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  1. Biography

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Biography

Large 9780648884538

Together Apart: Life In Lockdown by BELINDA JACKSON & JUDE VAN DAALEN

$79.95 AUD

Available Stock:
39

Category: Biography

Portraits from a pandemic When COVID-19 hit Melbourne harder than a runaway tram, our lives changed - literally overnight.?Together Apart is a historical account of Melbourne's experiences during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, told through 60 stories of lives in lockdown. The book captures the poignanc y of the lollipop lady waiting for the children who never come and the grieving families divided by borders. There's the barista serving up caffeine and counselling, the football coach relegated to the bench and the joy rediscovered in rainbows and bears as our world slowed.? What started as a conversation over the back fence to break the solitude of lockdown has grown into a friendship and a partnership between portrait photographer Jude van Daalen and her next-door neighbour, journalist Belinda Jackson. Photographed, written and printed in Melbourne, Together Apart is Jude and Belinda's black-and-white coffee table book featuring 60 portraits of people in their neighbourhood, a time capsule reminding us of our emotional fragility and our resilience, our hope and humour, and our innate and unstoppable human need for togetherness.   ...Show more

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Large 9781990003042

Believer - Conversations with Mike Moore by Peter Parussini

$49.95 AUD

Available Stock:
33

Category: Biography

Michael Kenneth Moore was probably the country's last working class Prime Minister and while the book is inevitably political, it is also a remarkable New Zealand story about an ordinary kiwi achieving extraordinary things. This book is based on conversations held with Mike Moore over the past 12 months and reflections on his life and career involving people who were part of it. The chapters focus on key moments in his life - growing up partially crippled in poverty in rural Northland, moving to Auckland and becoming a trade unionist and New Zealand's youngest MP, losing his seat and fighting the Labour Party to get another one only to be diagnosed with cancer, helping make David Lange Prime Minister and beating Muldoon, the turmoil of the fourth Labour Government including becoming Prime Minister for only 59 days, taking Labour to within two seats of Government and being cruelling deposed as leader by Helen Clark in 1993, the years in wilderness when he came close to setting up a new party and not participating in a coup against Clark, his audacious campaign to become Director General of the World Trade Organisation, becoming New Zealand's Ambassador to the US and the stroke that cut it short, and his hopes for the future. In a country that celebrates sporting success Moore's story is also heroic because he has the same traits of smarts, hard work and determination to achieve at the highest levels - despite numerous setbacks - that all New Zealanders admire in the successful. ...Show more

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Large 9781988503141

Llew Summers - Body and Soul by John Newton

$71.95 AUD

Available Stock:
19

Category: Biography

Llew Summers (1947-2019) was a rarity in the art world - a figurative artist in a scene dominated by abstract practices. Llew Summers: Body and Soul depicts the work and life of one of New Zealand's most recognisable sculptors, a man of great warmth and astonishing vitality, whose works are daring, sens ual and provocative.John Newton takes us from Summers' beginnings as a self-taught artist, through his relationships and family life, to his success as a highly visible sculptor with works found in public spaces throughout New Zealand.We follow Summers' progression as an artist, a true independent, working outside the hierarchies of the art world. His early monumental works in concrete made him a public fixture, with themes of nurture and nature, sexuality and solidity seen in his idealised female forms. As he discovered carving in wood and marble, the work became more subtle and increasingly dynamic. From the early 2000s, following his first trip to Europe, religious imagery entered Summers' work in ways that extended both his visual and thematic range, and introduced a more overtly spiritual element. His later career features depictions of Christ, angelic winged figures and large, ambitious works in bronze.Illustrated with more than 200 photographs, including newly commissioned images of Summers' works, Llew Summers: Body and Soul is a joyful record of a life in sculpture and a testimony to the value of public art. ...Show more

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Large 9781988592510

Bus Stops on the Moon: Red Mole Days, 1974-1980 by Martin Edmond

$39.95 AUD

Available Stock:
52

Category: Autobiography | Reading Level: very good

Bus Stops on the Moon is a personal and a cultural history. As memoir, it is a sequel to The Dreaming Land (2015). A troubled and restless young Martin Edmond is on his way to becoming the wiser, older man who will sit down and write both narratives. As cultural history, the book gives us a participant' s-eye view of the early years of Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell's avant-garde theatre troupe Red Mole. Formed in 1974, Red Mole performed Dadaesque cabaret, agit-prop, costume drama, street theatre, circus and puppetry, live music, and became a national sensation. They toured the country with Split Enz and travelled internationally. One of Red Mole's five founding principles was 'to escape programmed behaviour by remaining erratic'. They ticked that one off. In Bus Stops on the Moon Martin Edmond offers, with his customary elegance, a rich and entertaining picture of the high times and low lives of Red Mole. ...Show more

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Large 9781776563128

In the Time of the Manaroans by Miro Bilbrough

$39.95 AUD

Available Stock:
82

Category: Biography

At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms. Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit. In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind. ...Show more

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Large 9781925902075

Bourke Street My View from Here by Jen Hutchison; Tony Brooks (As told by); Nicole Melbourne (Cover Design by); Nikki M Group (Designed by); Lisa Heffernan (Photographer); Journeys to Words Publishing (Produced by); Daniel Chelchowski (Compiled by, Text by)

$29.95 AUD

Available Stock:
70

Category: Biography

Bourke Street, My View from Here follows the untold story of Tony Brooks through a journey that sounds to be more fiction than fact. Jen converses with the man people call 'The Mentor of Bourke Street' about tattoos, leading to his past - alcohol dependency, a stint in prison for a murder he claims he d id not commit and his eventual release. It is a tale fraught with drugs and violence but ultimately one of understanding, change and acceptance.Tony shares the truth about his incarceration, the murder charge, his co-accused, and confession of the murder of Francisca Parquita Rodriguez. Tony talks - about it all.The reader is offered not only insight into the life of Tony, but an analysis of another culture within Melbourne that most people are unaware of. Despite his struggles, Tony remains an uplifting charmer on Bourke Street to hundreds who know him, and a friendly stranger with a cavalier smile to those who don't. ...Show more

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Large 9781869409128

You have a Lot to Lose - A Memoir, 1956 - 1986 by C. K. Stead

$54.95 AUD

Available Stock:
10

Category: Biography | Series: C. K. Stead Memoirs Ser.

