'A VIVID, HEARTFELT TRIP INTO THE HUMAN SIDE OF ROCK 'N' ROLL . . . PAINFULLY HONEST AND INSIGHTFUL, THIS IS A PUBERTY BLUES FOR THE '80S GENERATION.'
Richard Lowenstein, director of Dogs in Space and He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

I looked down at this man who adorned the bedroom walls of girls all over the world. His eyes were spinning, his makeup was melting and he had the goofiest grin on his handsome face. This was what the Vulture Club was about. This was fun. This was as rock and roll as it got. I was bedding this rock god on behalf of every teenage girl who had ever imagined doing exactly this – and it felt fantastic.

In 1981, fifteen-year-old Nikki McWatters is living in a Gold Coast suburb, dragging herself through humdrum schooldays and dreaming of losing her virginity to a rock star. With three friends she starts the Vulture Club for aspiring groupies – and so begins a festival of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. By day Nikki is a dutiful student; by night she collects rock stars, crawling out her bedroom window and sneaking backstage to meet the band.

As Nikki gets older, her conquests get bigger and the stakes get higher. Soon she finds herself in Sydney, chasing an acting career and carousing with her idols. From Australian Crawl to INXS, Pseudo Echo to Duran Duran, she is living her teenage dream – but is the groupie life all it's cracked up to be?

One Way or Another is a rollicking ride through a world of pub rock, big hair, wild nights and mornings after. With irrepressible humour and a bulging little black book, Nikki McWatters recalls an age when everything seemed possible – even if everything wasn't such a good idea.

'Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream. And Stevie Wonder had a dream. This is a book about dreams.' In the autumn of 1980, Stevie Wonder invited Gil Scott-Heron to join him on a forty-one-city tour across America, ending in Washington in January 1981, to gather popular support for the creation of a holiday in honour of the great civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. Scott-Heron uses this history-making tour as the backbone of his fascinating memoir. Raised by his grandmother in Jackson, Tennessee, Scott-Heron's journey from humble beginnings to becoming one of the most uncompromising and influential musicians and songwriters of his generation is a remarkable one. Politically savvy and savagely satirical, socially conscious and tender-hearted, Gil Scott-Heron has been called the godfather of rap, and his unexpected death in May 2011 marked the loss of one of the world's most vocal and articulate artists. Chuck D of Public Enemy said of Scott-Heron, 'we do what we do and who we do because of you' and Eminem added, 'Scott-Heron influenced all of hip-hop'. In the words of Sarah Silverman, 'he mirrored ugliness with beauty, audacity, and valour'. A compelling testament to Gil Scott-Heron's career and achievements, The Last Holiday is full of Scott-Heron's keen insights into the music industry, the civil rights movement, modern America, governmental hypocrisy and our wider place in the world.

Review: Gil Scott-Heron is timeless. - New York Times


Author Biography: In a musical career spanning five decades, from Small Talk at 125th and Lenox to I'm New Here, Gil Scott-Heron (1949 - 2011) released twenty albums and many seminal singles including 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', 'Home Is Where the Hatred Is', 'Winter in America', 'B Movie', 'JohanA--nesburg' and 'Lady Day and John Coltrane'. He was also the author of three previous books ‒ two novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron.                                            

'Amy Choi's voice is sassy, smart and spirited as she guides you through places exhilaratingly foreign and yet comfortingly familiar.' Alice Pung 'A unique, moving and human memoir of love, family, travel and cats.' Mark Dapin Playing House is a rare pleasure, a warm and humorous memoir in three parts that subtly reveals what it means to create a family. Firstly working and travelling in Europe, then settling in inner city Melbourne and becoming caregivers to Lydia, a troubled teenager who tests the limits of friendship, and lastly parenthood and returning to visit family in Hong Kong. At its heart it is a story of an enduring relationship between an Asian-Australian and an Australian. Elegant and insightful, Playing House makes you realise love can be uncomplicated, and that it's often the people you surround yourself with and the blessings in disguise that make life sweet. Amy Choi was born in Melbourne in 1975. She has worked as a counter hand, in customer service, as an usher,foster carer,

