Fallen: Inside Story of the Secret Trial and Conviction of Cardinal George Pell by Lucie Morris-Marr

$29.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

The dramatic story of the extraordinary trial of the third most senior Catholic cleric in the world for child sex abuse, and the conviction that sent ripples around the world.

Fighting for Hakeem by Craig Foster; Alexandra Engel (As told to)

$34.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Football is the world game. It unites. At a grassroots level it creates communities and, in 2019, those communities helped save the life of one of its own. In 2012, Hakeem al-Araibi was a promising young player on Bahrain's national football team when he was arrested for attacking a police station durin g the Arab Spring, despite television footage showing him playing soccer at the time of the alleged attack. After three months of torture and wrongful imprisonment, Hakeem was released. He fled the country and made his way to Australia, where he was granted refugee status. Hakeem made a life here and was playing for the suburban Pascoe Vale Football Club, in Melbourne. He thought he was safe. But, in November 2018, on a holiday to Thailand with his wife, Hakeem was again arrested. The Bahraini government wanted to extradite him to face a ten-year jail sentence, or worse. What happened next shows the best of what soccer can do, and the worst the governing body of FIFA brings. If it wasn't for the Australian soccer community and former Socceroo Craig Foster, Hakeem may never have been freed. This powerful memoir reveals how a local soccer legend fought tirelessly to help bring home a man he'd never met. From Pascoe Vale to Switzerland, Canberra to Thailand, Foster raised his voice and tens of thousands of Australians were galvanised to #FreeHakeem. Foster lobbied FIFA and the United Nations and worked with human rights organisations worldwide to enable Hakeem's safe return to his wife in Australia. Despite being from different backgrounds, religions and generations, Craig Foster and Hakeem al-Araibi are united forever through their love of the world game and their fight for freedom. ...Show more

Men at Work: Australia's Parenthood Trap: Quarterly Essay 75 by Annabel Crabb

$22.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

When New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her pregnancy, the headlines raced around the world. But when Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg became the first Prime Minister and Treasurer duo since the 1970s to take on those roles while bringing up primary-school-aged children, this detail p assed largely without notice. Why do we accept that fathers will be absent? Why do so few men take parental leave in this country? In the last half-century, women have revolutionised the way we work and live. But men's lives have changed remarkably little in that time. Why is that? Is it because men don't want to change? Or is it because, every day in various ways, we tell them they shouldn't?" In this Quarterly Essay, Annabel Crabb deploys political observation, workplace research and her characteristic humour and intelligence to argue that gender equity cannot be achieved until men are as free to leave the workplace (when their lives demand it) as women are to enter it. ...Show more

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

$19.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In the twentieth century, European democracies colla psed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good time to do so. ...Show more

Secret: The Making of Australia's Security State by Brian Toohey

$39.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Australia is less secure than it has ever been and the greatest threat comes from our elected government. Political leaders increasingly promote secrecy, ignorance and fear to introduce new laws that undermine individual liberties and safety. It is a criminal offence to receive or publish a wide range of information unrelated to national security. Our defence weapons are so dependent on US technical support that Australia couldn't defend itself without US involvement. And comprehensive databases on citizens' digital fingerprints and facial recognition characteristics are being amassed by the Commonwealth. Conspiracy? Paranoia? Read Secret- The Making of Australia's Security State and you decide. Fresh archival material and revealing details of conversations between former CIA, US State Department and Australian officials will make you reconsider the world around you. ...Show more

Webtopia: The Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work by Peter Lewis

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: very good

Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s was a world of limited choice, one where we all watched the same television programs and the household phone was at the heart of allnetworks people belonged to: family, school, church and the neighbourhood. The arrival of the internet promised a utopian, creative and democr atic future that would break down traditional institutions and replace them with exciting collaborative networks. So how did we end up here? In Webtopia, Peter Lewis draws from his own pre- and post-tech experience and conversations with entrepreneurs, politicians, pastors, parents, teachers and journalists to show us that technology is not the problem. We are. If we fix our relationship with technology, it will be easier to fix our relationships with each other in a fragmenting world. Riveting, engaging and wise, Webtopia traces our digital journey to this point and, fearlessly, marks out the best route from here. 'This book is an encounter with a born raconteur. This makes for a highly readable book, but it also reflects something more profound: that people power the web and modern tech is the embodiment of human genius, human folly and every human choice that lies in between.' -- Edward Santow, Australian Human Rights Commissioner   ...Show more

Incidental Inventions (HB) by Elena Ferrante; Ann Goldstein (Translator); Andrea Ucini (Illustrator)

