Australia Books

I mark this book as a required text to my students in my Cultural Studies Course.

Despite, or rather because of it's professed limitation to British Cultural Studies, Turner demonstrates a lot of sensitivity to what is and what is not British Cultural Studies, making any reader immediately aware of how other Cultural Studies traditions may differ. His extremely cogent and clear account takes the reader easily into the heart of Cultural Studies- what quarrels does British Cultural Studies have with other disciplines and what is so unique about its orientation as a discipline?

Turner's is a well-summarized, well-written introduction to the tradition of so-called critical cultural studies. This can draw a lot of attention from undergrads to phd-to-bes, from all across the social science and hmanities fields--such as mass media, communication, literature, aesthetics, philosophy, criticism, popular culture. If you believe that there's something missing in the US mainstream social science and humanities, this is the book you must start with.

This book contains a wealth of information about the business life of these great industrialists like JRD Tata, Walchand Hirachand, G D Birla & Kasturbhai Lalbhai. While there are a lot of information available about G D Birla & JRD Tata, this book contains little known facts about the life of Walchand Hirachand & Kasturbhai Lalbhai which make for a very interesting reading of the business life in India in the earlier part of the 20th Century.

A most interesting read, shows the business acumen of the old times, a large part of it is still valid in this day and age. Most interesting part was how the Birla's managed their conglomerate, how they became a conglomerate - the concept of the "Partha". The lessons from these great men are most inspiring. This could be a text book for a Business school. Show the west - How the east does business and are successful at it. Good work Gita Piramal. - Cheers, Sarab Sokhey

This is a great book, for surfers and non-surfers alike. An exciting and humorous, and at times sad, book to read. Rabbit's life is a series of twists and turns and very human mistakes. I especially liked the stories of his first trip to the Hawaiian Islands, North Shore. I was laughing a lot and couldn't put the book down. A good chronicle of the "Aussie Invasion" of the mid-1970's, and all of the crazy stuff that happened during that time.Pro Surfing nowadays seems very tame in comparison. And to think, Rabbit Bartholomew is now the President of the ASP!

If you've ever gone out at 5 in the morning to catch a wave before school. Or gone out during lunch break even if it's flat. You'll love this book. Nuff said.

David Landau's family engaged in leather manufacture before the war. Despite their wealth, they were Communists. (p. 8). After Poland's 1939 defeat, Landau joined the ZZW, despite being professedly apolitical, because it was the first Jewish group to organize armed resistance. (p. xiv).

Jews who were citizens of neutral countries were exempt from Nazi persecution. (p. 64). And, on a day-to-day basis, Jews and Poles under German rule weren't that far apart: "The Poles in Warsaw lived life close to death; for the remaining Jews, death was the rule around which life centered." (204). The Nazi extermination camps shouldn't be dichotomized with conventional Nazi concentration camps: "In terms of goals, there were no differences. They were all intended to destroy innumerable victims...[differences only] in the methods used to achieve this end." (p. 75).

Jan T. Gross and his fans have argued that Poles regularly incurred the German-imposed death penalty while black marketeering, but seldom in hiding Jews. This disingenuous argument presupposes that both activities had comparable risk of discovery, and comparable experiencing of the death penalty if caught. They were not. In fact, Landau writes: "Open black markets in primary products were working in different parts of Warsaw. The German authorities looked the other way where Poles were concerned. Germans were making the greatest profits anyway." (p. 58).

Hard-core Polish blackmailers of fugitive Jews had no regard for Jewish lives. What is often forgotten is that they had no regard for Polish lives either. Landau comments: "The SZMALCOVNIKS made no distinction between Jews and their protectors." (p. 267; see also p. 209). Landau adds: "To this day, whoever speaks of the Polish people as a unit, `the Poles', does them the same injustice as the anti-Semite does to the Jewish people when they speak of `the Jews'." (p. 289).

Landau's narrative of his participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising focuses on combat in the attics and the bunkers, and the help given by Polish sewer workers. He met "Bystry" (Iwanski)(pp. 40-41, 80-84), and thus summarized Polish involvement: "It would be as false to claim they [Poles] trained us merely for their interests as to claim they did it merely for our own. Our benefit was mutual. Before, during, and after the Uprising, our Polish friends stood by. A few even entered into the ghetto to fight, and some died fighting with us." (p. 97). WARNING: The descriptions of German atrocities are atypically graphic.

