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biography & memoir

Large 9781844085767

My Judy Garland Life by Susie Boyt

$35.00 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Fascinating and extraordinary, thrilling and poignant, My Judy Garland Life will speak to anyone who has ever nursed an obsession or held a candle to a star. Judy Garland has been an important figure in Susie Boyt's life since she was three years old, comforting, inspiring and at times disturbing her. I n this unique book, Boyt travels deep into the underworld of hero worship, reviewing through the prism of Judy our understanding of rescue, addiction, love, grief and fame. What does it mean to adore someone you don't know? What is the proper husbandry of a twenty-first century obsession? Boyt's journey takes in a duetting breakfast with Mickey Rooney, a Munchkin luncheon, tea with the largest collector of Garlandia, an illicit late-night spree at the Minnesota Judy Garland Museum and a breathless, semi-sacred encounter with Miss Liza Minnelli . . ...Show more

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Large 9780753819852

Dirk Bogarde : The authorised biography by John Coldstream

$29.95 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Official biography of the charismatic actor and bestselling author. 'Biographies only tend to be definitive until the next one comes along, but there's no danger of Coldstream's erudite, moving analysis ever being superseded' - Independent on Sunday As an actor Dirk Bogarde was a Rank contract a rtist and matin ...Show more

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Large 9781848542020

Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin by Randal Keynes

$24.95 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Annie was Charles and Emma Darwin's adored first daughter. Her death at the age of ten broke their hearts. At the time, Darwin was working secretly on his theory of evolution and the pain of his daughter's death sharpened his conviction that natural laws have nothing to do with divine intervention. But he became racked with anxiety about his ground-breaking theories in The Origin of Species, and the controversy they would cause. As Darwin's theories continue to shape so much of our thinking about human nature today, Creation gives us fresh insight into the private life of a man who viewed the world in a new and extraordinary way. ...Show more

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Large 9780571269440

Country Girl by Edna O'Brien

$23.00 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."--National Public Radio   When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was und eterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation.   Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime. ...Show more

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Large 9780753824313

Clarissa Eden by Clarissa Eden

$19.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

In 1955, at the astonishingly young age of 34, Clarissa Eden entered No. 10 Downing Street as the wife of the new Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. A renowned beauty, she was at home with her mother's Liberal intellectual circle, and mixed in her youth with the pillars of Oxford's academic community. Accor ding to Antonia Fraser, she was 'the don's delight because she was beautiful and extremely intellectual'. Her close circle of friends included some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century: Cecil Beaton, Evelyn Waugh, Orson Welles among them. Her observations and insights into these men and their world provide a unique window into the mid 20th century. As the spouse of the most important man in Britain, the hostess at No. 10 and Chequers, Clarissa Eden was inevitably privy to a multitude of top-level secrets. The Suez crisis and Eden's ill health meant that she shared just four years of Anthony's political life and eighteen months as Prime Minister's wife. ...Show more

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Large 9780753826461

Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien

$24.95 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his gigantic flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal. Everything abo ut Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. He was also a great poet, but as he reminded us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has little to do with the individual life of its creator. Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life. ...Show more

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Large 9781447210986

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

$19.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Cast aside by his family at an early age, abandoned and left to fend for himself in the woods of Washington State, young Joe Rantz turns to rowing as a way of escaping his past. What follows is an extraordinary journey, as Joe and eight other working-class boys exchange the sweat and dust of life in 193 0s America for the promise of glory at the heart of Hitler's Berlin. Stroke by stroke, a remarkable young man strives to regain his shattered self-regard, to dare again to trust in others - and to find his way back home. Told against the backdrop of the Great Depression, The Boys in the Boat is narrative non-fiction of the first order; a personal story full of lyricism and unexpected beauty that rises above the grand sweep of history, and captures instead the purest essence of what it means to be alive.     ...Show more

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Large 9781471140730

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: My Life as a Fairy Tale by Sophia Loren

$29.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow is Sophia Loren's definitive autobiography, revealing her personal journey from the hardship of her childhood in Naples to her life as a screen legend, sharing stories of work, love, and family. Each chapter begins with a letter, a document, a photograph, or object that pr ompts her reminiscences. In her own words, these memoirs originated as, "Unpublished memories, curious anecdotes, tiny secrets told, all of which spring from a box found by chance, a precious treasure trove filled with emotions, experiences, adventures." In her incredible life story, Loren vividly recounts her difficult childhood in Naples during World War II, remembers her parents and their tempestuous relationship, and reveals the pain of growing up in her grandparents' house with her single, unmarried mother and younger sister. She tells how she got her start by winning a beauty pageant ("La regina del mare") and how her ambition drove her success in cinema before revealing the influence of the producer Carlo Ponti, who cast her in her early roles and later became her husband. Loren takes us behind the scenes of the movies, her early stardom and move to Hollywood revealing intimate and never before shared stories of her famed costars: Brando, Newman, Burton, Peck, Heston, and many more. With emotional honesty, Loren goes on to discuss her long desire to become a mother and the disappointments she suffered on that path, the ultimate joy she felt at having her two sons, and scenes from her life as a mother and grandmother. ...Show more