       Inventor. Visionary. Genius. Dropout. Adopted. Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple and he was all of these things. Steve Jobs has been described as a showman, artist, tyrant, genius, jerk. Through his life he was loved, hated, admired and dismissed, yet he was a living legend; the genius who founded Apple in his parent's garage when he was just 21 years-old, revolutionising the music world. He single-handedly introduced the first computer that could sit on your desk and founded and nurtured a company called Pixar bringing to life Oscar wining animations Toy Story and Finding Nemo. So how did the man, who was neither engineer nor computer geek change the world we live in, making us want every product he touched? On graduation day in 2005, a fifty-year-old Steve Jobs said: 'Today I want to tell you three stories from my life, That's it. Just three stories'. The first story is about connecting the dots. My second story is about love and loss. My third story is about death. This is his story...Critically acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal takes us to the core of this complicated and legendary man, from his adoption and early years through to the pinnacles of his career, his dismissal from his duties at Apple (for being too disruptive and difficult) to the graduation where he gave the commencement speech just 6 years before his death, giving life to what were soon to become some of most famous quotes of his career, ending with the message: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you." "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

Author Biography: Karen Blumenthal is a critically acclaimed writer, award-winning author and long-time journalist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine and the laws of prohibition as well as Sibert Honor book Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929, and Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, which won her a Jane Addams Children's Book Award. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

                                           

Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her. Before 30 Rock, Mean Girls and 'Sarah Palin', Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. She has seen both these dreams come true. At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon - from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.

Review: A masterpiece in comedy writing...I was hooked from the first word -- Sunday Telegraph 

Author Biography: Tina Fey was the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live and created, writes and stars in 30 Rock. She has received numerous awards for her comedy writing, including the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, 5 Emmys, and 5 Writers Guild Awards. She also wrote and appeared in the acclaimed and wildly popular movie Mean G

Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly seized control of media, exiled or killed political rivals and dismantled Russia's fragile electoral system, transforming Russia once more into a threat to her own people and to the world. Masha Gessen experienced this history first-hand, in the form of death-threats and the murder, exile, and mysterious disappearances of many of her friends and colleagues. She courageously returned to Moscow to report on Putin's alarming ascent, tracking down sources who dared speak to no one else.


Author Biography: Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author, and editor of the Russian-language Snob magazine, aimed at Russians living abroad. She has contributed to Granta, Slate and the New Statesman, among other publications. She is the author of several previous books, most recently Perfect Rigor and Blood Matters. She lives in Moscow.                                            

'People who truly live in the outback listen to it. What they hear, I do not know ...What the country says is beyond words.' In the early 1950s, Australia was riding on the sheep's back and no-one doubted the wisdom of making a life in the wool industry, certainly not sixteen-year-old Ian Parkes. Having grown up with his grandfather's stories about the bush, he was eager to earn his way on sheep stations in the Australian outback. But he had no idea that the country would creep inside him and take root. Tough yet tender, funny one moment, poignant the next, this is the story of a life lived on the land and for the land. It was a time when a young lad starting out might work side-by-side with Aboriginal stockmen, when a big social event was a day at the races, followed by a game of two-up. And a time when a young man might discover a love of books, camped out under the stars.

Author Biography: Born in Perth in 1934, Ian Parkes left home at sixteen to work as a jackeroo on a merino stud in South Australia. He spent a year on a remote property near Broken Hill, before returning to Western Australia, where he worked on various sheep stations inland from Carnarvon and Meekatharra. At the age of twenty-one, after illness threatened his life, Ian reflected on where his real interests lay and, much as he loved the outback, he decided he wanted to write. He worked as a copywriter at 6IX in Perth and wrote radio talks for the ABC in his spare time. Soon he started his own advertising agency, which in time became Parkes Clemenger, the biggest in Western Australia. The bush still claims him and he returns to it regularly.                                            

A gripping, triumphant memoir about the power of addiction and its effect on the brain Marc Lewis knows addiction: that desperate ambition to get high accompanied him around the world for many years.; In the 1960s, Lewis was a teenager in boarding school, experimenting with cough syrup and alcohol to assuage his depression.; When he moved to Berkeley, California, the pulsing heart of the counter-cultural movement, he began using LSD and heroin.; His spiralling journey of addiction eventually led him to Asia, where he sniffed nitrous oxide in the Malay jungle, took speed in Kuala Lumpur, and lost himself in the opium dens of Calcutta.; This was the beginning of his descent into a moonlit world of crime, poverty, and desperation.; Returning to Toronto, Lewis lived a double life: by day, he was a psychology student; and by night, he stole from homes and laboratories to get high. Thirty-four years on, Lewis is a neuroscientist, and he studies the brains of troubled children.; But he never forgets that he was once one of those kids - and that, no matter how many scientific conferences he attends, he always will be. In this mesmerising memoir, Lewis recounts his relationship with drugs from the inside out, giving a revelatory analysis of the chemical changes in his brain that sustained his addiction.; This is not just the story of a man who found his calling while fighting a habit that crossed continents and brought him in contact with the wilder edges of life.; It is also a penetrating, powerful analysis of addiction, offering a fascinating insight into the human brain, and what drives it to self-destruction. 

