Welcome to the Paperback - New Releases - April 2009
Art Instinct
Denis Dutton
Aesthetic pleasure and the need to create art can be found in the rich variety of artistic expression in every human society. In The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton explores the idea that this need has an evolutionary basis. Combining the science of evolutionary psychology and aesthetics he sheds some light on fundamental questions about the nature of art: Why do people indulge in displaying their artistic skills? How can we understand artistic genius? Why do we value art, and what is it for?.more details...
more Design...
Better Than God
Peter Porter
Whether working in the forms of epigram or narrative, or writing of memory, mortality, Renaissance intrigue or the more surreal distortions of old age – Porter can make a song of material others might take an essay to cover. Porter's faith in poetry as a road to the truth shines through.more details...
more Poetry...
Cradle To Cradle
Braungart and Mcdonaugh
'Reduce, reuse, recycle' urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart point out in this provocative, visionary book, this approach only perpetuates the one-way, 'cradle to grave' manufacturing model, dating to the Industrial Revolution. Why not challenge the belief that human industry must damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model for making things? Guided by this principle, McDonough and Braungart explain how products can be designed from the outset so that, after their useful lives, they will provide nourishment for something new - continually circulating as pure and viable materials within a 'cradle to cradle' model. An exciting and viable case for putting eco-effectiveness into practicemore details...
more Philosophy, Politics and Current Affairs...
Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work
Alain De Botton
An exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace - what people do all day, and all night – to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye de Botton takes a journey around an eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacturing, accountancy to art, in the name of exploring what makes our jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying. This is an investigation of something as central to a good life as love – but which we often find remarkably hard to reflect on properly. Asking the big questions we all tend to ask of our work: What should I do with my life? How can I combine earning money with attaining fulfilment? What will I have achieved by the end of my career? De Botton provides entertaining and engaging ways to discover the answers to these fundamental issues.more details...
more Philosophy, Politics and Current Affairs...
Ransom
David Malouf
Malouf revisits the story of Homer’s Iliad in his latest novel. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body - Malouf explores pride, grief, brutality, neighbourliness and love. This is a beautifully written, moving and philosophical novel in Malouf’s characteristic spare and lyrical language.more details...
more Fiction...
Secret Scripture
Sebastian Barry
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life, prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, yet still marked by love, passion and hope.more details...
more Fiction...
Van Diemen's Land
James Boyce
'The most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore. In re-imagining Australia's past, it invents a new future.' - Richard Flanagan. Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen's Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. An acclaimed history, now in paperback.more details...
more Australian Non-fiction...