Australia Books

One of the best biographies I have read. Harsha does well to take the reader on a emotional roller coaster ride along with Azhar the player. Azhar as a player had seen many ups and downs in his career. Every time Azhar came back with a century, the reader feels vindicated. Azhar had played some of the greatest test and one-day innings played by an Indian batsman and the book recounts those innings very well. With the match-fixing controversy, it is easy to overlook Azhar's contribution to Indian cricket. Leaving match-fixing aside, this book is a deserving tribute to one of the greatest batsman produced by India.

I am extremely happy to review the book about azharuddin by bhogle. This book completely analyses the career graph of azhar and also his strange way of bouncing back at the right time. This book will tell us if you are mentally strong, would like to work hard always, if you happens to be a god fearing man and if you accept your mistakes, then you can also succeed like azhar inspite of any external disturbance coming on your way.
harsha bhogle has given a inside picture of azhar the man, the character of azharuddin on and off the field, his affection towards the game, fellow players, and ability to succeed in very difficult circumstances.
His relationship with the mumbai cricketers have been very much highlighted throughout like shastri supporting him initially and having difference of opinion with him in the later stages, vengsarkar who was unhappy with azhar on the tour of west indies as azhar failed miserably (remember vengsarkar also failed in the series), gavaskar's mixed reaction on the captaincy issue when azhar was made the captain for the 1992 world cup and the rapport what he shared with sachin tendulkar throughout his career (which should have got ended with the match fixing saga as sachin accused azhar on his credibility,quite strange and shocking!?)
the last line of the book is still in my memory like harsha finishing like " kisi rah pe kisi mod par tum chal nehidana mera hamsafar" which means that azhar doesn't want to miss friends at any point of his time in life which he recollects from a very famous hindi song, bhogle signed off the book saying that azhar is not alone!
But, now the whole world has left azharuddin alone without knowing the actual truth, hope the man of destiny will bounce back with the grace of god!!
regards - venkat

This map is the best in the market for a clear, concise overview of both New Zealand islands.

Very good product. Durable and has the ability to be written on with laminate pens.

The above review is appropriately complementary to Michaels, thorough and fascinating work. Aboriginal Australians from all over the contient have been represented as Others by european settlers for just over 200 years. The story of colonisation is still very much a contmeporary issue for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Accordingly, Michaels work is a fine contribution to an understanding of the need for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination and the ability to produce their own media and communications services.

Everything Michaels wrote was extremely interesting.

Eric Michaels, a social scientist from Texas who was a lecturer on media studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, documents the development of aboriginal media in the book "Bad Aboriginal Art - Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons." Published posthumously after his death in 1988 from AIDS, this rich volume contains Michaels' field essays and research papers exploring the impact of communications technology has had on the Aborigines in central Australia outside the margins of the "electronic grid."

When the Australian government launched the new AUSSAT satellite in the early eighties to broadcast network television to remote communities across the outback, Michaels, who spent three years living with the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu in central western Australia, witnessed the transition the new communications technology brought to the region. Like the early effort broadcast network television to Inuit communities, Michaels reports that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had initially disregarded cultural sensitivities of Aborigines through the communications downlink.

Again, disparate interests between the Aborigines, the government and the ABC raised questions over cultural assimilation and sparked conflict over technological institutionalization. Michaels, who passionately supports the interests of the Aborigines, analytically details the situation throughout, including his 1987 essay "Hundreds Shot at Aboriginal Community: ABC Makes TV Documentary at Yuendumu."

He writes: "If the goal is to be cultural maintenance, not deterioration and assimilation, the only solution for traditional people will be developed at the local community level, where these comparatively small cultural and linguistic groups can buck the bias of mass media by filtering incoming signals through local stations and inserting local material." Motivated ot this end, Aborigines on their own seized the opportunity to produce their own pirate -- and legit -- television, broadcast locally produced material, and form their own broadcasting organizations such as the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association and its television subsidiary Imparja.

Rather than positioning his focus as a voyeur, Michaels approaches this insightful study with a participatory stance, rather than an interpretive one. As a result, he intimately relates his experience with the Warlpiri, their struggles for empowerment, providing a cultural context of aboriginal tradition and outlining their ethical parameters of image representation. For instance, he describes aboriginal taboos associated with deceased community members, and the nuances of community ownership in creative expression and dissemination.

