As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she'd simply say 'I'm light-skinned.' Later he wondered if he was different too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. 'You're a human being,' she snapped. 'Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!' And when James asked what colour God was, she said 'God is the colour of water.' As an adult, McBride finally persuaded his mother to tell her story - the story of a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Bap... View More...
Cory Friedman was an ordinary fun-loving little boy. That fateful March morning in 1989 started just like any other but later that day, he started to feel very different and the course of his life was set to change. It started with an irresistible urge to shake his head, and before long, his body became a volatile, explosive and unpredictable force. Overtaken by physical urges, tics and compulsions, the bright young boy started to feel and look like a puppet on a string. Cory had developed a rare combination of Tourette Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety Disorder and other neurol... View More...
Jennifer Worth's tales of being a midwife in 1950s London, now a major BBC TV series. Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were ... View More...
The third and final book in the bestselling CALL THE MIDWIFE series, now a major BBC TV series. This final book in Jennifer Worth's memories of her time as a midwife in London's East End brings her story full circle. As always there are heartbreaking stories such as the family devastated by tuberculosis and a ship's woman who 'serviced' the entire crew, as well as plenty of humour and warmth, such as the tale of two women who shared the same husband! Other stories cover backstreet abortions, the changing life of the docklands, infanticide, as well as the lives of the inhabitants of Nonnatus ... View More...
This is an account of the extraordinary life of John Laffin, editor and journalist, novelist and poet, soldier, military historian, and more. Crammed with incident and anecdote, it is the story of a man determined to leave his mark on the world. View More...
Through the lives of three different women - grandmother, mother and daughter - this book tells the story of 20th-century China. At times scarcely credible in the details it reveals of the suffering of millions of ordinary Chinese people, it is an unforgettable record of tyranny, hope and ultimate survival under conditions of extreme harshness. In 1924, at the age of 15, the author's grandmother became the concubine of a powerful warlord, whom she was seldom to see during the ten years of their "marriage". Her daughter, born in 1931, experienced the horrors of Japanese occupation in Manchuria ... View More...
ME AND HER: a Memoir of Madness reveals how Karen Tyrrell, a dedicated Australian teacher is repeatedly harassed by parents at her school to breaking point and beyond. In a fit of desperation, she escapes and runs. Police and medical professionals discover her hiding in a lonely motel, forcing her into the frightening world of the psychiatric system. The reader is taken back to the classroom, discovering how the harassment affected Karen as we journey through her gradual decline and disintegration leading to her incarceration. Later Karen performs an 'experiment', purposefully stressing over a... View More...
Me & Him: A Guide to Recovery reveals the shock discoveries casting Karen Tyrrell's first memoir Me & Her: A Memoir of Madness in a new light. An Australian teacher, Karen highlights the crucial role of her husband, Steve played as carer in her recovery from parent harassment and subsequent mental illness. In this self-help memoir, Karen shares practical mental-wellness advice, demystifies meditation, addresses sleep problems and explains how to beat depression and anxiety. Karen also discloses the dreaded secrets Steve finally revealed to her. 'On that fateful blue-sky day, my life as I knew ... View More...
Growing up in North Queensland in the early 1900's. Australian children of this new millennium takes for granted a lofestyle that includes videos, T.V. Soapies, DVD's, computer games. But the children of a hundred years ago, the Federation era, had a different set of expectations. They walked barefoot through the bindies to school. Their homes were barkhuts with ant-beds for floors. they harnessed their billy-goat carts to fetch wood and water. This earlier generation of North Queenslanders lived with floods and droughts. They knew grinding poverty and they knew hard work, but they were proud ... View More...
Charlie and Pauline Rayment wouldn't live anywhere but the Outback. Charlie brought Pauline as a bride to 'Kurran', in the ranges of the Diamantina catchment. Pauline faced the wilderness while Charlie carved a property from the harsh environment. Their story typifies this new collection by Marion Houldsworth. Readers share the Outback experience at one remove; wake face-to-face with a rock-python, are sucked down in a whirlpool, trapped inside a water-tank, help a neighbour bury a dead child. They swim cattle across the flooded Burdekin, and, like Clancy of old, tail 'twelve-fifty fats' down ... View More...
Maybe It'll Rain Tomorrow is the perfect title for Marion Houldsworth's Volume Two of From the Gulf to God Knows Where. Rain is a lifeblood and a ubiquitous topic of conversation in the bush. It can mean the difference between success and failure; life and death. 'Maybe it'll rain tomorrow' is a catch phrase used by country people and expresses the optimism and courage they show in the face of often almost overwhelming adversity. Critique: This second volume of From the Gulf to God Knows Where is a tribute to some wonderful people. It is also a tribute to Marion Houldsworth's work. Readers... View More...
