Considered one of American’s most brilliant writers by the journalism community, this long-awaited book debut presents Labash at his very best. A latter day Leibling, Labash’s collection will take its place alongside books by writers such as Calvin Trillin and P.J. O’Rourke..• A unique voice that’s well-connected: Labash’s well-informed insights, self-deprecating wit, and provocative candor feature regularly in The Weekly Standard and have also appeared in Washingtonian Magazine , American Spectator , and on Slate.com. Extremely well-liked and respected, his media contacts are many and varied. He has declined invitations to appear on everything from HBO Sports to Meet the Press —but is finally willing to make the rounds. As LA Weekly wrote after his Detroit piece, “it’s not new to give props to Matt Labash.”.• Remarkable collection: Full of wit, insight, and a trenchant grasp of the American scoundrel, Labash’s masterful profiles of men on the nation’s fringe—Pirate Kingfish Gov. Edwin Johnson, The Right Reverend Dr. Al Sharpton, Dirty Trickster Roger Stone—are published alongside devastating pieces on such dead or dying cities as Detroit and New Orleans; work celebrating such joyous, but overlooked pockets of American culture as Revival music and Rebirth Brass Band; and scathing, hilarious briefs on the nation’s great phonies—Michael Moore, Louis Farrakhan, Donald Trump to name a few..

    This biography traces his life from a classic Australian childhood in the suburbs of Brisbane to the glory of captaining the World Cup winning Wallabies.

    A political betrayal. A constitutional crisis. The Palace Letters is the groundbreaking result of one historian’s fight to expose secret letters between the Queen and the then Australian governor general, Sir John Kerr, during the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam in the 1970s. Whitlam was a progressive prime minister whose reforms proved divisive after two decades of conservative leadership in Australia. When he could not get a budget approved, it sparked a political deadlock that culminated in his unexpected and deeply controversial dismissal by Kerr.More than 200 letters between Kerr and the Queen from the period exist in the archive, and historians have long believed that they could reveal the extent to which Buckingham Palace knew about or approved of the dismissal. But until now they have remained hidden in the National Archives of Australia, protected from public scrutiny through their designation as ‘personal’.In the face of this, Professor Jenny Hocking embarked on a 10-year campaign and a four-year legal battle to force the Archives to release the letters. In 2015, she secured a stellar pro bono team that took her case all the way to the High Court of Australia. On 29 May 2020, the court ruled in her favour, requiring the correspondence to be released.Now, Professor Hocking is able to reveal the previously hidden trove of letters. And, drawing on never-before-published material from Kerr’s archives and submissions to the court, Hocking traces the collusion and deception behind the dismissal, and charts the role of High Court judges, the Queen’s private secretary, and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, in Kerr’s actions, and any prior involvement of the Queen and Prince Charles in Kerr’s planning.

     Mike Weiss spent nearly two years with Ferrari-Carano, a California winemaker founded in Sonoma County just over twenty years ago by Don Carano, a casino and hotel mogul from Reno. The narrative in A Very Good Year follows Ferrari-Carano’s Fume Blanc from barren vines in November to its first sampling by a customer at the Four Seasons in New York, and, over the course of the book, Weiss presents his unique insight into the making and marketing of wine today. BACKCOVER: “Superb. . . . Weiss tells a great story.” —THE NEW YORK TIMES “Finally, a wine book that explains all the ingredients. . . . You will marvel at the richness of what Mike Weiss . . . was able to capture and convey within this delicious book.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES “Compelling . . . A Very Good Year is both entertaining and comprehensive.” —THE BOSTON GLOBE “A sweeping book about tourism, globalism, environmental sustainability, immigration, and glamour. . . . The bottle of Fume Blanc . . . is like a Pandora’s box. Open it up and out spill all the vanity, marketing savvy, self-mythologizing, acres of land, buckets of money, precise science, alchemical blending, and feudal working conditions that make up the California dream known as the wine industry.” —SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

    Three teenagers from Newcastle had taken the world by storm within the time it typically takes most bands to record their first single. Over their stratospheric career, Daniel Johns developed into a performer and songwriter with few peers in modern music.Shortly after the break-up of the band, Johns's marriage to pop star Natalie Imbruglia also ended. He became the focus of sordid headlines and whispers of wayward behaviour. People feared what might happen next.But at the same time a new Daniel Johns emerged. His debut solo album, Talk, appeared to rapturous reviews in 2015 and raced to the top of the Australian charts, and then 2018 saw the advent of DREAMS, his long-awaited collaboration with Luke Steele,. This was a vastly different Daniel Johns to the grungy, guitar-blazing teen of the 1990s. His new sound and image were sophisticated, brilliant and sexy as hell. It was a remarkable creative makeover, perhaps the most ambitious ever undertaken by an Australian rockstar. Former rockstar.The Book of Daniel documents how the reclusive Johns also battled many personal demons, including life-threatening anorexia and crippling reactive arthritis. Drawing on more than fifteen years of documenting the life and times of Daniel Johns, author Jeff Apter has brought his story to life, revealing the struggles and triumphs of one of Australia's most distinctive and dazzling talents. The book also includes a collection of exclusive photographs of Johns by eminent rock photographer Tony Mott.

