CATEGORIES

The shortlist for the 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was been announced on Friday 5 October and it’s an impressively mixed bag. The nominated books will are as varied in location as they are in subject matter. They will take you up Everest, across UK on foot, and down into the slums of Mumbai. [...]

…bring a bottle of wine, apparently. I’m not sure what the rest of the rules are – this is my first ever book club – but everyone was very clear about the wine. Despite a lifetime of loving books and reading books and obsessing about books and occasionally fresking people about by thrusting books at [...]

It’s Australia Day and we’re a nation of sport-lovers. Want to know the score? This is what you need. DK’s remarkable and very visual stylings bring sport alive in this encyclopedic hardcover book. Starting with Team Sports, the astonishing photos begin with a double-page photo of a mid-play NFL tackle, followed by football (soccer or [...]

Strange World – John Long’s Hung Like an Argentine Duck The truth is stranger than fiction and Dr John Long has (literally) dug up some of the weirdest evidence and facts from the evolution of sex for this book; he’s the discoverer of the Gogo Fish, a 380-million-year-old fossilised armoured shark-like fish replete with a [...]

There’s many a fact book on the Australian market – and there’s a reason for this. Kids love them. I mean, who doesn’t? Isn’t fact stranger and sometimes more mind-boggling than fiction? We may be a young country with a small populace but there’s a heck of a lot going on here at any given [...]

The other day both my friend and my father voiced what I had myself been feeling—that although they loved the current crop of books I’ve been distributing to them as must-reads, that they might need to inject a few slightly trashier ones for some light relief. Phew. Me too. I’d encountered a bumper crop of [...]

News surfaced today of a cache of over a quarter million confidential US diplomatic cables between embassies and consulates and the US State Department. The leak has been released to news organisations and has been made available to the public via the website WikiLeaks, a not-for-profit organisation devoted to releasing confidential documents that may have [...]