Download or read book Kinglake 350 written by Adrian Hyland and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted Prime Minister's Award and Age Book of the Year Awards, 2012 Black Saturday. February 7, 2009. Roger Wood is the cop on duty at Kinglake when the most devastating fire in the nation's history roars through the ranges onto his beat. His task is to defend his town against the colossus that threatens to destroy it. And, over the course of one nightmarish day, that is what he will do. Even at the risk of his own life. Even after he receives the dreadful phone call telling him his own wife and kids are caught on the front line of the inferno. Adrian Hyland is the award-winning author of Diamond Dove and Gunshot Road. He lives in St Andrews, north-east of Melbourne, and teaches at LaTrobe University. 'A masterpiece of storytelling...The central characters in this special book emerge as Victoria Cross heroes in the heart of a bush community.' Kerry O'Brien 'What sets Kinglake-350 apart is its strong, agile storytelling - particularly Hyland's skill for weaving together small, telling details with big-picture concerns like climate change, weather pattern complexity, the failings of fire management policy and Australia's historical relationship with fire...' Meg Mundell, Readings 'Every Australian, both rural and urban, should read this book. Adrian Hyland pulls no punches in describing the harrowing consequences of living on the planet's driest and most fire-prone continent, and his account of the disastrous Black Saturday fires is a story of courage, dread and fallibility that will never leave you.' Cate Kennedy 'I've been waiting for a writer to look Black Saturday in the eye ever since the flames died down and, finally, Adrian Hyland's done it. In this compelling and moving book, Hyland has captured the character of a town caught, quite literally, in a fireball.' Anna Krien 'Kinglake-350 is about more than Black Saturday. It's about families and communities, the vital nature of ecology and geology; it's about the genesis of life itself. And while there are too many deaths in this saddest of tales, for the lucky ones the outcome was redemption.' Lincoln Hall 'Adrian Hyland has found a path through the smoke and confusion to produce an informed account that brings tears to the eyes of the reader. He has woven a selection of experiences into a seamless and gripping narrative that shows the courage, uncertainty, tragedy and stupidity of that day. Although the causes and lessons of the fire were explored in the report by the royal commission, this book will be more widely read. And deservedly so.' Age Book of the Year ‘Terrifying and moving... Kinglake-350 leaves us with a visceral sense of a harrowing event.’ Australian ‘Gripping and deeply moving.’ Adelaide Advertiser ‘As in the best fiction these characters will stay with you.’ Daily Telegraph

Download or read book Double Entry How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance written by Jane Gleeson-White and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Lively history. . . . Show[s] double entry’s role in the creation of the accounting profession, and even of capitalism itself.”—The New Yorker Filled with colorful characters and history, Double Entry takes us from the ancient origins of accounting in Mesopotamia to the frontiers of modern finance. At the heart of the story is double-entry bookkeeping: the first system that allowed merchants to actually measure the worth of their businesses. Luca Pacioli—monk, mathematician, alchemist, and friend of Leonardo da Vinci—incorporated Arabic mathematics to formulate a system that could work across all trades and nations. As Jane Gleeson-White reveals, double-entry accounting was nothing short of revolutionary: it fueled the Renaissance, enabled capitalism to flourish, and created the global economy. John Maynard Keynes would use it to calculate GDP, the measure of a nation’s wealth. Yet double-entry accounting has had its failures. With the costs of sudden corporate collapses such as Enron and Lehman Brothers, and its disregard of environmental and human costs, the time may have come to re-create it for the future.

Download or read book Acute Misfortune written by Erik Jensen and published by Black Inc.. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008, the artist Adam Cullen invited journalist Erik Jensen to stay in his spare room and write his biography. What followed were four years of intense honesty and a relationship that became increasingly claustrophobic. At one point Cullen shot Jensen, in part to see how committed he was to the book. At another, he threw Jensen from a speeding motorbike. The book contract Cullen used to convince Jensen to stay with him never existed. Acute Misfortune is a riveting account of the life and death of one of Australia’s most celebrated artists, the man behind the Archibald Prize–winning portrait of David Wenham. Jensen follows Cullen through drug deals and periods of deep self-reflection, onwards into his court appearance for weapons possession and finally his death in 2012 at the age of forty-six. After much critical acclaim, Acute Misfortune was developed into a feature film, winning The Age Critics Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2018. The story is by turns tender and horrifying: a spare tale of art, sex, drugs and childhood, told at close quarters and without judgement. Winner of the 2015 Nib Waverley Library Award for Literature Shortlisted in the 2015 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and for the 2015 Walkley Book Award ‘Erik Jensen is a Boswell or Vasari for our baffled, fractured, fucked-up times. Acute Misfortune is the most intimate, revealing, and original take on an artist’s life I know of.’ —Sebastian Smee ‘Erik Jensen gives us that ingenious place where biography is also art.’ —Jennifer Clement ‘This is supposed to be about an artist, a wild man, his lifetime, and it is; but Jensen has written such a beautiful window that all art and life is shining through. I'm supposed to be an artist but I cannot put this down.’ —DBC Pierre