Considering that aboriginal people have been defined through images from an outside European perspective for nearly 500 years, the role aboriginal people have in creating media is not merely about access. . . . In the long run, the importance of aboriginal television and video production to serve the needs of localized communities is a significant step towards self-determination and cultural preservation.

Basil is the Sherlock Holmes of the Mouse World. His friend and associate Dr. Dawson narrates the story. Mrs. Judson is their mousekeeper. The mouse detective has learned his sleuthing skills by listening to Sherlock Holmes tell Dr. Watson how he solved his cases. Basil takes notes in shortpaw. Basil and Dr. Dawson live in the mouse village Holmestead in the cellar at 221B Baker St. In this book Basil solves the kidnapping of the mouse twins Angela and Agatha. Children will enjoy this book, and grown-up Sherlockians will appreciate it even more. It is charmingly illustrated. If you like "Basil of Baker Street," there are four delightful sequels.

I really liked this book because I like books about detectives. This is about a mouse detective who gets lessons from Sherlock Holmes.Like Sherlock Holmes, Basil has an assistant and together they go on lots of adventures solving cases.I couldn't put this book down I liked it so much. It wasn't too scary but it was never boring.

The book arrived in a timely fashion and was in pristine condition.
The book is incredibly interesting, very informative, and beautifully illustrated. A must have for those interested in Naval warfare.

Great book that includes descriptions of many sea battles from the East that are often ignored in histories. Illustrations are good, often photos of models. Battles get an average of 2 pages each, arranged in chronological order.

I agree with the reviewer above that this book contains a great collection of memories and pics from the famous 1964 tour of the Far East & Australia/New Zealand. As a collector of Beatle books & such, I'd recommend this to any avid collector.
I have to disagree with this reviewer regarding the "inaccuracy" of reported numerous liaisons with fans. This tour was famous for them! I have personally not come across anywhere George or Ringo refute or even discuss these allegations. However, John Lennon made it clear that Beatle tours were "like Satyricon on tour." Further, in a later interview with Jimmy Nicols (the drummer who temporarily replaced Ringo on this tour, he states: "....Paul was not the clean chap he wanted the world to see. His love of blonde women and his general dislike of the crowds are not told. John, on the other hand, enjoyed the people, but used his sense of humour to ward off any he didn't care for. He also drunk in excess. In Denmark, for example, his head was a balloon! He had drunk so much the night before, he was on stage sweating like a pig. George was not shy at all, as the press had tried to paint him. He was into sex as well as partying all night with the rest of us. I was not even close to them when it came to mischief and carrying on. I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them until I met up with these guys! But I did as they did. To sit here and list each and every little thing we did in such a short time, well, I just can't do it... The Beatles living life to the fullest. I just thank God that I was there to live it with them. Needless to say, the 300,000 people screaming at me and tearing me coat off to the skin was a trip in itself,"(excerpted from a 1987 interview with Austin Teutsch).

In all the books written about The Beatles, the Australian tour of July 1964 is usually dismissed with the three word reference "Far East Tour". This book was the first attempt to redress that injustice. Quite simply, the Beatles tour turned Australia upside down. In Adelaide 600,000 people gathered outside the hotel where they were staying (Adelaide had a population of 1.4 million). John Lennon told reporters "This is the greatest reception we've had anywhere in the world". In this book, acclaimed rock historian Glenn A. Baker chronicles the tour, and the visit to New Zealand. There is one glaring inaccuracy - it is claimed that the group slept with hundreds of young girls during the tour. This has been discredited by Ringo and George. Anybody familiar with the group would know that there was simply no time for this type of funny business, besides Brian Epstein kept them on a tight reign and wouldn't have allowed it. This part was probably included to get some cheap headlines in Australia's more salacious tabloids. One interesting section is the information on Jimmy Nicol, the stand-in drummer who filled in for Ringo during the first half of the tour. There is also the devastating photo showing Nicol sitting in a deserted airport terminal waiting for the flight back to England. All in all this book is a must for any serious Beatle afficionado. It gives a stark illustration of a country still coming to grips with not only a rock tour but a whole social phenomenon.

