. .' Alison Hammond loves to laugh. And the nation laughs with her. Her sunny personality and zest for life have brought joy to millions and made her one of the UK's best-loved television presenters. Known for her hilarious and unforgettable interviews with Hollywood A-listers, Alison is also responsible for countless classic moments of broadcasting gold - from getting stuck on a caravan door to delivering Christmas cash dressed as an elf. But who is Alison Hammond really, and how did she become the personality we know and love? Shaped by the influence of her incredible mum, Alison went from small roles on television shows as a youngster to that life-changing appearance on Big Brother, before landing her dream job on This Morning. And through it all, she found the joy in every day, the positives in any situation. You've Got to Laugh gives a never-before-seen insight into Alison's life: her loves, her losses - with a side order of gossip. As well as being a hugely entertaining and uplifting read, Alison's story will inspire you to grab life with both hands and make the most of every single moment. 'Interviewer extraordinaire, reigning queen of the huns, and an out-and-out national treasure' Bustle

    In 1919, her father arrived there on the back of a camel. By the time Jacqueline was born, he’d become a mounted trooper, working in a succession of outback towns chasing down murderers and cattle thieves. Jacqueline’s childhood was spent in isolated bush settlements until her parents sent her to boarding school in Darwin to be ‘civilised’.After finishing school, Jacqueline found herself drawn back to the Territory where she soon met and fell in love with cattleman, Ken Hammar. Together they moved to one of the most inaccessible regions in the Top End. Starting out in a bark hut they’d built themselves, hard work and determination saw them prosper until they had a thriving million-acre cattle station with a more comfortable house, where they brought up their two children.A larger-than-life tale of adventure, survival and love in some of Australia’s most isolated country, Daughter of the Territory is an extraordinary autobiography that zips along at a cracking pace, with one entertaining yarn after another.Jacqueline and Ken Hammar are now in their eighties and live in the hinterland of the Gold Coast.

    The world she lived in — with its global economic uncertainty, political conservatism, and precarious employment conditions — didn’t match the one her parents grew up in. She read article after article about the reluctance of millennials to embrace the traditional markers of adulthood: a stable job, a house in the suburbs, a nuclear family. But do these emblems of maturity mean the same thing today as they did thirty years ago?In this smart, spirited enquiry, Doyle examines whether millennials are redefining what it means to be an adult now. Blending personal essay and cultural critique, she ventures into the big claims of philosophy and the neon buzz of pop culture to ask: in a rapidly changing world, do the so-called adult milestones distract us from other measures of maturity?

    A massive bestseller in Germany, this astonishing, fascinating and at times hilarious book relates a football career in which Lutz: Became the only person to have played professional football in all FIFA Confederations Was wrongly jailed for match fixing in Singapore spending 101 days in horrific conditions Signed for 25 teams (including Notts Forest, Wimbledon's Crazy Gang and Calgary) Stopped breathing three times after his heart stopped during a game Turned down mighty Bayern Munich to play in Malaysia Coached teams in such exotic locations as Norway, Namibia, Armenia and Cuba Kidnapped a Penguin! All this because he simply loved playing football and because, quite simply, goalkeepers are mad!"

    Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My FatherI began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present.According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree.You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity.Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked.Max is an astonishing and moving tribute to friendship, a meditation on memory itself, and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity.'A wonderful book. It is a story that needs to be heard.' Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University'It is a beautiful and haunting book…There is something sacred about this story, this delicate act of remembrance…There is a slow, elegant circling in the book's storytelling, as if those precious shards are held up to the light and turned to reveal their facets. But there is a compelling journey of discovery too, not so much into the light as into the darkness, into Max's silence. In Max, the reader becomes engaged in a fascinating, visceral wrestling with facts, the power of the imagination and the character of truth…This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception.' - Tom Griffiths. Emeritus Professor, ANU

    She's just flown in from Dublin ready for the start of school, but not at all ready, as it turns out, for what the year holds.A scandal at Matt's father's work plays itself out in the media. Matt feels his family changing, his life changing, the certainties of his world slipping away. Meanwhile, Monica Bloom finds trouble of her own, and Matt finds that he can't stop thinking about her. A funny and beautiful story about the power of first love and memory, expectations and change. About Nick Earls' novels: ". . . poignant and perceptive" Cleo ". . . warm, funny and deeply moving" Courier Mail ". . . written with verve and intelligence" The Bulletin

    The backroom deals, the frontroom coniving, the bitter defeat of idealism and the triumph of opportunism.

    Julia Gillard had plenty of warnings, but even she lasted longer than Abbott. Abbott ignored all the warnings, from beginning to end — the public ones, the private ones, from his friends, his colleagues, the media. His colleagues were not being disloyal. They did not feel they had betrayed him; they believed he had betrayed them. Their motives were honourable. They didn’t want him to fail; they wanted the government to succeed, and they wanted the Coalition re-elected. Abbott and Credlin had played it harder and rougher than anybody else to get where they wanted to be. But they proved incapable of managing their own office, much less the government. Then, when it was over, when it was crystal-clear to everyone that they had failed, when everyone else could see why they had failed, she played the gender card while he played the victim. In The Road to Ruin, prominent political commentator, author, and columnist for The Australian Niki Savva reveals the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Based on her unrivalled access to their colleagues, and devastating first-person accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Savva paints an unforgettable picture of a unique duo who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.