    She shared her passion for climbing with her partner Andrew and it was a dream come true when Andrew proposed at Everest Base Camp. For them, climbing mountains made anything seem possible and represented their attitude to life.But a year after Sally and Andrew were married Sally was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She was only 28 and was training to be a Macmillan nurse – she wanted to care for the terminally ill. But Sally was determined the disease wouldn't slow her down: she went back to work looking after others and, despite warnings that her condition could deteriorate in pregnancy, went on to have three beautiful children.But it was when her youngest child Melissa was diagnosed with severe autism that Sally began to spiral into depression. Sally felt guilty about the pressures faced by her elder daughter Clara in her role as carer. Sally worried that she was missing out on the freedom of childhood.She needed help. Unsure who to turn to, she happened upon Canine Partners and an extraordinary dog called Harmony. They formed an instant bond; Harmony can perform over 100 chores – from putting groceries into the trolley to handing over Sally's purse at the till. Harmony is an unending source of comfort: she intuitively knows when Sally is in pain and calms Melissa when she suffers panic attacks.Harmony has given Sally the ability to start living once more, and become a mother again in her own way. She has shown Sally that the sky's the limit and, with a taste for independence that she hadn't felt since her mountaineering days, Sally set her sights on the peaks of Ben Nevis once more.In August 2010 Sally planned to climb the hardest of the Munro Mountains. Sadly her first attempt was thwarted after her motorised wheelchair short-circuited. But Sally is a fighter and reached the summit in June 2011 with her husband by her side. And Harmony too, of course.

    Grant and Murray Ball, his travels to the ends of the earth with his close friend Ed Hillary, and more...

    

    As the daughter of an Indian Muslim father and a white Australian mother, growing up in the conservative environment of 1970s Perth, Rabia Siddique was always going to be marked as different. Escaping her traumatic childhood, Rabia moved to London after graduating from law school to pursue her passionate commitment to social justice. She joined the British Army as a military lawyer just days after 9/11, finally finding herself stationed in Southern Iraq, where she pushed herself to make a difference in one of the most dangerous and testing environments on earth. On 19 September 2005, Rabia and another soldier were taken hostage by Islamic insurgents as they tried to negotiate the release of two kidnapped British SAS operatives. She battled for hours to save their lives, using her legal expertise, knowledge of Islam and Arabic to negotiate with their captors as a violent mob tried to storm the compound where she was being held. After their release, her colleague received a Military Cross, while Rabia received nothing. Her subsequent sex and race discrimination case against the British Army made headlines around the world. Her memoir is a story of grit, courage and conviction, born out of a unique perspective.

    What monster would dare take financial advantage of the most treasured bond of love – between parent and child? Just weeks earlier, Graeme’s parents had won a fortune in the Opera House Lottery, and this had attracted the attention of the perpetrator, Stephen Bradley. Bradley was a most unlikely kidnapper, however his greed for the Thorne’s windfall saw him cast aside any sympathy for his victim or his victim’s family, and drove him to take brazen risks with the life of his young captive. Kidnapped tells the astounding true story of how this crime was planned and committed, and describes the extraordinary police investigation that was launched to track the criminal down. Mark Tedeschi explores the mind of the intriguing and seriously flawed Stephen Bradley, and also the points of view of the victim, his family – and the police, whose work pioneered the use of many techniques that are now considered commonplace, marking the beginning of modern-day forensic science in Australia. Using his powerful research and storytelling skills, Mark Tedeschi reveals one of Australia’s greatest true crime dramas, and what can only be described as the trial of the 20th Century. ‘Remarkably researched so as to explain one of Australia’s most extraordinary criminal cases.’ Chester Porter QC

    Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark and handsome George Rowley who fell in love her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle’s first three children until after she died. Desperate to know how such a thing could happen to a devoted and caring mother, JB went on a journey to find out. What she discovered was a heartbreaking story of loss. It was a long time before JB was able to work out that her mother kept her early life and her first family secret out of misplaced guilt and shame. To redress that, JB decided to tell the whole world her mother’s secret. Whisper My Secret is a proud declaration that Myrtle did nothing deserving of guilt or shame.

    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.

    New South Wales has Eddie Obeid.Meet Australia's most corrupt politician whose brazen misdeeds were on a scale said to be "unexceeded since the days of the Rum Corps".From the shadows Obeid ran the state as his fiefdom, making and unmaking premiers. Along the way he pocketed tens of millions of dollars following corrupt deals. This explosive book chronicles the grubby deals the powerbroker had been making for decades before he was exposed. His tentacles stretched through all levels of government, encircling almost every precious resource - coal leases, Circular Quay cafes, marinas, even the state's water. All of them were secret money-spinners for Obeid and his family.Above ground, below ground, in the air, on the water, there was no domain beyond Obeid's grasp. Now, many of the key politicians of his era have given a candid account of Obeid's pernicious backroom influence.Following their groundbreaking investigations, the award-winning journalists Kate McClymont and Linton Besser have unearthed the vast but secret empire Obeid built over the decades, producing an authoritative account of how he got away with so much for so long.

    The gritty drama from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Nobody's Girl.

    Forget the textbook theory now and settle down for what amounts to an eavesdrop into their girlie chats.