversial perception by the author of Australian apathy, greed and intolerance while scrambling for a fast buck and endless possessions - not to mention being lazy and overweight as well. And delusional. King - a descendant of Philip Gidley King, Governor of N.S.W. 1800 - 1806 - explodes the myths of the hard-working outback heroes to replace them with I'm all right Jack...I'm getting rich quick...I'm getting my share of...on the grounds that the spirit of materialism has waltzed through Australian history for too long. Illustrated by John Spooner. -
Here is the story of seven years of patrolling by one of the Australian Inland Mission padres and his wife. Their only home was the vehicle in which they travelled and their parish was the northern third of Queensland - the then-forgotten 'top-end' of Australia. Written with humour, warmth and a very human fellow-feeling together with a love for her country and the end result is a story with plenty of information and interest regarding the Australian Inland Mission and its work. -
Dewey's story starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next working by library director Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of them in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with this enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most. As his fame grew and spread from town to town...then state to state... and finally, amazingly, worldwide, Dewey became more than just a friend; he became a source of pride for an extraordinary Heartland farming town pulling its way slowly back from the greatest crisis in its long history. How much of an impact can an animal have? How many lives can one cat touch? How is it possible for an abandoned kitten to transform a small library, save a classic American town, and eventually become famous around the world? For Dewey Readmore Books, it was easy. -
Antonino is an abandoned child struggling for survival in the dark alleys of Naples. He is one of thousands whose waking hours are spent in petty crime and whose bed is a street grating above a baker's oven. At eight years old, his body is so small, his face so pinched, you would take him for five or six. Yet there is hope, in the shape of a young priest, Mario Borrelli. In a journey of self-transformation and love, Father Borrelli befriends the street children and sets up a support network for them: The House of the Urchins. Morris West spent time in the slums of impoverished postwar Naples. His chilling account of the local street urchins in his international bestseller Children of the Sun drew the world's attention to their plight, and offers a timeless insight into child poverty. West's portrayal of Father Borelli has inspired many others to follow in Borelli's footsteps. -
Guiseppe Balsamo was born in the mid-eighteenth century in the slums of Palermo, Sicily. He would rise from obscurity to become the legendary Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, whose dangerous charm and reputed healing would make him the darling - and bane - of upper-crust Europe. Moving through the period between the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - a time when reason and superstition co-mingled in the minds of even the best educated - Cagliostro earned a reputation for dazzling kings, feeding the poor, healing the ill and - most conspicuously - relieving the careless rich of their money. He was involved with major figures in Europe at that time: Casanova, Mozart, Goethe and Catherine the Great just to name a few. Eventually a lifetime of political intrigue led him to become the key figure in The Diamond Necklace Affair, which many believe precipitated the French Revolution itself and which would lead to his imprisonment by Louis XVI. Also the leader of an exotic brand of Freemasonry, Count Cagliostro was indisputably one of the most influential and notorious figures of the latter eighteenth century, overcoming poverty and an ignoble birth to become the darling - and bane - of noble society. Yet in London, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg, he established "healing clinics" for the poorest of the poor, and his dexterity in the worlds of alchemy and spiritualism won him acclaim among the European nobility.
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