$29.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

"This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me." With these words, Elena Ferrante, the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian. For a full year she penned short pieces, the subjects of which were suggested by editors at the Guardian, turning the writing process into a kind of prolonged interlocution; the subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the adaptation of her novels to film and TV. As she said in her final column: "I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are important to me and that--if I have the will and the time--I'd like to develop within real narrative mechanisms." Here, then, are the seeds of possible future novels, the ruminations of an internationally beloved author, and the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called "one of the great novelists of our time" (the New York Times). Gathered here in a beautiful gift edition and accompanied by a new, original introduction by the author and Andrea Ucini's intelligent, witty, and beautiful illustrations, this is a must for all Ferrante fans. ...Show more

30-Second Feminism by Jess McCabe

$27.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs | Series: 30 Second

Feminism is a global movement, developing with each cut and thrust of history to form a parallel "herstory." But what are the most important feminist ideas? What do terms like "patriarchy," "rape culture," and "intersectionality" mean? How have these terms emerged from historical conditions facing women around the world--from a lack of basic rights to harassment and intimidation online? How has activism shaped those ideas and who have been the key activists? From Emily Pankhurst to Beyonce, from how the personal is political to changing views of sisterhood, and from the  suffragettes to hashtag feminism, 30-Second Feminism offers readers the fastest way to enter the world of sexual politics fully briefed, with an overview of the main ideas in Feminism today--and an explanation of how they came into being.  ...Show more

Andrew Bolt, the Far Right and the First Nations by Steve Mickler

$24.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Breaking The Banks by Joseph Healy

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

What was once an industry built on trust, professionalism and value, has become synonymous with greed, complacency and everything that has gone wrong with capitalism. So how did Australian banks, which avoided much of the aftermath of the GFC, lose their way and become engulfed in scandal? Breaking the Banks delves into the causes and effects of the banking crisis that plagued Australia and the world, to re-establish the fundamentals of banking that for so long have been overshadowed by power and wealth, and provides us with a crucial blueprint to revolutionise the future of banking.  With expertise in banking that spans over three decades and several markets and as a former senior executive at two of Australia's largest banks, Joseph Healy, co-founder and co-CEO of Judo Bank, writes the insider's account of the banking crisis that plagued Australia and the world.   ...Show more

End Times by Bryan Walsh

$32.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

Could an incoming asteroid cause human beings to go the way of the dinosaurs? Will artificial intelligence make the world a better place-or make human beings obsolescent? Could a massive volcanic supereruption thrust the planet into a killer Ice Age? What would happen the day after a nuclear war? Bryan Walsh, a 15-year veteran reporter and editor of TIME, has written a vital work of popular science and investigative journalism that will peel back the layers of complexity around the unthinkable - the end of humankind. In End Times, Walsh provides a stunning panoramic analysis of the catastrophic dangers of human extinction that emerge from nature and those of our own making: the rising danger of a nuclear war, and the shockingly weak government protocols in place to prevent it; the climate change that threatens to burn the future even as our politicians deny and delay; ground-breaking emerging technologies like gene editing, tools that could save the world-or destroy it. Walsh examines the impact of these disasters were they to happen, the true probability of these world-ending catastrophes, and the best strategies for prevention, all pulled from his rigorous and deeply thoughtful reporting and research. End Times may be dark, but it does not wallow in doom. Walsh goes into the room with the men and women whose job it is to imagine the unimaginable. He includes stories and colourful profiles of those on the front lines of prevention, actively working to head off existential threats in biotechnology labs and boardrooms. Guided by Walsh's evocative, page-turning prose, we follow the likes of the asteroid hunters at NASA and the disease detectives on the trail of the next mass killer. Walsh examines the possibility of apocalypse in all forms, employing everything from geology to astronomy, bionics, economics and even human psychology to determine how we can apocalypse-proof our species. In the end, it will be the breadth of our knowledge, the depth of our imagination, and our will to survive that will decide the future. ...Show more

Gun Control: What Australia Got Right (and Wrong) by Tom Frame

$34.99 AUD

Category: Current Affairs

In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre on 28 April 1996 - when a gunman murdered 35 people and injured another 23 at a popular Tasmanian tourist attraction - John Howard, a conservative prime minister who had been in office for just six weeks, surprised his colleagues and startled the nation by mo ving swiftly to transform Australia's lax firearm laws. The National Firearms Agreement, produced just twelve days after the massacre with support from all levels of government and across the political divide, is now held up around the world as a model for gun control.Gun Control analyses whether the Australian Government achieved its intention and what it might have done in response to the massacre, and didn't. ...Show more