Amazon Kindle – Now Available In Australia – BookOffers Buyers Guide
Amazon.com today announced that the Kindle will become available in Australia from October 19 2009. Australian book lovers will no doubt have the new international Kindle on the top of their Christmas lists this year. BookOffers.com.au predicts that the arrival of the Kindle in Australia will be a game changer for the Australian book industry. [...]
Learn MoreIn his latest corpse strewn novel renowned Swedish author Henning Mankell reminds us that ordinary people can do dreadful things. He starts his tale with a grisly mass murder in rural climes and then spans 150 years and crosses several continents before we discover why it was The Man from Beijing.
One cold January day the police are called to a sleepy little hamlet in the north of Sweden where they discover a savagely murdered man lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation they notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history. When Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre, she realises that she has a family connection to one of the couples involved and decides to investigate.
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A nineteenth-century diary and a red silk ribbon found in the forest nearby are the only clues. What Birgitta eventually uncovers leads her into an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years, linking China and the USA of the 1860s with modern-day Beijing, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and coming to a shocking climax in London’s Chinatown. The Man from Beijing is both a gripping and perceptive political thriller and a compelling detective story.
Links and Further Reading
Interview with Henning Mankell
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An award winning journalist, who has reported from the world’s most troubled regions such as Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans and the Middle East, Mark Danner is more than controversial in his Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War, which has left many critics gasping for both air and words.
Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. As a newly installed Haitian president told Mark Danner in riot-torn Port-au-Prince, ‘Violence strips bare a society’s body, the better to place the stethoscope and track the life beneath the skin.’ This stark truth came to haunt Danner, especially after the president was overthrown in a bloody coup d’etat.
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Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War moves from mass murder on election day in Port-au-Prince, to massacre by mortar bomb on the streets of Sarajevo, to suicide bombings in the suburbs of Baghdad, to torture in the secret ‘black site’ prisons of Thailand and Afghanistan, to political deal-making, personal rivalries and bureaucratic in-fighting in Washington and New York and Langley. Here is the vivid, unforgettable history of what Mark Danner calls a ‘grim age, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams.’
Links and Further Reading
Listen to the Author
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Award winning author Ian McEwan in his newest, and very stylish novel Solar, provides us with yet another engrossing tale about a team of protagonists involved in the intrigues and emotional turmoil that surround the issues of climate change.
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.
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When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster. Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time. A story of one man’s greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers.
Links and Further Reading
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- Tags: 9780224090506, Climate Change, Deception, Humanity, Ian McEwan, Intrigue, Solar
Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge, Skills and Issues – Colin Marsh
Becoming a Teacher: Knowledge, Skills and Issues is a practical guide for those seeking to become leading professionals in their field. Author Colin Marsh has established himself as a leading authority about the many skills required by today’s thinking teacher. They need to be able to inspire our youth to examine societal and environmental challenges, while developing an ability to grapple with international issues, such as terrorism and ideological conflicts.
This 4th edition offers pre-service teachers a user friendly guide to learning to teach that students will find invaluable throughout their entire degree.
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Marsh covers a comprehensive introduction to teaching methodology, preparing pre-service teachers for teaching students of the twenty first century to better understand the world and their place within it.
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Leaving Microsoft To Change The World – John Wood
Leaving Microsoft To Change The World, as related by John Wood, is all about a personal journey that leads toward benefiting children of the developing world by expanding knowledge.
John Wood discovered his passion, his greatest success, and his life’s work not at business school or helping lead Microsoft’s charge into Asia in the 1990s but on a soul searching trip to the Himalayas. He made the difficult decision to walk away from his lucrative career to create Room to Read, a nonprofit organization that promotes education across the developing world. By the end of 2007, the organization will have established over 5,000 libraries and 400 schools, and awarded long term scholarships to more than 3,000 girls, giving more than one million children the lifelong gift of education.
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If you have ever pondered abandoning your desk job for an adventure and an opportunity to give back, Wood’s story will inspire you. He offers a vivid, emotional, and absorbing tale of how to take the lessons learned at a hard charging company like Microsoft and apply them to the world’s most pressing social problems.