Goodbye to Italia by Marisa Parker. A pretty little Italian girl skips outside to peer up at the unexpected drone of aeroplanes, unaware of the danger as her neighbour, an eccentric opera singer, fervently prays for her teenage son. It is the start of WWII. An age difference of thirteen years separates the little girl Mariolina Martore and the army officer Eugenio Piergiovanni, but their lives are destined to intertwine. Mariolina is a timid but stalwart child who lives with her mother and grandmother. During the war years, they endure bombings, cold, hunger, and disease in Torino, Northern I... View More...
In an exquisitely written memoir, Mia Farrow introduces us to the landscapes of her extraordinary life. Moving from her earliest memories of the walled gardens and rocky shores of western Ireland and her Hollywood childhood to her career as an actress, she writes of these experiences and her struggle to protect her children in a painful custody battle with Woody Allen. It was this crisis that led her to reflect upon the incidents that had brought her to a place so incomprehensible. Now, in What Falls Away, a memoir resonant not only in its honesty but also in its beautifully crafted prose, ... View More...
Mercenary Mum is the true story of a young single mother who went from working at her local Woolworths store to serving as a soldier in the Australian Army's elite Close Personal Protection Unit. She then left the army to become a high-risk security contractor, where she was responsible for protecting high-threat targets from assassination and opportune attack in Iraq. Neryl reveals what it's like to be a woman in a private army trying to survive in a prejudiced man's world, exposed to alcohol-fuelled parties, drugs and sexual abuse. Neryl's professional and personal resolve is pushed to its... View More...
'Did you ever feel that you were missing someone you had never met?'. Haunted by the ghost of the wise, mystical, lovely lady who lives just around the corner in time, Richard Bach begins his quest to find her, to learn of love and immortality not in the here-after, but in the here and now. Yet caught in storms of wealth and success, disaster and betrayal, he abandons the search, and the walls he builds for protection become his prison. Then he meets the one brilliant and beautiful woman who can set him free, and with her begins a transforming journey, a magical discovery of love and joy. 'Non... View More...
Fifty Years of Flying Fun covers, in a roughly chronological order, over fifty continuous years of flying. This ranges from joining the RAF in 1962, through his intriguing first operational tour on Hunters in Aden, the early days of the Jaguar in Germany and, finally in the RAF, an almost outrageous two years flying the Jaguar and Hunter with the Sultan of Oman's Air Force. His subsequent civil flying has been exclusively in the General Aviation and flying display fields as a flying instructor and well known display pilot, including being involved in many varied and interesting display-rela... View More...
More to the Story looks beyond negative media reports, political speeches and fear-mongering statistics to tell human stories of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. Rosemary Sayer writes with empathy and humility of her interviews with refugees from Burma, Afghanistan and South Sudan. Together, they tell stories of persecution, violence and starvation; families separated for a time, or forever; the desperation of thousands in refugee camps, awaiting relocation under humanitarian programs; the perilous journeys by boat of those for whom waiting would have meant death; life in mandatory d... View More...
***each copy signed by the author on front end paper 'Best Wishes, Sandy Thorne'*** Feel like a trip down memory lane? Need a laugh? If you've ever pinched fruit, pelted rocks on people's roofs, talked about hairs in grade seven or been expelled from school, this hilarious memoir will be your cup of tea. If you didn't do any of those things but wanted to, this book is also for you. Growing up wild and free in the golden era of the 1950s and '60s in rural Queensland, Sandy Thorne was constantly in more strife than Flash Gordon. Her bum frequently glowed as crimson as a baboon's after t... View More...
The inspiring true story of how courage, a dream, and some needle and thread can change a life forever... Since she was young, Tala Raassi knew her fate lay in fashion. But growing up in her beloved homeland of Iran, a woman can be punished for exposing her hair in public, let alone wearing the newest trends. Despite strict regulations, Tala developed a keen sense of style in backroom cafes and secret parties. She never imagined her behavior would land her in prison, or bring the cruel sting of a whip for the crime of wearing a mini-skirt. Tala's forty lashes didn't keep her down – the... View More...
This autobiography describes the hours before and after Terry Waite was taken hostage in January 1987 in Beirut. Waite analyzes his thoughts and feelings immediately prior to captivity - what was the nature of his role as envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury? What was his relationship with the Americans and Colonel Oliver North? The book looks at Waite from his upbringing in Styal, Cheshire, until after his release in November 1991, when he had become one of the best-known figures of his time. It is an account of his years in solitary confinement and of the inner strengths which enabled him ... View More...
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