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Large 9780099556091

Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

$19.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir | Reading Level: very good

Jeanette Winterson's bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most acclaimed books of the last three decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is considered one of the most important books in contemporary fiction. Jeanette's adoptive mother loomed over her life until Jeanette finally moved out at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. As Jeanette left behind the strict confines of her youth, her mother asked, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" This memoir is the chronicle of a life's work to find happiness. It is an audiobook full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser drawer; about growing up in a north England industrial town in the 1960s and 1970s; and about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also an audiobook about literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can guide us when we are lost. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging--for love, identity, and a home.   ...Show more

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Large 9780732295691

Victoria: The Woman Who Made the Modern World (HB) by Julia Baird

$49.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

The true story for fans of the PBS Masterpiece series Victoria, this page-turning biography reveals the real woman behind the myth: a bold, glamorous, unbreakable queen--a Victoria for our times. Drawing on previously unpublished papers, this stunning new portrait is a story of love and heartbreak, of d evotion and grief, of strength and resilience.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTHE NEW YORK TIMES - ESQUIRE - THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY   "Victoria the Queen, Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch."--The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)   When Victoria was born, in 1819, the world was a very different place. Revolution would threaten many of Europe's monarchies in the coming decades. In Britain, a generation of royals had indulged their whims at the public's expense, and republican sentiment was growing. The Industrial Revolution was transforming the landscape, and the British Empire was commanding ever larger tracts of the globe. In a world where women were often powerless, during a century roiling with change, Victoria went on to rule the most powerful country on earth with a decisive hand.   Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role. As a girl, she defied her mother's meddling and an adviser's bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. At twenty, she fell passionately in love with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, eventually giving birth to nine children. She loved sex and delighted in power. She was outspoken with her ministers, overstepping conventional boundaries and asserting her opinions. After the death of her adored Albert, she began a controversial, intimate relationship with her servant John Brown. She survived eight assassination attempts over the course of her lifetime. And as science, technology, and democracy were dramatically reshaping the world, Victoria was a symbol of steadfastness and security--queen of a quarter of the world's population at the height of the British Empire's reach.   Drawing on sources that include fresh revelations about Victoria's relationship with John Brown, Julia Baird brings vividly to life the fascinating story of a woman who struggled with so many of the things we do today: balancing work and family, raising children, navigating marital strife, losing parents, combating anxiety and self-doubt, finding an identity, searching for meaning. ...Show more

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Large 9781509813698

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks

$24.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

'If you did not think that gallium and iridium could move you, this superb book will change your mind.' - The Times In Uncle Tungsten Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. Ther e follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft ten-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy's adventures, and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind. ...Show more

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Large 9780733636523

Songs of a War Boy by Deng Thiak Adut; Ben Mckelvey

$32.99 AUD

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Category: biography & memoir

Deng Adut's family were farmers in South Sudan when a brutal civil war altered his life forever. At six years old, his mother was told she had to give him up to fight. At the age most Australian children are starting school , Deng was conscripted into the Sudan People's Liberation Army. He began a harsh , relentless military training that saw this young boy trained to use an AK-47 and sent into battle. He lost the right to be a child. He lost the right to learn. The things Deng saw over those years will stay with him forever. He suffered from cholera, malaria and numerous other debilitating illnesses but still he had to fight. A child soldier is expected to kill or be killed and Deng almost died a number of times. He survived being shot in the back. The desperation and loneliness was overwhelming. He thought he was all alone. But Deng was rescued from war by his brother John. Hidden in the back of a truck, he was smuggled out of Sudan and into Kenya. Here he lived in refugee camps until he was befriended by an Australian couple. With their help and the support of the UN, Deng Adut came to Australia as a refugee. Despite physical injuries and mental trauma he grabbed the chance to make a new life. He worked in a local service station and learnt English watching The Wiggles. He taught himself to read and started studying at TAFE. In 2005 he enrolled in a Bachelor of Law at Western Sydney University. He and his brother John were the first people in his family to graduate from university. This is an inspiring story of a man who has overcome deadly adversity to become a lawyer and committed worker for the disenfranchised, helping refugees in Western Sydney. It is an important reminder of the power of compassion and the benefit to us all when we open our doors and our hearts to fleeing war, persecution and trauma. ...Show more

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