This exciting, new book marks a new stage in the maturation of the coaching industry and presents a coherent definition and model of behavioural coaching based upon scientific, validated behavioural principles. It provides structured models and strategies for bringing about durable and measurable change in individuals and organizations. Both authors are respected leaders in their fields and have an established reputation as coaching authorities. The authors are also founders of the internationally renowned Behavioral Coaching Institute. The institute is the global leader in the development and supply of world-best practice coaching technology and has trained and certified over 800 coaches working with organizations around the world.

Dr. Skiffington's coaching books have become industry standard materials throughout the global coaching community and make valuable reference resources for any coaching program.

Today, more and more professional coaches are moving away from reliance on simplistic and mechanical proprietary coaching systems taught by the many commercial coach training schools and are seeking to work with theoretically grounded and empirically validated approaches.

This text book is a detailed and well-crafted exposition of the behavioural science of executive, workplace and personal coaching -technical enough to satisfy the theorists but accessible to those without a background in the behavioural sciences. Authors Dr Skiffington and Zeus present an integrated model of evidence-based coaching which draws on adult learning principles, psychology, management and leadership literature and have integrated it with their considerable experience and research. Some of the key features of the text include: coaching as personal development; learning and behavioral change; the practice of behavioral coaching; client-centered coaching for internal/external coaches; and how behavioral coaching is being used today.

This work makes a significant contribution to establishing coaching as a well-grounded cross-disciplinary means of facilitating human and organisational change. Readership: It is a must-have for current and potential coaches, trainers, HRM personnel, consultants, management generally, academics, small business proprietors, students, professionals and even sports coaches etc.

Excelent for understanding the basics of this rather new field of expertise.

Conrad's account of his return to Tasmania is a delightful journey in time, place and language. Tasmania's special place in history and geography is depicted in the special style that can only be invoked by the self-exile. His prose is rich with metaphor in dealing with his own life, Tasmania's physical features and the society English society imposed on it. Raised in a suburb north of the State Capital, Hobart [the world's most southern such], Conrad's childhood environment was overshadowed by the looming, capriciously moody Mount Wellington. Everything else about Tasmania was "Behind the Mountain."

Conrad is expressive about what it was like to be raised in a place that even the rest of Australia seemed to have forgotten - it was left off school maps of the Last Continent. As the site of imprisonment for the most incorrigible of Britain's transported felons, its white inhabitants later tried to erase their own history. Isolated, then, in place both globally and socially, its people clung to the only culture they could derive - the "home" that was England. Even when the rest of Australia sought ties with the Americans, Tasmania remained locked into their version of the "old country."

Conrad breaks the mould of that image. He's frank about the white's treatment of Tasmania's Aborigine population and culture. He contrasts the outlook that named and respected every mountain, stream or other physical feature of the island. The Parlemar people were rounded up in a series of paramilitary exercises, the most notorious that of the Black Line. The surviving Aborigines [some suicided from seaside cliffs] were exiled to Flinders Island and other off-shore sites to rot and die. Even their corpses were desecrated by amateur "anthropologists" keen to depict them as sub-humans, well deserving extinction. The eradication was absolute - Tasmania remains the only Australian State with no surviving indigenous population.

Conrad journeys over the island by bus and aircraft [he is unable to drive]. The jaunts confront us with bizarre naming practices the island was subjected to by white settlers. No Aborigine names were applied until the State's Hydro Commission attempted some restitution while building dams in the mountains. The attempt is simply a final instance of the paucity of knowledge of Aborigine culture. His tours take us to Port Davey, a week's walk from the nearest road end, and the distant, disreputable Macquarie Harbour. His map shows the anomaly of this extensive estuary with its entrance but 60 metres wide. It was truly the end of the world for many convicts who laboured their lives away under assault by winds originating off the South African coast.

His candor in descriptions of his life and his family is refreshing. He aspired to the exile he entered with unwarranted enthusiasm. The book opens with the conflagration of his childhood artifacts. He is later as disturbed by this sacrifice as we are while reading it. His evocative metaphors evoke the remorse to follow him as he recovers or recreates those childhood losses. The memories he solicits show a level of confusion about his own identity - at one point unable to discern whether the image in a photograph is himself or his father. Life on the Apple Isle could lead to such vague self-persona given the paucity of information about his roots. An alcoholic grandfather had simply been made to disappear by the rest of his family.