Why didn't the Polish Underground follow through and integrate the surviving ZZW units into the AK? Landau opines: "The Home Army officially welcomed Jews in their ranks. However, as history was later to prove, a secret order was sent out early in 1944 to eliminate the Jewish Underground fighters because they were suspected of helping the advancing Red Army, which was politically against the interests of the Government-in-Exile." (p. 288).

Subsequently, Landau observed the Polish Warsaw Uprising (1944), and was one of several hundred Jews who survived by hiding in its ruins following the German-forced evacuation of the population. Just as Poles had earlier looted Jewish properties, so now the Jews looted Polish properties. (pp. 321-324).

I share the author's name, which was the way I heard of this book. It is an amazing story, and I very much enjoyed reading it. Intense, emotional, and an overall great book. I liked it better than Elie Wiesel's Night; Caged was more in-depth, longer, more interesting to me, and a story of what life in Europe was like outside of the death camps.

I started reading this novel in my Canadian literature course.
I wasn't sure exactly what to expect, especially seeing how this is a school thing.
This woman brings you right into her life, showing you the different demented ways that some people on this planet live.
She tells you about her insanely horrifying life.
Everything from her marriage, her drug addicted ways, her affair with a married man in prison, giving birth to her baby boy in a morgue next to a dead woman whom she had just seen a few days before in a restaurant where she was having breakfast with her kidnapper,who is also the wife of her childs father.
This novel gets better by the paragraph. It grasps your interest so tight that you don't want to put it down until it's finished.
I would honestly rate this non-fiction novel the best I have ever read.

I was a bit skeptical to read this book, all I knew about the author was that she wrote poems - and I hadn't read any of them. Much to my pleasure - this book was fascinating. It was raw, real, honest and utterly irrisistable. I found myself reading slower and slower as I got to the end - simply because I didn't want it to end. The reader is immediatly brought into the narrator's world, you feel her feelings, her fright and her pain. It's a great read - one that you won't ever forget.

100 female convicts were sent from England to Sydney on the Princess Royal. Babette Smith has traced the fates of all of them, so far as possible. For a few, she has fascinating detail. Susannah Watson, a forebear of the author's, regarded transportation as the "best thing befell me, except for you children."
Scholarly but full of lively detail and action, this is a remarkable work

This is a splendid history of the women who, in the 1830s, were convicted of various petty (and some not so petty) offenses and shipped off to the convict colonies of early Australia. Many American booksellers still stock "The Fatal Shore," but in many ways this is a more compelling story, not just because of its observations on early Victorian morality but also because of the fascinating, if tragic, story of its central character, Susannah Watson. Great adventure, great history.