Download or read book Three Crooked Kings written by Matthew Condon and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the landmark Australian true-crime books, with a new introduction following the death of disgraced Police Commissioner Terry Lewis. Three Crooked Kings is the shocking true story of Queensland and how a society was shaped by almost half a century of corruption. At its core is Terry Lewis, deposed and jailed former police commissioner. From his entry into the force in 1949, Lewis rose through the ranks, becoming part of the so-called Rat Pack with detectives Glen Hallahan and Tony Murphy under the guiding influence of Commissioner Frank Bischof.The next four decades make for a searing tale of cops and killings, bagmen and blackmail, and sin and sleaze that exposes a police underworld that operated from Queensland to New South Wales. This gripping book examines the final pieces of the puzzle, unearths new evidence on cold cases, and explores the pivotal role that whistleblower Shirley Brifman, prostitute and brothel owner, played until her sudden death.Awarded journalist and novelist Matthew Condon has crafted the definitive account of an era that changed a state and is still reverberating to this day.

Download or read book Signs and Wonders written by Delia Falconer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Nib Literary Awards. Chosen as a 2021 ‘Book of the Year’ in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Book Review. The celebrated, Walkley Award-winning author on how global warming is changing not only our climate but our culture. Beautifully observed, brilliantly argued and deeply felt, these essays show that our emotions, our art, our relationships with the generations around us – all the delicate networks that make us who we are – have already been transformed. In Signs and Wonders, Falconer explores how it feels to live as a reader, a writer, a lover of nature and a mother of small children in an era of profound ecological change. Building on Falconer’s two acclaimed essays, ‘Signs and Wonders’ and the Walkley Award-winning ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, Signs and Wonders is a pioneering examination of how we are changing our culture, language and imaginations along with our climate. Is a mammoth emerging from the permafrost beautiful or terrifying? How is our imagination affected when something that used to be ordinary – like a car windscreen smeared with insects – becomes unimaginable? What can the disappearance of the paragraph from much contemporary writing tell us about what’s happening in the modern mind? Scientists write about a 'great acceleration' in human impact on the natural world. Signs and Wonders shows that we are also in a period of profound cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme and, sometimes, beautiful. Ranging from an ‘unnatural’ history of coal to the effect of a large fur seal turning up in the park below her apartment, this book is a searching and poetic examination of the ways we are thinking about how, and why, to live now. ‘Only the finest of writers can hope to convey the mercurial nature of the times we are living though: the sense of slippage; of terror and beauty. Falconer is such a writer. Signs and Wonders is an essential collection.’ Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees ‘Delia Falconer is one of the best writers working today, and in Signs and Wonders she demonstrates everything that makes her writing so necessary. Brave, beautiful, and breathtaking in its elegance and intelligence, it is, quite simply, a marvel.’ James Bradley ‘Scintillating. Delia Falconer is at the peak of her powers as a critic, and as an observer of the natural world. Signs and Wonders looks outward from Sydney, and from literature, to trace the contours of our environmental moment.’ Rebecca Giggs, author of Fathoms ‘Exquisite … From reflections on feeding birds, analyses of literary trends, to Falconer’s Covid and fire diaries, the essays are complex, ambitious, rewarding … Delia Falconer’s mesmerising Signs and Wonders helps us to process the disorienting complexity of living in this time of great beauty and loss.’ Jonica Newby, Australian Book Review

Download or read book The Daughters of Mars written by Thomas Keneally and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what is perhaps “the best novel of his career” (The Spectator), the acclaimed author of Schindler’s List tells the unforgettable story of two sisters whose lives are transformed by the cataclysm of the first world war. In 1915, Naomi and Sally Durance, two spirited Australian sisters, join the war effort as nurses, escaping the confines of their father’s farm and carrying a guilty secret with them. Amid the carnage, the sisters’ tenuous bond strengthens as they bravely face extreme danger and hostility—sometimes from their own side. There is great humor and compassion, too, and the inspiring example of the incredible women they serve alongside. In France, each meets an exceptional man, the kind for whom she might relinquish her newfound independence—if only they all survive. At once vast in scope and extraordinarily intimate, The Daughters of Mars is a remarkable novel about suffering and transcendence, despair and triumph, and the simple acts of decency that make us human even in a world gone mad.

Download or read book The Italian Girl written by Iris Murdoch and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-07-20 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A family struggles for redemption after a funeral brings dark secrets to the surface in this novel from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Sea, The Sea. For the first time in years, Edmund Narraway has returned to his childhood home—for the funeral of his mother. The visit rekindles feelings of affection and nostalgia—but also triggers a resurgence of the tensions that caused him to leave in the first place. As Edmund once again becomes entangled in his family’s web of corrosive secrets, his homecoming tips a precariously balanced dynamic into sudden chaos, in this compelling story of reunion and coming apart from Iris Murdoch, “one of the most significant novelists of her generation” (The Guardian).

