"If you know where to look, you can still discover and recognize what it was that intoxicating John Coast fifty years ago." -Sir David AttenboroughThis book is one of the great classics about Bali, now with dozens of illustrations and photographs.Dancing out of Bali is a fascinating personal account of a young Englishman who settled in a small house in Bali in the midst of the political turmoil that griped postwar Indones...

A bestseller in 1946, Railroad of Death is the first and best account of forced labour on the Burma Railway. John Coast was a young officer in the Norfolk Regiment who was taken prisoner at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942. He took notes and concealed them from the Japanese for nearly three years, but he lost the lot when he was forced to bury them in Chungkai Camp to avoid repeated searches. Coast had to write the book all over again while on the voyage home. His book is moving, dramat...

Many parts of the world are experiencing rapid demographic restructuring, resulting in an ageing population with increasingly significant work and care pressures on cohorts less able or willing to provide support. This book examines some of the important trends that have underpinned reductions in fertility, including delayed child-bearing and increased childlessness. It demonstrates how relationships between partners have resulted in new living arrangements with changing attitudes from mar...

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this “extraordinary” and beloved novel that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review), named a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century.Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a weal...

Phoenix, Arizona is one of America's fastest growing metropolitan regions. It is also its least sustainable one, sprawling over a thousand square miles, with a population of four and a half million, minimal rainfall, scorching heat, and an insatiable appetite for unrestrained growth and unrestricted property rights. In Bird on Fire, eminent social and cultural analyst Andrew Ross focuses on the prospects for sustainability in Phoenix--a city in the bull's eye of global warming--and also th...

Intersectionality theory has emerged over the past thirty years as a way to think about the avenues by which inequalities (most often dealing with, but not limited to, race, gender, class and sexuality) are produced. Rather than seeing such categories as signaling distinct identities that can be adopted, imposed or rejected, intersectionality theory considers the logic by which each of these categories is socially constructed as well as how they operate within the diffusion of power relati...

The truly classic Australian story of Tom Kruse - legendary mailman of the Birdsville Track.For the people who lived in the desert between Marree and Birdsville, contact with the outside world was hard and sporadic - but one man was their lifeline: Tom Kruse. For more than twenty years he was the connection with the outside world for the families, station workers and others who lived along the Birdsville Track.Tom delivered everything from the mail and news...

Nobel laureate Robert Fogel's compelling study, first published in 2004, examines health, nutrition and technology over the last three centuries and beyond. Throughout most of human history, chronic malnutrition has been the norm. During the past three centuries, however, a synergy between improvements in productive technology and in human physiology has enabled humans to more than double their average longevity and to increase their average body size by over 50 per cent. Larger, healthier...

In the colorful tradition of Orwell and Hemingway, Jerry Hopkins recalls his first decade as a Bangkok expatriate by profiling twenty-five of the city's most unforgettable characters.In 25 vivid profiles, Hopkins explores what motivates people to leave home and the unforeseen adventures that can befall them once abroad. Hopkin's knack for the biography is evident in his coverage of individuals ranging from famous performers to ordinary businesspeople.The 25...

A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a fifteen-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, north, and west, and home again to Hoarfrost River.His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled...

This book tells the story of a French cabin boy, Narcisse Pelletier, and his life with the Uutaalnganu people of north-east Cape York from 1858 to 1875. Even though it is all but forgotten in Australia, and in France is known only in its broad outlines, Pelletier's story rivals that of the famous William Buckley, both as a tale of human survival and as an enthralling and accessible ethnographic record.Narcisse Pelletier, from the village of Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie, was fourteen years ...

Focusing on émigrés from Baden, Württemberg and Hungary in four host societies (Switzerland, the Ottoman Empire, England and the United States), Heléna Tóth considers exile in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848–9 as a European phenomenon with global dimensions. While exile is often presented as an individual challenge, Tóth studies its collective aspects in the realms of the family and of professional and social networks. Exploring the interconnectedness of these areas, she argues th...