Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Politics & Social Sciences

In the first Quarterly Essay of 2014, Paul Toohey searches for the solution our politicians have been unwilling or unable to find, and asks whether, amid the diplomatic turmoil, we’ve now missed our chance. Tony Abbott promised to stop the boats. With the help of Kevin Rudd’s "PNG solution", he has. But at what cost? Visiting the Indonesian departure points, Toohey tells the dramatic stories of asylum seekers heading from Java to Australia, investigates people-smuggling and witnesses the aftermath of a sinking at sea.

The west coast of Tasmania has always held true to a distinct identity which endures to this day. It is based on geography and a history of isolation from the rest of the island. The mountain ranges running down the west of Tasmania are a natural barrier to the more populated eastern regions of the island, and flourished through exporting lumber and valuable minerals. Despite this, no roads existed to the east coast until 1932. In 1974 broadcaster Tim Bowden interviewed various Huon piners and miners, who remembered West Coast life back almost to the turn of the 20th century.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. As young as six, it was clear that the gender assigned to him at birth was incorrect. With the financial means of seeing specialist doctors in Europe and procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as a man, even correcting the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry. Then, in 1965, Ewan found himself in line to inherit the family baronetcy.

Frank, fearless, funny, articulate and inspiring, Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a dynamo - a young Muslim dynamo offering a bracing breath of fresh air...and hope. At 21 Yassmin found herself working on a remote Australian oil and gas rig; she was the only woman and certainly the only Sudanese-Egyptian-Australian-with-some-Turkish-and-Moroccan-background Muslim woman.

A businessman struggles with his luggage at an airport and pioneers the wheeled suitcase. An engineer watches people using walkie-talkies and dreams up the mobile phone. A printer is frustrated by his unpredictable inks and creates the Pantone colour system. Why were these particular people able to identify problems, and how did they discover the solutions that everyone else missed? Where exactly did their great ideas come from, and how did they go about making them into reality?

A deeply felt meditation on race, sex and American culture - at once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac. The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's Black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation.

Adam Ford is an archaeologist. Not only has he been on expeditions to unlock the mysteries of the past in the Caribbean, British Isles, Jordan, Syria, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Australia, he's also had heat stroke, hypothermia, and dysentery; been chased by camel spiders; been walked on by scorpions; and been pestered by bugs big enough to ride.

TV and radio presenter Kate Garraway has a lot on her mind. She's about to turn 50, which is fine (she thinks), but suddenly she seems to have many questions about everything. Is she running out of time? Should she have had children earlier? How will she cope when they leave home? What on Earth is happening to her body? Should she be bungee jumping, skydiving...and all of those other bucket list type things? Is cosmetic surgery the norm now? What will happen to her sex life after the menopause? Is her pension big enough?

At 11 years old, Gabriel Naumann is witness to a horrific crime. Twenty-nine years later his girlfriend is taken. Then the messages begin. 'If you want to find her, then you'll have to find me.' Somebody knows the truth. Somebody knows what he did. And now his girlfriend will pay for it - unless he can find her in time. When you've spent decades running from your past, what do you do when it finally catches up with you?

A fun and simple way to disengage from the pressures of the outside world and find a place of peace internally. With the aid of color breathing and guided imagery, these meditations will enliven your spirit and inspire your heart. Each of the 12 individual color meditations will evoke a particular emotional response and can be used as a tool to transform sadness to joy, anger to peace, or fear to love.

As dramatic, graceful and deeply felt as a pas de deux, Shanghai Tango is a deeply personal and inspiring account of growing up in a body that feels alien and of braving pioneering surgery in communist China.

A tragic death, a murder trial and a 170-year-old mystery - but what really happened? Shortly after Maria Kirwan died in a lonely inlet on Ireland’s Eye, it was decided that she had drowned accidentally during a day spent with her husband on the picturesque island. This inquest verdict appeared to conclude the melancholy events that consumed the fishing village of Howth, Co Dublin, in September 1852.

We know science is awesome, as are its achievements. Yet so far, scientists have managed to sidestep the most awesome reality of all: the true nature of human life, the source of their own genius. How is it that in the overwhelming immensity of the cosmos, on microscopic Earth, human beings exist? We have not yet looked reality in the face and perceived the nobility and grandeur of who we are, each of us having a responsibility in the universe and being part of a vast and continuing process.

Drugs, money, cartels: this is what FBI rookie Scott Lawson expected when he was sent to the border town of Laredo, but instead he's deskbound, writing intelligence reports about the drug war. Then, one day, Lawson is asked to check out an anonymous tip: a horse was sold at an Oklahoma auction house for a record-topping price, and the buyer was Miguel Trevino, one of the leaders of the Zetas, Mexico's most brutal drug cartel. The source suggested that Trevino was laundering money through American quarter horse racing.

The eagerly anticipated tribute to one of Australian radio's most-loved presenters, Eoin Cameron. Eoin Cameron's program was a consistently top-rating program for the breakfast time slot, and he genuinely cared for the thousands of dedicated listeners who woke up with him every morning, filling their heads with his hilarious anecdotes of family life, Taj the psycho spaniel or his love of Eurovision and all things tacky and trailer park-esque.

Can personality and intelligence be measured? How do babies learn to perceive and think? What happens when we sleep? Attempting to answer these important questions and more, psychology - the scientific study of human and nonhuman behaviour - has never been more popular. From TV experts to the amateur musings of your best friend, the language of psychology has permeated all aspects of everyday life.

Every now and again America confronts its demons, walks away from deep internal division, and strives towards justice. Barack Obama: The Movement for Change tells the story of a visionary leader who refuses to be limited by America's history and determines instead to change it.

In Big Men, Broken Dreams, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson relive the vicious tribal struggle that took place in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea through the 1980s while they were there to film documentaries. Connolly and Anderson recount to presenter Tim Bowden the devastating effects that blind ambition, welfare, destruction, and grief have on human beings - and how they managed to record 60 hours of footage while living in a grass hut with their 2-year-old daughter, Catherine.

WikiLeaks, a platform for disclosing information, has managed to produce more scoops in the last three years than the Washington Post has in the last 30: the gruesome video of Iraqi civilians and journalists being murdered by members of the US military; the true circumstances surrounding the bombing of two hijacked petrol-tankers in Kunduz, Afghanistan; the plundering of the Icelandic bank Kaupthing; the planning documents for the Duisburg Love Parade, and many more.

Il Dottore is the true story of a "nerdy Jewish kid" from the Bronx who, through a series of circumstances, became physician to top Mafia Dons including John Gotti, Carlos Gambino, and Joe Bonanno. At the same time, his reputation as a medical genius was spreading, and he was fast becoming one of the nation's leading cardiac surgeons. Ron Felber paints a vivid portrait of this doctor's unlikely life in the fast lane as he becomes a top confidante of New York's most notorious criminals.