Download or read book Please Look After Mom written by Kyung-Sook Shin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE • When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom? “A terrific novel that stayed with me long after I’d finished its final, haunting pages.” —Abraham Verghese, bestselling author of The Covenant of Water “A raw tribute to the mysteries of motherhood.” —The New York Times Book Review Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love. “A suspenseful, haunting, achingly lovely novel about the hidden lives, wishes, struggles and dreams of those we think we know best.” —The Seattle Times

Download or read book Selective Memory written by Sue Milliken and published by Hybrid Publishers. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a memoir about the Australian film industry, with inside stories about how films are funded and made, and the problems facing a producer. Sue met and worked with some unforgettable characters, including Sidney Nolan, George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Frank Thring, John Meillon, Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves, Bryan Brown, Graeme Blundell and Barry Humphries. The book includes a number of black-and-white photos, and a foreword by well known director Bruce Beresford, who has worked closely with Sue.

Download or read book The Last Painting of Sara de Vos written by Dominic Smith and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, “The Last Painting” is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart. Vividly detailed, acutely sensitive to stratifications of gender and class, it’s fiction that keeps you up at night — first because you’re barreling through the book, then because you’ve slowed your pace to a crawl, savoring the suspense.” —Boston Globe A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A RARE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING LINKS THREE LIVES, ON THREE CONTINENTS, OVER THREE CENTURIES IN THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, AN EXHILARATING NEW NOVEL FROM DOMINIC SMITH. Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city’s Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it. New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. The lawyer’s marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict. Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably.

Download or read book Seven Types of Ambiguity written by William Empson and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1966 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.

Download or read book Timelines of Nearly Everything written by Manjunath.R and published by Manjunath.R. This book was released on 2021-07-03 with total page 2658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes readers back and forth through time and makes the past accessible to all families, students and the general reader and is an unprecedented collection of a list of events in chronological order and a wealth of informative knowledge about the rise and fall of empires, major scientific breakthroughs, groundbreaking inventions, and monumental moments about everything that has ever happened.

Download or read book First Person written by Richard Flanagan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book. But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with: evasive, contradictory, and easily distracted by his still-running “business concerns”—which Kif worries may involve hiring hitmen from their shared office. Worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy. As the deadline draws near, Kif becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Ziggy is rewriting him—his life, his future, and the very nature of the truth. By turns comic, compelling, and finally chilling, First Person is a haunting look at an age where fact is indistinguishable from fiction, and freedom is traded for a false idea of progress.

Download or read book The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf written by Ambelin Kwaymullina and published by Candlewick Press (MA). This book was released on 2014 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking refuge among other teens who are in hiding from a government threatened by their supernatural powers, Ashala covertly practices her abilities only to be captured and interrogated for information about the location of her friends.

Download or read book The Comfort of Figs written by Simon Cleary and published by Univ. of Queensland Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: &‘A poignant tale of secret histories and the mechanics of forgiveness' The Age1939. As a burgeoning city emerges from its landscape, so too does a bridge that will transform it from a sleepy country town. Three young men work on the construction of this iconic steel bridge. Labouring high above the river in dangerous conditions, close bonds develop between them. But one slip can &– and does &– alter their lives forever.A generation later, Robbie, a young landscaper, grapples with his difficult relationship with his father whose past is inextricably linked with the famous cantilevered bridge. Robbie is also battling to save his future with his girlfriend Freya, after a violent assault by a stranger sends her spiralling into herself.The Comfort of Figs is the engrossing story of the birth of a city and the burden of a family secret. Its legacy is two monuments &– one of nature and one of engineering &– both of them unforgettable.

Download or read book The Price of Valour written by John Hamilton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Goodbye Cobber, God Bless You and Gallipoli Sniper.When Hugo Throssell joined the 10th Light Horse Regiment in 1914, soon after the outbreak of the First World War, he was emblematic of the young Australian nation at that time: full of youth, vigour, courage and idealism. These traits were to see him awarded a Victoria Cross after the savage fighting for Hill 60 during the Gallipoli campaign. Badly wounded, Throssell was sent to England to recover. There he met his future wife, Katharine Susannah Prichard, journalist, novelist and committed socialist. It was the beginning of a relationship that changed the course of his life, for although he was to return to war and fight in Palestine, his view of the conflict and its terrible sacrifices began to turn. By 1919, Throssell – once hailed as an Australian hero – was ready to publicly denounce the war. His stance was to forever alienate him from former comrades and the political establishment. The war affected him in other ways too, as he found himself unable to hold down a job and increasingly prone to episodes of depression. In 1933, Throssell killed himself, leaving behind his beloved wife and only child. In his triumph and tragedy he remained as emblematic to his country as he’d been in those heady days of 1914, an example of courage and sacrifice whose youth and future had been forever darkened by the experience of war. Award-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hamilton has written a compelling narrative, giving us an extraordinary perspective of the Gallipoli battles for The Nek and Hill 60, combined with a compassionate and intimate account of the rise and fall of a real Australian hero.

Download or read book Florence Broadhurst written by Helen O'Neill and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2007-04-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of 2007 APA Book Design award for Best Designed Book of the Year and also for Best Designed Non-fiction Illustrated Book.