At my secondary school it was obligatory in senior years to read Homer and very dull it was. In stodgy translation, he seemed remote in space/time and world-view from our daily life. This novel touches the Greek myths with an electric spark. How enticing it is to read about Aphrodite's magic brassiere that she lends to aid the seduction of Zeus. Just as Aphrodite was charged with responsibility for sexual love, each Greek god represents some universal human passion. These passions are alive still, operating in present day affairs. One of the premises of Maze's novel is that the ancient deities' interactions offer an analogue for today's social and international undercurrents. Specifically, he holds that since the deities possess mythical being, and the myths are extant in mass entertainment, it is imaginable those old gods still exist and follow their favourite amusement of interfering in mortal affairs.
Most science fiction and modern fantasy are decidedly American. In Cassandra Peel and the Wild Gods of Cyberspace there are no surreal goings on in some small Midwestern town or in slick California, no vision of a future fractured New York, no imaginary metropolis haunted by mushroom dwellers or regal species of riverine squid. This allegorical fantasy for young adults - anyone older than ten - is set in our present world in a traditional genre. We are spared postmodernist distortions and overwrought syntax. The story is told in the invisible author's adult narrative voice.
It is a Sister-of-Harry-Potter novel. Cassandra Peel and her friend Parvati are the dominant characters. Their allies, Pran and Giorgio, have their own personalities and gifts, but their role is basically supportive. We meet them in an Australian country town at a special school for talented, non-conforming dropouts. Working on her computer, Cassandra, a single-minded literature student, accidentally accesses Greek goddess Athena in cyberspace. For her own reasons, Athena later introduces Hephaistos, master craftsman, and his former, faithless wife, the Marilyn Monroe-figure Aphrodite. The four youngsters soon find themselves swept into a plot to foment World War III, hatched by Ares, war-god and seducer of Aphrodite. Our heroes, with the help of Hephaistos, his beautiful robot maidservant Eliza, and the complex Indian goddess Durga who comes to Parvati's aid, foil this plot. The ambivalence between Ares and Aphrodite mirrors the frequent real-life fusion of sex and violence, as Cassandra's admired literature teacher, Sarah Beecham, warns her.
Psychological complexities are important in the novel and for the author, a former psychology professor. The wonderfully capable Eliza has great difficulty when Cassandra encourages her to refer to herself in the first person, not the third. Like a child, she cannot understand how she can be "I" when Cassandra also is "I"- and she is sure Hephaistos, her Maker, won't allow her to be a person. The robot maids are not Maze's invention; they are present in the Iliad, and his references to events there are reliable - such things as Athena gloating how she had felled Aphrodite once with a big rock.
The youngsters rely not on the familiar witches, shapeshifters, vampires and demons, hobbits and wizards as supportive companions but on themselves and each other. Giorgio has developed a Virtual Reality helmet that Hephaistos secretly converts into a Bodily Reality one, so the wearer can be flashed into cyberspace along a TV beam. The kids use this invention to defeat Ares's plot and rescue one another from danger. There is nothing extravagantly fantastical about Bodily Reality travel, there is a feeling it could happen. The novel's hold on reality extends to the oil-economy competition that Ares manipulates to bring about World War III, and the way patriotic fervour colludes with him.
The humour and parody of our own world rattle along and the real and virtual plots come to a satisfying, heart-warming conclusion. Some issues are intentionally left unresolved because the immortals are immortal. A sequel is advertised as forthcoming in 2004 and promises to delve into the darker side of the adolescents' personalities more deeply than in this first novel.
On average one per thousand of new authors' unsolicited manuscripts in children and young adults' fiction are published. Not all of these even cover the cost of publication. Must we believe that the remaining 999 have all been carefully read and found wanting? This terrific read and impressive first novel, defiantly self-published and recently reprinted with Booksurge, was numbered among the 999. Its worldly ironic humour is a refreshing contrast to the prevalent `dumbing-down' of orthodox education, and the publishing industry's low estimate of adolescent taste and understanding.
There is something for everyone in this charming book. The cheerful acceptance of ethnic diversity and disrespectful approach to traditional sanctities give it a distinctly Australian air. It is rich and complex enough for adults and fully accessible to children. Give it to your kids and grandkids and friends' teenage kids - that's after you have read it yourself.

Dr Rachael Henry
Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Sydney
Australia

At my secondary school it was obligatory in senior years to read Homer¯and very dull it was. In stodgy translation, he seemed remote in space/time and world-view from our daily life. This novel touches the Greek myths with an electric spark. How enticing it is to read about Aphrodite's magic brassiere that she lends to aid the seduction of Zeus. Just as Aphrodite was charged with responsibility for sexual love, each Greek god represents some universal human passion. These passions are alive still, operating in present day affairs. One of the premises of Maze's novel is that the ancient deities' interactions offer an analogue for today's social and international undercurrents. Specifically, he holds that since the deities possess mythical being, and the myths are extant in mass entertainment, it is imaginable those old gods still exist and follow their favourite amusement of interfering in mortal affairs.
In Cassandra Peel and the Wild Gods of Cyberspace there are no surreal goings on in some small Midwestern town or in slick California, no vision of a future fractured New York, no imaginary metropolis haunted by mushroom dwellers or regal species of riverine squid. This allegorical fantasy for young adults - anyone older than ten - is set in our present world in a traditional genre. We are spared postmodernist distortions and overwrought syntax. The story is told in the invisible author's adult narrative voice.
It is a Sister-of-Harry-Potter novel. Cassandra Peel and her friend Parvati are the dominant characters. Their allies, Pran and Giorgio, have their own personalities and gifts, but their role is basically supportive. We meet them in an Australian country town at a special school for talented, non-conforming dropouts. Working on her computer, Cassandra, a single-minded literature student, accidentally accesses Greek goddess Athena in cyberspace. For her own reasons, Athena later introduces Hephaistos, master craftsman, and his former, faithless wife, the Marilyn Monroe- figure Aphrodite. The four youngsters soon find themselves swept into a plot to foment World War III, hatched by Ares, war-god and seducer of Aphrodite. Our heroes, with the help of Hephaistos, his beautiful robot maidservant Eliza, and the complex Indian goddess Durga who comes to Parvati's aid, foil this plot. The ambivalence between Ares and Aphrodite mirrors the frequent real-life fusion of sex and violence, as Cassandra's admired literature teacher, Sarah Beecham, warns her.
Psychological complexities are important in the novel and for the author, a former psychology professor. The wonderfully capable Eliza has great difficulty when Cassandra encourages her to refer to herself in the first person, not the third. Like a child, she cannot understand how she can be "I" when Cassandra also is "I"- and she is sure Hephaistos, her Maker, won't allow her to be a person. The robot maids are not Maze's invention; they are present in the Iliad, and his references to events there are reliable - such things as Athena gloating how she had felled Aphrodite once with a big rock.
The youngsters rely not on the familiar witches, shapeshifters, vampires and demons, hobbits and wizards as supportive companions but on themselves and each other. Giorgio has developed a Virtual Reality helmet that Hephaistos secretly converts into a Bodily Reality one, so the wearer can be flashed into cyberspace along a TV beam. The kids use this invention to defeat Ares's plot and rescue one another from danger. There is nothing extravagantly fantastical about Bodily Reality travel, there is a feeling it could happen. The novel's hold on reality extends to the oil-economy competition that Ares manipulates to bring about World War III, and the way patriotic fervour colludes with him.
The humour and parody of our own world rattle along and the real and virtual plots come to a satisfying, heart-warming conclusion. Some issues are intentionally left unresolved because the immortals are immortal.