It's trite to state that any examination of one's roots can lead to disillusionment. But Conrad's return to this remote land provided an improved sense of self-identity. He returned to learn more of his natal surroundings than would have been possible had he not left. He demonstrates that all he learned during his journeys didn't require a comparison to his adopted land to be valuable. Every place he visited or researched provided new elements of his self-awareness in their own right. The book is an object lesson for anyone who has left home for other venues. Read it to learn of this faraway land, the brilliance of its re-discoverer, and perhaps some insight into your own outlook about where you are. It's a rewarding journey.

Behind the Mountain is a unique creation, more than a close, personal look at a most unusual place, Tasmania, "an appendix, an after thought" to the mainland of Australia. It is also the memoir of a brilliant, scholarly self-exile's return after twenty years and his coming-to-terms with the people and places that made him who he is.

Conrad had "escaped" from Tasmania at age twenty to attend university at Oxford and to start a new life. He had burned in the back yard all his diaries, exercise books, and "anything that might incriminate [him] by attaching an identity to [him]." He had left his home and family behind, intending never to return, believing that "Home was where you started from, not where you stayed." Twenty years older when he writes of revisiting Tasmania, he has discovered that despite his attempt to escape, "Tasmania had set the terms of [his] life. The home you cannot return to you carry off with you: it lies down the at the bottom of the world, and of the sleeping, imagining mind."

This search for identity and roots informs his travels within Tasmania and gives the book an immediacy and liveliness lacking in so many other studies of place. Tasmania, he explains, is "an offshore island off the shore of an offshore continent," its residents therefore the "victims of a twofold alienation," with nothing between them and Anarctica, the end of the world. Conrad turns his eagle eye, his thoughtful sensibility, his absolutely limitless vocabulary, and his extraordinary skills at description to the recreation of Tasmania from the air, from the water, from the farm, from the mountain, and even under the ground, all in vivid word pictures. You will travel with him, and experience the great good fortune of seeing the island through the eyes of a gifted and introspective native whose twenty-year absence has given him a perspective on life in Tasmania that enable him to communicate it with "outsiders."

Best of all, Conrad permits the reader to share his discovery that he had "placed [his] trust, mistakenly, in the myth of self-invention. You created yourself, and did so out of nothing." Instead, he finds, "we are all still pioneers, required to colonise the piece of ground which chance assigns us, to make it our own by shaping it into a small, autonomous intelligible world....[Tasmania] was the landscape inside me: the space where I spent my dreaming time....Tasmania had set the terms of my life."

Beautiful photographs of LIFE - from the ovum and sperm joining together to the baby's head emerging at birth, this book takes you there. My son loved looking at the pictures. My husband and I had to take a deep breath to read the part that tells how the sperm gets in there to begin with. He's 7 and it was time. This was the best possible way. Amazing pictures!

This book was given to us when we were expecting our first son and we loved seeing the stages of development. It has become a favorite of our sons from the moment when they both first asked "what happened when we were in your tummy?".

The Best Beak in Boonaroo Bay is a great book which would appeal to a wide range of kids (and adults!). It's Australian without being strange to those from other nations, and contains the brilliant outcome that so many kids would appreciate - a contest with EVERYONE as the winner. The illustrations are bold and gorgeous - coloured lino prints. The birds' characterisations are so human and relatable! A lovely book all round.

.

This book was shortlisted for the 1994 "Picture Book of the Year Award". If your child is a budding birder here's a book that will both entertain, as well as inform.

Boonaroo Bay is normally a peaceful place but one day the spoonbill, the darter, the cormorant, the curlew and the oystercatcher had a big dispute over who had the best beak in the Bay. But luckily Pelican who is the wisest of the birds was watching this noisy argument and decided to hold a contest to settle the question.

The contest was very cleverly devised since there were five events: - collect shrimp from the mud....spearing fish......extract a pipi (clam) from its shell....find a worm in the sand....and finally catch a slithery eel.

Each bird won the event for which its beak was best suited. This is a very good lesson in life.

Narelle Oliver is both author and illustrator. Her linocut illustrations although very bold contain lots of subtle detail with accurate representations of the characteristics of each of the bird species.

This book would appeal to all children who are developing a love of birding.