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Biography

Agent sonya

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

$35.00
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The incredible story behind the greatest female spy in history from one of Britain’s most acclaimed historians

In a quiet English village in 1942, an elegant housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted wife and mother-of-three, the woman known to her neighbours as Mrs Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity.

However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, she was racing through the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific intelligence from one of the country’s most brilliant nuclear physicists. Secrets that she would transmit to Soviet intelligence headquarters via the radio transmitter she was hiding in her outdoor privy.

Far from a British housewife, ‘Mrs Burton’ – born Ursula Kuczynski, and codenamed ‘Sonya’ – was a German Jew, a dedicated communist, a colonel in Russia’s Red Army, and a highly-trained spy. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, and helping the Soviet Union build the atom bomb, Sonya conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. Her story has never been told – until now.

Agent Sonya is the exhilarating account of one woman’s life; a life that encompasses the rise and fall of communism itself, and altered the course of history.

jfk

JFK Volume 1

$35.00
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The definitive biography of JFK, from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall

This is the untold story of how the rise of President Kennedy and the rise of the United States mirror one another – from 1917, when Kennedy was born, to 1963, when he died and the US was at the peak of its power. Full of new material from sources including a huge number of Oval Office tapes, a large volume of interviews with Jackie Kennedy, and never-before-seen CIA documents, Harvard professor Logevall focuses on international relations more so than any other biographer of this misunderstood figure. For example, he uncovers detailed material not only on President Kennedy’s father as ambassador to Britain but also on his rapidly-established relationship with Harold Macmillan, and on his and Jackie’s relationships with individuals in the United Kingdom. Peerlessly authoritative, this is a biography for the ages.

icon

Kim Gordon: No Icon

$80.00
By

As cofounder of legendary rock band Sonic Youth, best-selling author, and celebrated artist, Kim Gordon is one of the most singular and influential figures of the modern era.

This personally curated scrapbook includes a foreword by Carrie Brownstein and is an edgy and evocative portrait of Gordon’s life, art, and style. Spanning from her childhood on Californian surf beaches in the ’60s and ’70s to New York’s downtown art and music scene in the ’80s and ’90s where Sonic Youth was born. Through unpublished personal photographs, magazine and newspaper clippings, fashion editorials, and advertising campaigns, interspersed with Gordon’s song lyrics, writings, artworks, private objects, and ephemera, this book demonstrates how Kim Gordon has been a role model for generations of women and men.

lowitja

Lowitja

$45.00
By

Lowitja O’Donoghue is a truly great Australian. She is arguably our nation’s most recognised Indigenous woman. A powerful and unrelenting advocate for her people, an inspiration for many, a former Australian of the Year, she sat opposite Prime Minister Paul Keating in the first negotiations between an Australian government and Aboriginal people and changed the course of the nation.

But when Lowitja was born in 1932 to an Aboriginal mother and a white father in the harsh and uncompromising landscape of Central Australia the expectations for her life could not have been more different. At the age of two, she was handed over to the missionaries of the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children and cut off completely from her people and her culture. She would not see her mother again for another thirty years and would have no memory of her father.

In 2001 a bitter controversy arose over whether Lowitja was ‘stolen’ as a child. In search of a past she did not remember, Lowitja went back to Central Australia accompanied by journalist Stuart Rintoul. This ground-breaking and long-awaited biography completes that journey into Lowitja’s life and the challenging history of her times. It is a remarkable work about an extraordinary woman.

helen

One Day I’ll Remember This

$29.99
By

Helen Garner’s second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work and the enduring value of friendship.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Ruth Bader Ginsberg

$35.00
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The definitive account of an icon who shaped gender equality for all women.

In this comprehensive, revelatory biography — fifteen years of interviews and research in the making — historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs was her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to ‘repair the world’, with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.

Ruth’s journey began with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the country and having to fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and arguing momentous anti-sex-discrimination cases before the US Supreme Court.

All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound impact will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

son of

Son of the Brush

$34.99
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A frank and revealing memoir by the son of Australia’s greatest living painter.

Tim Olsen is the son of arguably Australia’s greatest living artist, Dr John Olsen. Son of the Brush is his fascinating, candid memoir of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of artistic genius, with all its wonder, excitement and bitter disappointments.

Tim’s childhood was dominated by his father’s work, which took the family to Europe and to communities around Australia as John sought inspiration and artistic fellowship. Wine, food, conversation and the emerging sexual freedom of the 1960s wove a pattern of life for the family. It was both the best and worst of childhoods, filled with vibrancy and stimulation, yet fraught with anxiety and eventual sadness as John separated from Tim’s mother Valerie and moved away from the family.

The course of Tim’s life has been set by the experiences of his childhood, and by the passion for art he inherited from both his parents (his mother was an acclaimed painter in her own right). His life has always been about art, although he has followed a different path from his parents. Having overcome and recovered from addiction, Tim is today one of Australia’s most respected gallery owners, with a knowledge of art and artists forged from what is literally a lifetime immersed in the art world.

Son of the Brush is a memoir about a son and his father, and what it takes to forge your own identity and chart your own course in life, but it is also about the wider world of art, artists and the joy, inspiration and sacrifices of the creative life.

Malcolm X

The Dead Are Arising

$59.99
By,

An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author’s interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X – including siblings, classmates, friends, cellmates, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world. His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become hundreds of hours of interviews into a portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most compelling figures that would separate fact from fiction.The result is this magisterial work that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his followers stir with purpose, to overcome the obstacles of racism. Setting his life not only within the political struggles of his day but also against the larger backdrop of American history, this remarkable masterpiece traces his path from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.

Payne paints vivid scenes from start to finish and delivers extraordinary revelations – from a hair-raising scene of Malcolm’s 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK, to a minute-by-minute account of his murder in Harlem in 1965, in which he makes the case for the complicity of the American government. The Dead Are Arising is a penetrating and riveting work that affirms the centrality of Malcolm X to the African American freedom struggle and the story of the twentieth century.

Secet life

The Secret Life of the Savoy

$32.99
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The story of the Savoy’s founders, through three generations and a hundred years of luxury

In 1889, Victorian impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte opened The Savoy, Britain’s first luxury hotel. Allowing the rich to live like royalty, it attracted glamour, scandal and a cast of eccentric characters, with the D’Oyly Carte family elevated to a unique vantage point on high society.

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE SAVOY tells their story through three generations: Richard (a showman who made his fortune from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas), Rupert (who expanded the D’Oyly Carte empire through two world wars and the roaring twenties), and Bridget (the reluctant heiress and last of the family line).

In this, the first biography of the family, Olivia Williams revives their extroardinary cultural legacy, told through the prism of their iconic hotel and its many distinguished guests.