Form/Genre: Politics & Current Affairs

Award-winning foreign correspondent Eric Campbell has been stoned by fundamentalists, captured by US Special Forces, arrested in Serbia and threatened with expulsion from China. He's negotiated dating rituals in Moscow, shared a house with a charismatic mercenary in Kabul and taken up smoking at ...

Have we ever taken our fair share of refugees? Have our past responses been motivated by humanitarian concerns or economic self-interest? Is the influx of ‘boat people’ over the last fifteen years really unprecedented?In this eloquent and informative book, historian Klaus Neumann examines both go...

‘I pictured myself a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.’Briohny Doyle turned thirty without a clear idea of what her adult life should look like. The world she lived in,...

You might think today’s politicians play rough—but history reveals that dirty tricks are as American as apple pie. This revised and updated edition of Anything for a Vote covers 225-plus years of smear campaigns and bad behavior in U.S. presidential elections, from George Washington to Barack Oba...

The FBI kept a secret dossier on him. He was a confidante to stars; adviser to politicians; and lawyer to the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Rita Hayworth, and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, whom he defended during the House Un-American Activities Committee trials of 1947. Bartley C. Crum was ...

As democracy began emerging in 5th-century Athens, public speaking and debate became an increasingly important tool to garner influence in the assemblies, councils, and law courts of ancient Greece. In response to this, both politicians and ordinary citizens became desperate to learn greater skil...

The U.S. government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal-testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn't by...

Ten years after his internationally bestselling The Weather Makers, acclaimed scientist and author Tim Flannery argues that Earth’s climate system is approaching a crisis. Catastrophe is not inevitable, but time is fast running out. In the lead-up to the United Nations Climate Change Summit to be...

In 1950 Australian prime minister Robert Menzies blithely agreed to atomic tests that offered no benefit to Australia and relinquished control over them – and left the public completely in the dark. This book reveals the devastating consequences of that decision. After earlier tests at Monte Bell...

The Audacity of Hope is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary man. Barack Obama spells out a vision of public life that is about finding the common threads that bind us all. He describes his hopes for a different America, and how the ideals of its democracy can be renewed.

From Weary Dunlop to Vassily Grossman, from David Hicks to Craig Thomson, Flanagan takes us on a wildly entertaining and unsettling trip. If we are to find hope, he says, we must take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful.

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America - the first African-American to serve in that role - she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House...

In 2004 Kofi Annan was nearly hounded from office by scandal. Following the invasion of Iraq, critics, and even some supporters, began asking whether the UN had outlived its usefulness. Do its failures arise from its own structure or from a clash with a US administration determined to go its own ...

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits names the filthy-rich sugar-daddies who are super-funding the Super-PACs of both parties—billionaires with nicknames like "The Ice Man," "The Vulture" and, of course, The Brothers Koch. Told with Palast's no-holds-barred, reporter-on-the-beat style, the facts as he l...

With Tim Flannery as our guide, we hear the voices of Arthur Phillip, Surgeon John White, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Macarthur, Nat Gould, Mark Twain and a host of others as they tell their stories of a metropolis, built on one of the world's most spectacular harbours, which bega...

"I pull on my balaclava and step onto the bridge wing. It’s loud outside: I can hear the rumbles of nine vessels’ engines and the hiss of ten water cannons … Suddenly the bridge is full of refugees from the upper deck. They are blocking my view out the back windows, but their faces – afraid, exci...

For the first time in history, the navies of every superpower on the planet have united against a common enemy - a couple of thousand rag tag underfed men and boys. Crammed together in tiny open boats, they range up to a thousand miles from their home shores. Armed with ancient AK47s and rocket p...

Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Afric...

We’re now in the fifteenth year since 9/11 and, horrible as it is to contemplate, we may be nowhere close to the end of the War on Terror. For a while, it looked like things were improving: we were getting on top of the threat. But that was before ISIS began crucifying children, before the Taliba...

In 2000, too-cool-to-care Belgrade rock kid Srdja Popovic found himself at the centre of a movement which was about to change the world.Popovic was one of the unexpected leaders of the student movement Otpor! that overthrew dictator Slobodan Milosevic and established democracy in Serbia — all by ...