On average one per thousand of new authors' unsolicited manuscripts in children and young adults' fiction are published. Not all of these even cover the cost of publication. Must we believe that the remaining 999 have all been carefully read and found wanting? This terrific read and impressive first novel, originally self-published with Books & Writers Network and recently reprinted by Booksurge, was numbered among the 999. Its worldly ironic humour is a refreshing contrast to the prevalent `dumbing-down' of orthodox education, and the publishing industry's low estimate of adolescent taste and understanding.
There is something for everyone in this charming book. The cheerful acceptance of ethnic diversity and disrespectful approach to traditional sanctities give it a distinctly Australian air. It is rich and complex enough for adults and fully accessible to children. Give it to your kids and grandkids and friends' teenage kids - that's after you have read it yourself.

Rachael Henry
Institute of Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Sydney
Australia

An absolute god send. I have been in the hospitlaity industry for 25 years and never have I seen a book geared especially to the large scale market. It has given me so many ideas. Where is volume 2 and 3 and 4.

This book has proved to be useful on a daily basis. It deals with large numbers as the title suggests and the recipes are given for 25, 50, 100 which I have found, working in a boarding school, to be a great resource. Most of the recipes are basic but are easily modified.

this was a required text in a college political science class. the book gave concise examples of concepts and read easily. plus, dr. hertzke was one of the book's editors.

I give this book more exactly 4,5 stars. I am glad I acquired the book and included it in my personal library of political science. The authors build on a solid framework of different church-state regimes. They analyse neither too many nor two few countries. However, extension by others to cover more countries would be welcome. One can also ask if a similar approach could not be used for studying relations of the state to other organisations than churches. In all cases, the hypothesis is that explicit separation of the state from certain values leads to implicit support to those who are the strongest in pushing the values of their own.

What I love about this book is its simplicity. I keep it in my waiting room for patients to read. Each chapter is a habit to change all on its own and can make a difference to how you feel.

What Cyndi does not expect you to do is change your eating habits overnight. In each chapter Cyndi gives you a reason to change a particular habit e.g. drinking water or eating chocolate (yes, eating chocolate). Each habit in and of itself is easy to incorporate into a busy lifestyle and once it has become a habit, well, then you don't have to think about it and you can move onto the next habit to change.

This is a lifestyle book and I have enough patients that have been grateful for the change that I can't help but recommend the book. Increased energy and vitality is more than enough reason to read this book and start making some changes.

Wow! What an awesome book!
Cyndi O'Meara and 'Changing Habits Changing Lives'has indeed been the saviour I was looking for.
Cyndi's simple yet so effective ideas of how to change one bad habit at a time is very powerful. I love the idea that this is not a diet book, but rather a book that explains the basic understanding of food, it's origins and how getting back to basics with food is a healthier alternative to all the so called diet products on the market.
Cyndi's explanations just make so much sense and are so simple that it makes you wonder why food became so complex in the first place!