New Zealand's most extraordinary literary everyman - poet, novelist, critic, activist - C. K. Stead told the story of his first twenty-three years in South-West of Eden. In this second volume of his memoirs, Stead takes us from the moment he left New Zealand for a job in rural Australia, through study a broad, writing and a university career, until he left the University of Auckland to write full time aged fifty-three. It is a tumultuous tale of literary friends and foes (Curnow and Baxter, A. S. Byatt and Barry Humphries and many more) and of navigating a personal and political life through the social change of the 1960s and 70s. And, at its heart, it is an account of a remarkable life among books - of writing and reading, critics and authors, students and professors. From Booloominbah to Menton, The New Poetic to All Visitors Ashore, from Vietnam to the Springbok Tour, C. K. Stead's You Have a Lot to Lose takes readers on a remarkable voyage through New Zealand's intellectual and cultural history. ...Show more

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Large 9780995106789

White Moko by Tim Tipene

$36.95 AUD

Available Stock:
28

Category: Biography

A memoir from award-winning writer and inspirational speaker Tim Tipene. Tim founded the Warrior Kids programme 22 years ago. His courses now empower families and children. Himself the product of rape, Tim spent a miserable childhood in which he was abused by both his birth and foster families. This me moir is a recollection of his life raised in violence, and follows on from a junior collection published last year, Mrs Battleship. It is a tribute especially to the few teachers who acted at different times to protect him, as well as his discovery that not everyone endured what he did. This is funny, sad, poignant and telling. Tim has found jewels of wisdom and love in a world that had no place for him. ...Show more

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Large 9781910258712

Hold the Front Page! - For the First Female Star of Fleet Street by Anne Scott-James; Clare Hastings

$44.95 AUD

Available Stock:
18

Category: Biography

In 1953 pioneering journalist Anne Scott-James started to write a weekly column for the Sunday Express newspaper. 'The Anne Scott-James Page' set the bar for a new way of writing. Scott-James perfected the art of the short, sharp column - and many of the topics she covered are equally on-trend today. Sh e cogently expressed her views on men, children, fashion, beauty, food, interiors, travel, and anything else that took her fancy. Political opinions might be squashed between thoughts on eyebrow tweezing and a piece on swimsuit lines. Scott-James was a great believer in entertaining her readers, and her columns are sharp, witty, to the point, often very funny, sometimes very moving. In Hold the Front Page! a selection of the Sunday Express columns is brought together with a commentary by her daughter, writer Clare Hastings, and with photographs from the Scott-James/Hastings family albums and drawings by Osbert Lancaster, Scott-James's third husband, to provide a fascinating insight into the 1950s - and into the public and private life of one of the most celebrated columnists of the twentieth century. ...Show more

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Large 9781988531793

The Paper Nautilus by Michael Jackson

$38.95 AUD

Available Stock:
4

Category: Autobiography | Reading Level: very good

The Paper Nautilus is about loss the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. The paper nautilus provides a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the angelically beau tiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered. Michael Jackson has recourse to his ethnographic fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as well as autobiography and fiction, in exploring his theme. This book crosses and blends genres most engagingly. Beginning as a series of essays, it gradually morphs into a mesmerising work of the imagination in which the boundary between author and other becomes blurred, and the line between fact and fiction erased. ...Show more

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Nophoto

We Don't Go Far But We Do See Life: Adventures on a Dutch Barge by KEITH HARRIS

$23.95 AUD

Available Stock:
21

Category: Biography

Follow Dutch barge Saul Trader on her voyages through the canals of Europe. Author Keith Harris and his merry crew journey from England to Belgium and Holland through the centre of France to the Southern extremities of the extensive French canal system. There are stories and anecdotes about the people t hat they meet along the way, and the amusing and sometimes frightening incidents that occur during their epic jaunt. ...Show more

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Large 9780995122956

One Minute Crying Time by Barbara Ewing

$43.95 AUD

Available Stock:
23

Category: Biography | Reading Level: near fine

This vivid memoir by well-known New Zealand actor and novelist Barbara Ewing covers her tumultuous childhood, adolescence and young-adulthood in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s - a very different time - and ends in 1962, when she boards a ship for London, to study at the Royal Acade my of Dramatic Art. It draws heavily on the diaries she kept from the age of twelve, which lead her to some surprising conclusions about memory and truth. Ewing struggled with what would now be diagnosed as anxiety; she had a difficult relationship with her brilliant but frustrated and angry mother; and her decision to somehow learn te reo Maori drew her into a world to which few Pakeha had access. A love affair with a young Maori man destined for greatness was complicated by society's unease about such relationships, and changed them both. Evocative, candid, brave, bright and darting, this entrancing book takes us to a long-ago New Zealand and to enduring truths about love. ...Show more

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