    From catch wrestling masters Strangler Lewis and Billy Robinson to pro-wrestling icons like Frank Gotch and Lou Thesz, from Olympic heroes Danny Hodge and Kurt Angle to the Japanese wrestler who trained the famous Gracie family and gave birth to the global phenomenon of MMA, Shooters takes you from the shadowy carnival tent and the dingy training hall to the bright lights of the squared circle and the Las Vegas glitz of the Octagon. This volume takes fans of pro wrestling and MMA from Billy Riley’s legendary Wigan Snake Pit to the rigorous UWF Dojo in Tokyo, and draws on meticulous research and original interviews with today’s tough guys.

    In his car were the drugs the team needed if they were to have any chance of playing a competitive part in the 1998 Tour de France. The car was searched, he was immediately arrested and so the story that has been undermining the sport of cycling since the death of Tommy Simpson in 1967, finally broke. Imprisoned for sixteen days, sacked from the Festina team and ostracised from the sport to which he had dedicated his life, Willy Voet at last was able to tell the truth. His sensational story will change cycling forever.Cocaine, amphetamines, EPO, heroin - all these are now considered not optional but necessary, not to win but just to compete in the Tour de France. Details of how these drugs are obtained, mixed together to make cocktails, administered and concealed are all included in this graphic and uninhibited account of how drugs brought cycling to its knees.

    Tarrawagga is a hole. Its only ambition is to be a crater, and it has every chance of getting there.The last thing you expect is to have action all around you, dangerous strangers in the backyard, and bullets flying past your ears.At your new school, everyone thinks you're the biggest loser in Grade 6. Little do they know. When they realise the truth, teachers and students alike are in for the shock of their life.Funny, gripping and full of surprises, The Year My Life Broke could be the most real book your read this year.WARNING: This book is not a fantasy. It contains no superheroes, wizards, dragons, time-travel, aliens or magic.

    Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul weren't surprised by the popularity of the class (UC Santa Barbara is a surfing school, after all, and together they have more than a century of experience in the water), but they were surprised that their non-surfing students outnumbered the surfers. There is something about surfing that people yearn to understand--and this is the book that examines the enduring worldwide appeal of the sport both in myth and reality.     Drawing on the authors' expertise as, respectively, a cold war historian and a historian of environmental history, The Surfing Professors Explain the World brings alive the colorful history of surfing by drawing readers into the ideas that have fueled the sport's expansion: colonialism, the military-industrial complex, globalization, capitalism, and race and gender roles. In a highly readable and provocative narrative history of the sport's signal moments--from the spread of surfing to the US, to the development of surf culture, to the introduction of women into the sport--Neushul and Westwick draw an indelible portrait of surfing and surfers as actors on the global stage.

    Its recession-proof economy is the envy of the world. It's the planet's great lifestyle superpower. Its artistic exports win unprecedented acclaim. But never before has its politics been so brutal, narrow and facile, as well as being such a global laughing stock. A positive national story is at odds with a deeply unattractive Canberra story.The country should be enjoying The Australian Moment, so vividly described by the best-selling author George Megalogenis. But that description may turn out to be inadvertently precise. It could end up being just that: a fleeting moment.At present the country seems to be in speedy regression, with the nation's leaders, on both sides, mired in relatively small problems, such as the arrival of boat people, rather than mapping out a larger and more inspiring national future.In The Rise and Fall of Australia, BBC correspondent and author Nick Bryant offers an outsider's take on the great paradox of modern-day Australian life: of how the country has got richer at a time when its politics have become more impoverished. In this thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking book, dealing with politics, racism, sexism, the country's place in the region and the world, culture and sport, the author argues that Australia needs to discard the out-dated language used to describe itself, to push back against Lucky Country thinking, to celebrate how the cultural creep has replaced the cultural cringe and to stop negatively typecasting itself. Rejecting most of the national stereotypes, Nick Bryant sets out to describe the new Australia rather than the mythic country so often misunderstood not just by foreigners but Australians themselves.

    During his 27-year career, “The Ryan Express” was named an eight-time All-Star and amassed seven no-hitters and more than 5,700 strikeouts—more than any other pitcher in major-league history. This comprehensive biography of Nolan Ryan follows the baseball legend’s journey from the start of his professional career in 1965 to his retirement in 1993. Hall of Famers, journeymen, clubhouse workers, coaches, and trainers offer their own unique take on Ryan in this book filled with never-before-told anecdotes and personal recollections and peppered with eyewitness accounts of his greatest games. In the pages of this history, readers will discover what made Nolan Ryan one of the most revered and respected athletes and citizens of his time.

    The crowning moment of Hogan’s comeback was his dramatic victory in the1950 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club near Philadelphia, where his battered legs could barely carry him on the 36-hole final day.Miracle at Merion tells the stirring story of Hogan’s triumph over adversity—the rarely-performed surgery that saved his life, the months of rehabilitation when he couldn’t even hit a golf ball, his stunning return to competition at the Los Angeles Open, and,finally, the U.S. Open triumph that returned him to the pinnacle of the game.While Hogan was severely injured in the accident, fracturing his pelvis, collarbone, rib, and ankle, his life wasn’t in danger until two weeks later when blood clots developed in his leg, necessitating emergency surgery. Hogan didn’t leave the hospital until April and didn’t even touch a golf club until August. It wasn’t until November,more than nine months after the accident, that he was able to go to the range to hit balls. Hogan’s performance at the Los Angeles Open in early January convinced Hollywood to make a movie out of his life and comeback (Follow the Sun, starring Glenn Ford).Five months later, Hogan completed his miraculous comeback by winning the U.S. Open in a riveting 36-hole playoff against Lloyd Mangrum and George Fazio, permanently cementing his legacy as one of the sport’s true legends.