Review:
'A picture of addiction as an unavoidable urge of human nature ...It's the way [Lewis] drapes his scientific understanding of human chemical function over the frame of his own life that makes his memoir compelling.' THE GLOBE AND MAIL 'A fascinating glimpse into the world of needles and need.' GEORGIA STRAIGHT                                  

Despite the African National Congress being at the height of its powers, its future is today less certain than at any time in its long history. In the past, the liberation movement went through two huge transformations with remarkable agility; the first at the instigation of the hot-headed young rebel, Nelson Mandela. He brought about changes that drove the organisation from gentlemanly petitions to armed resistance. The second great shake-up in the ANC occurred twenty-two years ago as Mandela emerged from prison, when the movement transformed itself from deep socialist militancy to centre-left political conformity. But it was at the time dominated by realistic, courageous leaders like Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo, who are no longer steering the vast juggernaut through the third revolution that is under way now. The ANC's struggle for freedom was supposed to have ended with its election to office in 1994, when it defeated apartheid. But rampant unemployment, income distribution as skewed as anywhere on earth, catastrophic corruption, inferior education and lingering racial tensions cast shadows that lengthen with each passing year. Whether the ANC, with its current leadership, still has the flexibility to transform itself and survive the anarchistic onslaught of politicians like Julius Malema remains to be seen.                                  

Long before SKII, La Prairie, or the coveted Creme de la Mer, there was Helena Rubinstein. Your mother or grandmother probably used Helena Rubinstein creams or cosmetics once upon a time. But not that many people know about Helena's Australian connections. She was little known and has been virtually forgotten, but her extraordinary life spanned nearly a century (she died in 1965 at the age of ninety-three) and three continents. She was banished by her family to Australia at age 24 for refusing to accept an arranged marriage and as a result, became a pioneer who reinvented beauty for modern times. Napoleon Perdis says that he is inspired by Helena. She really was a Polish modern day Scarlett O'Hara! This is the extraordinary story of the woman who created a cosmetic empire and gave it her name, of an entrepreneur who started with nothing except a belief in the strength of women. The eldest of eight girls in a poor Jewish Orthodox family, Helena was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1872. When she was banished to Australia her mother decided to slip a few pots of skin cream, made by a chemist friend of the family, into her daughter's suitcase. Barely two decades later, the cream her mother gave her had become the foundation of her fortune. Coleraine in Victoria, where her uncle was a shopkeeper, might have been an awful place but it did not lack for lanolin, the secret ingredient in Helena's creams. To disguise the sheep oil's pungent pong, Helena experimented with lavender, pine bark and water lilies. At the forefront of women's rights movements, Helena opened her first beauty institute in Collins Street, Melbourne in 1902, the year that women obtained the right to vote in Australia. Always ahead of her competitors (Arden, Factor, Revlon, Lauder), she developed marketing and advertising techniques that revolved around skin care and makeup, eventually opening beauty institutes in Australia, London, Paris, and New York. Using science to create cosmetics, she taught women all over the world to do their makeup, to take care of their skin, their bodies, and their well-being. Helena married Edward Titus, a Polish-American journalist, editor, and brilliant publicist who helped her establish her empire, with whom she had two sons. She was madly in love; he made her suffer miserably. But he knew everything one needed to know about culture and art in Europe and America. It was through Edward that she was introduced to Cocteau, Colette, D.H. Lawrence, Man Ray. Avant-garde in all domains, she developed an astounding art collection, was a model for Dali, Dufy, Picasso, and owned homes in Europe and the United States. In 1938, she even became a princess, marrying Georgian prince Artchill Gourielli soon after her divorce with Edward Titus. She sold her to business to Lehman Brothers in 1928 only to buy it back one year later in the midst of the Depression: making a profit of $6 million, she became one of the wealthiest and most talented businesswomen of her day.


Author Biography: Michele Fitoussi was born in Tunisia to French parents, and has lived in Paris since the age of five. She has worked for the past twenty-five years at Elle magazine and has interviewed many influential decision makers and world leaders in areas as varied as politics, human sciences, sports, literature and the media.