Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

It'd been a long time since I claimed some solitude in this blessed landscape; since I've done without life's little props. Here I have no friend, no dog, no radio, no clock, no phone, no roof, no body pollutants.

At just 10-years-old, Maya was raped by a stranger. At 18, her grandmother passed away, leaving her alone with her step-grandfather who then kicked her out of the house after an incident. Since she had already begun doing sex work at around 16 or 17 years of age, she then moved into one of the...

Tracing the birth of a revolutionary, Huey P. Newton's famous and oft-quoted autobiography is as much a manifesto as a portrait of the inner circle of America's Black Panther Party. From Newton's impoverished childhood on the streets of Oakland to his adolescence and struggles with the system, from his role in the Black Panthers to his solitary confinement in the Alameda County Jail, Revolutionary Suicide is unrepentant and thought-provoking in its portrayal of inspired radicalism.

Born in country NSW in the 1940s, baby Dianne is immediately taken from her Indigenous parents and adopted by an Irish couple. Raised in the era of the 'White Australia' policy and widespread racism, Dianne grows up believing her adoptive mother, Val, is her birth mother. Val promises Dianne that when she turns 15, she will 'tell her a story'. But just months before Dianne's 15th birthday, Val dies.

Red Dog was dead... A legend, the talisman of the Pilbara... My responsibility... How did I come to be digging his grave. This book is where it began and how I came to be Red Dog's vet.

Here is one of the great autobiographies of the English language - exuberant, wonderfully contemporary in spirit, by a man twice as large as life who—he said so himself—had no trouble remembering everything that had ever happened to him and a lot of things besides.

Has anyone ever tried to throw a cash register at you? Have so many irritating and inane questions caused you to develop a poker face so strong that a sledge hammer wouldn’t break it? Have you seen every dark impulse man possesses? Do you know every demon by name? Yes? Then you’ve probably worked retail, and this book is for you. No? Then you’ve probably never worked retail, and this book is for you.

In 1970, Lynda was 18, unmarried and pregnant when she was forced to give her baby up for adoption. She was sent by a doctor to a Catholic girls’ home for unmarried mothers, and told she’d have no hope of keeping her child because she was Aboriginal. After 26 years, Lynda was finally able to make contact with her lost son – but the much wished for reunion didn’t go well. When she looked into the adoption records, she found a web of lies – lies about her family, the baby’s father, her ‘consent’ for the adoption – and her Indigenous heritage had been completely erased.

Commando is more than a historical document. With prose that captures both the brutality and the beauty of war, Reitz weaves a narrative that resonates with authenticity, transcending time. As relevant today as when it was first penned, Commando has become a South African classic and stands as a testament to the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity.

Booker T. Washington fought his way out of slavery to become an educator, statesman, political shaper, and proponent of the "do-it-yourself" idea. In his autobiography, he describes his early life as a slave on a Virginia plantation, his steady rise during the Civil War, his struggle for education, his schooling at the Hampton Institute, and his years as founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which was devoted to helping minorities learn useful, marketable skills.

Khin's sister Theda has a strange illness and a euthanasia drug locked in a box under her bed. Her doctor thinks her problem is purely physical, and so does she, but Khin is not so sure. He knows what they both went through growing up in Perth – it wasn't welcoming back then for a Burmese-Australian family. With Theda's condition getting worse, Khin heads off to the United States. He needs to sort things out with his ex-partner. Once there, events take a very odd turn, and he finds himself in court.

As 13 year old André stands at the foot of the gangway to the ship, his mother fusses over their luggage - 32 suitcases, trunks and tea chests that contain their world. The ship will refuel and return to Alexandria, the home where they have left their father, as the Aciman family begin a new adventure.

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.

The first and only full biography on legendary Harlem gangster, Bumpy Johnson who was depicted in the movies Cotton Club, Hoodlum, and American Gangster.

Growing up on the whitewashed Central Coast in the 1980s and attending an elite school as a scholarship student from the wrong side of the tracks, Lebanese-Cypriot Simone Amelia Jordan felt like an outcast among her peers for years. Her lifeline was hip-hop, then in its golden age. From girlhood, Simone recognised the art form's pro-Black consciousness, and the rappers' resonant words inspired her to embrace her own identity and back herself.

Ashes and Stones is a moving and personal journey, along rugged coasts and through remote villages and modern cities, in search of the traces of those accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland. We visit modern memorials, roadside shrines and standing stones, and roam among forests and hedge mazes, folk lore and political fantasies. From fairy hills to forgotten caves, we explore a spellbound landscape.

A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon. Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing. But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality.

Roberto Gómez Bolaños, “Chespirito”, fue uno de los comediantes más queridos y respetados en el mundo de habla hispana. Sus divertidos programas de televisión y personajes entrañables han marcado la niñez —y la vida— de numerosas generaciones de televidentes. Sin querer queriendo es un testimonio apasionante y lleno de añoranza de las andanzas, batallas y triunfos de un hombre que conquistó el mundo del espectáculo mediante el trabajo, la tenacidad, el extraordinario ingenio y el sentido humano.

From one of Fine Homebuilding's best-loved authors, Larry Haun, comes a unique story that looks at American home building from the perspective of twelve houses he has known intimately. Part memoir, part cultural history, A Carpenter's Life as Told by Houses takes the reader house by house over an arc of 100 years.

No Longer Human (1948, Ningen Shikkaku / A Shameful Life / Confessions of a Faulty Man) was an attack on the traditions of Japan, capturing the postwar crisis of Japanese cultural identity. Framed by an epilogue and prologue, the story is told in the form three notebooks left by Ōba Yōzō, whose calm exterior hides his tormented soul. Osamu Dazai was a Japanese author who is considered one of the foremost fiction writers of 20th century Japan. A number of his most popular works, such as Shayō (The Setting Sun) and Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), are considered modern-day classics in Japan.