New to the Paperback - Biographies - February 2010
Just Kids
Patti Smith
Just Kids is Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The two met in Brooklyn and set up camp in the Chelsea Hotel, amidst a time when poetry, rock and roll, art and sex were what it was all about. Mapplethorpe's unforgettable portrait of Smith was the cover of her great album Horses. Smith's book is a love story and an elegy to New York in the late 60s and 70s.more details...
more Biography and Memoir...
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds
Lyndall Gordon
Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson's poems were published, her death revealed 1,800 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is now regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come down to us as a woman disappointed in love, an odd woman who dressed in white and shut herself away. Lyndall Gordon sees instead her volcanic character - 'a soul at White Heat' - a mystic and lover whose family harboured a hothouse drama of sex, scandal and devastating betrayal. Emily Dickinson was a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual quickening and immortality all on her own terms.more details...
more Biography and Memoir...
Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs
Simons and Fraser
In this book, part memoir and part authorised biography, Fraser, at the age of 79, explains himself and his record in government for the first time, speaking from his experience to the present and the future. Written in collaboration with journalist Margaret Simons, the book traces the story of a shy boy who was raised to be seen and not heard, yet grew to become one of the most persistent, insistent and controversial political voices of our times. From the Vietnam War to the Dismissal and his years as Prime Minister, through to his many disputes with the Howard Government, Fraser emerges as an enduring liberal, who has repeatedly reinterpreted his core values to meet the needs of changing times.more details...
more Biography and Memoir...
My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic's Journey
Ross Fitzgerald
I turn 65 on Christmas Day 2009. If I survive, I'll be 40 years sober. This means that I have had 40 more years on this planet than I otherwise would have had if I hadn't stopped drinking alcohol.' From his first drink at the age of fourteen Ross Fitzgerald has struggled with alcoholism. His story is one about despair, courage and hope and living to see another day. Insightful, brutally honest and inspiring, My Name is Ross is his account of life as an alcoholic and his battle to get sober and stay sober. Fitzgerald has written many books on politics and history and is well known journalist.more details...
more Biography and Memoir...
Trouble: Evolution of a Radical, Selected Writings 1970-2010
Kate Jennings
In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally into silence with a pull-no-punches speech calling for women's empowerment. Brave, impassioned and funny, it set the tone for an unconventional life. A few years later she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer, fall in love and, as a Wall Street speechwriter, enjoy ringside seats at some of the strangest events of our times. Trouble collects Jennings' best short work from the last four decades. She writes incisively about manners and morals, politics and economics, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider, and looks back at Australia with an expatriate's frankness.more details...
more Biography and Memoir...