Item category 1: Society & Culture

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing ...

Discover the story of Nike, from its beginnings in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports to its current position as the world's largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel. Packed with photographs and information covering the company's entire history, you'll discover the ground-breaking designs and campa...

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world's greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man's hunt for those fragments and his family's debt to an act of lit...

Troy has fallen. After 10 years of war, the Greeks make their way back to their own lands -- but what homes now await them? Agamemnon must return to his wife Clytemnestra, who has been nursing her rage since he sacrificed their daughter to the gods for a favourable wind. Her revenge will know no ...

The Teaching of Ptahhatp, composed two millennia before the birth of Plato, is the oldest surviving statement of philosophy in the ancient world and the earliest witness to the power of the written word. It ought to begin the list of the world's philosophy classics, yet it has been largely forgot...

For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world, until one day in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight. When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled c...

"The Outback Court Reporter is a sometimes funny, sometimes tragic look at the comings and goings on inside the country courtrooms dotted across Australia. From the case of the stolen cat flap, to missing lollipops and exploding chocolate milk in a country supermarket, to a custody dispute over a...

Fincham explores what your hands say about your personality and about the insights into your life path. Extensively illustrated throughout, the reader is led by clear instructions to achieve their own readings for themselves and others.

This is a book about the coming of age of four women born in China in the 1980s and 1990s, dreaming of better futures. It is about Leiya, who wants to escape the fate of the women in her village. Still underage, she bluffs her way on to the factory floor. It is about June, who at fifteen sets wha...

When it comes to queer British history, London has stolen the limelight. But what about the millions of queer lives lived elsewhere? In Queer beyond London, two leading LGBTQ historians take you on a journey through four English cities from the sixties to the noughties, exploring the northern pos...

Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know: what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was be...

One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the "Sweetheart Murders" cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father's da...

The food system is no longer simply a means of sustenance. It is one of the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth. It sustains us, but it is also killing us. Diet-related disease is now the biggest cause of preventable illness and death in the developed world, ...

A provocative pop history that explores the witches -- and witch hunts -- in the untold story of abortion, from the days of Socrates through the Salem Witch Trials and the 1980s Satanic Panic, all the way to our fraught present. For millennia, across cultures and continents, both providers and re...

"While travel was once a marker of sophistication, tourists now face tough questions: When does economic opportunity become exploitation? How do we justify the use of climate-changing jet fuel? And can we be sure our vacations aren't propping up corrupt and brutal regimes? In Reservations, avid t...

We record history, as it was and as it happens, sequentially. However, new discoveries and decisions made every day force us to revise and rethink what came before. Free from such sequence, novels, comics, films, and TV shows continue previous events (sequels), reveal previously unknown events (r...

As a White House speechwriter, Terry Szuplat helped craft hundreds of speeches for President Obama. But when it came to public speaking himself, Szuplat -- like many people -- was gripped by anxiety and preferred to stay in the shadows. When he was invited to give the first major speech of his li...

Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, then how should we go about understanding them? In this book, Chris French investigates paranormal cla...

This indefinitive collection brings together under one cover the very best comic writing - parody, poetry, prose, plays, philosophy and political treatise - by Australia's greatest living television host. From 'I Was Scott Morrison's Schnoodle' and 'Around the World in One Pair of Underpants' to ...

How do people turn listening into a musical performance? Through a series of compelling case studies, author Byrd McDaniel offers "spectacular listening" as a concept that explains the pervasive appeal of translating music consumption into a public practice, in a book that encompasses air guitar ...

Lifelong luddite Treena Orchard was a newly sober woman coming off a much-needed break from relationships, reluctantly taking the digital plunge by downloading a dating app. Instead of the fun, easy experiences advertised on swiping platforms, she discovered endless upkeep, ghosting, fleeting mom...

Passion pieces from the next generation of Australian longform journalists. Nine Australian writers, mentored by nine experienced Australian journalists, developed stories that they knew needed to be shared.With direction from Amanda Hooton of GW, Claire Keenan explores Catholicism in rural Austr...

Christopher Berry-Dee is the man who talks to serial killers. A world-renowned investigative criminologist, he has gained the trust of murderers across the world, entered their high security prisons and discussed in detail their shocking crimes. The killers' pursuit of horror and violence is desc...

Three years on, COVID is clearly here to stay. So what do we do now? Drawing on his expertise as one of the world's top virologists, Dr. Paul Offit helps weary readers address that crucial question in this brief, definitive guide. As a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee and a former mem...

Inspiring, revealing and deeply personal, Tested is an exploration of the remarkable place where challenge, crisis and opportunity meet, and how it's only in the moments when we are tested that we discover what we are made of.When Pat Cummins unexpectedly became Australia's 47th Test captain at a...

In 1959, Australians thrilled to every move made by a new criminal underdog, a Ned Kelly for the rock 'n' roll era. Kevin John Simmonds was a charismatic crook whose brazen crime spree had scored him a lengthy prison sentence. But as he was led from court, he boasted, 'They'll never hold me.' Two...

Like sharks to blood in the water, the mob arrived in Hollywood greedy and ready to tear away huge chunks of cash. Opportunistic mobsters saw labor unions as the means for muscling into the movie industry and extorting millions of dollars from studio bosses. Control the unions to which projection...

It's 2008, and it's been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised-crime worl...

Noongar writer Kim Scott has won the Miles Franklin Award twice for his novels. In this moving essay, Tony Birch shows how Scott uses fiction as a pathway to truth. We meet a writer who 'inhabits a range of guises, faces he wears to interrogate the complex and messy frontier history of colonial e...

Chelsey Goodan is a highly sought-after academic tutor who has worked with hundreds of girls from all different backgrounds, earning their trust, confidence, and friendship. They in turn have shared with her their innermost concerns, doubts, and what they wish they could communicate to their pare...