Links and Further Reading
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The first in a powerful magnum opus in three parts Your Face Tomorrow v. 1: Fever and Spear, from Spanish Novelist Javier Marias is all about the people he knows so well, those who renounce their own voices.
Part spy novel, part romance, part Henry James, Your Face Tomorrow v. 1: Fever and Spear is a wholly remarkable display of the immense gifts of Javier Marias. Volume One returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new — espionage. Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler — retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy — recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence.
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Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty’s secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century.
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Your Face Tomorrow v. 2: Dance and Dream is the second in a powerful group of novels written over a ten year span by Spanish translator and novelist Javier Marias about love and death, power and violence, and, above all, betrayal, loyalty and deceit.
Javier Marias’s dazzling unfolding magnum opus began with “Fever and Spear” (Chatto 2005). Described as an ‘intriguing and audacious experiment’ (“Sunday Times”) and an ‘outstanding spy novel of ideas’ (“Independent”), the book now takes us even deeper into the dark world of Jacques Deza as, in volume two, his relationship with his shadowy boss, Bertram Tupra, becomes increasingly disconcerting. Jacques Deza is in a kind of limbo. Separated from his wife and child, living in London to make a break from Spain, he has found work with an M16-like organisation who employ him for his acute powers of observation and insight into human nature.
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But, as Jacques discovers to his cost, it is not possible to distance yourself from other human beings entirely. Just to listen to someone asking you a favour, however insignificant, is to become implicated in their lives. And when your boss forces you to watch him lure a man into a nightclub toilet and threaten to execute him with a sword, your innocence is definitely suspect. Jacques finds himself remembering his father’s horrifying stories of the Spanish Civil War …Will Jacques manage to remain morally unharmed and will Marias sustain this novel’s brilliantly digressive dance? The reader longs for volume three in order to find out.
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An intelligent, compelling novel, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell is the final chapter in the incredible magnum opus by acclaimed Spanish author Javier Marias. He takes us into a world in which innocent remarks may have disastrous and unforeseen consequences.
Jacques Deza is back in London and once again working for the mysterious intelligence agency run by Bertram Tupra. Deza finds himself forced to watch Tupra’s collection of incriminating videotapes of important public figures. The recordings document unconventional private lives – and horrific acts. The scenes enter him like a poison, contaminating everything good, yet he is powerless to counteract them.
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Mind and memory polluted, Deza goes home to Madrid on leave to find his father gently slipping towards death, and his wife, Luisa, involved with a new man. Set against a background of brutality, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell asks whether violence can ever be justified and completes the extraordinary journey that has led us on a descent into hell and a re-emergence, not entirely unscathed, into life. Javier Marias has been called ‘the most significant Spanish writer of his generation’ and in a bravura performance he draws together themes not only from earlier volumes in the trilogy but from his entire body of work, to provide a thrilling end to his magnum opus.
Links and Further Reading
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Kevin McCloud’s Grand Tour of Europe is treading a well worn path, that of the young English grand tourist who, in the eighteenth century, spent up to five years traveling through France and Italy returning home via Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Their journey highlighted the importance of local customs and traditions growing an attitude that eventually helped toward redrawing the map of Europe following the revolution in France.
Loosely following in the footsteps of the most notorious grand tourists, Kevin clambers in, on and amongst the greatest buildings, ruins and cities in Europe and also veers drastically off the official path to visit the brothels, bathhouses and drinking dens which formed the other half of the grand tourists’ experiences.
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This accumulation of sights sounds and smells allows a sense of what it must have been like for a callow Briton to have come face to face with the heat and the noise, the drama and still living history of the civilisations of Europe. As always, Kevin is an entertaining and masterly companion as we delve behind the facades we all think we know so well.
Links and Further Reading
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2010 Edition: Complete Guide to Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs – H Winter Griffith. A no-nonsense guide that contains all the important information you need to know to secure your wellbeing.
Here is the classic guide to all major prescription and nonprescription drugs, which includes:
- Revised information on new FDA changes
- An easy-to-use chart format for quick access to data
- Guidelines to avoid dangerous interactions
- Information on dangerous side effects
- Warnings and vital data for safe use
- More than 6,000 brand names and 1,000 generic names
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2010 Edition: Complete Guide to Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs
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