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A Westerner's inside look into the workings of Chinese society.

For six years, from 2005 to 2011, Australian JFK Miller worked in Shanghai for English-language publications censored by state publishers under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party. In this wry memoir, he offers a view of that regime, as he saw it, as an outsider from the bottom up.

'Trickle-Down Censorship' explores how censorship affected him, a Westerner who took free speech for granted. It is about how he learned censorship in a system where the rules are kept secret; it is about how he became his own Thought Police through self-censorship; it is about the peculiar relationship he developed with his censors, and the moral choices he made as a result of censorship and how, having made those choices, he viewed others.

This is also the story of a re-emerging colossus - China, the world's most populous nation and one of its oldest civilizations - and how the Chinese relate to foreigners and the outside world. The so-called "clash of civilizations" is played out in the microcosm of JFK Miller's experience working under Chinese state censorship.

If you want to be entertained and yet stretched, then Twisted Journeys is the book for you.

 

Albert Trajstman has again shown his mastery of the novella in this new collection of three new works. Diverse and ambitious, the stories take us to faraway places and strange situations. Each novella twists and turns in unexpected directions, changes shape and weaves strands together.

Journeys of a Prodigal Son is a romp set in the sixteenth century, travelling with the story's insensitive protagonist on a journey through Renaissance Italy. He is shipwrecked and meets a Venetian merchant and his family, a duchessa, a Jewish librarian at the University of Bologna and a wise sophisticated Turk. Liberally laced with sexual adventures, the story takes us to exotic settings and unexpected endings.

Journey to Find out What Happened concerns a scam perpetrated against the US army in post-war Paris. The cast includes a world-weary journalist, a shady lawyer, an enigmatic US soldier and a number of bit players. Follow the journalist as he tries to find out what really happened. It's a mystery in the best tradition of Graham Greene's The Third Man.

Finally, My Journey with the Nixons and Others is a bitter-sweet story set in Melbourne from the 1960s to the present, a story of growing up in the company of a bizarre family called the Nixons. Sad and humorous in turns, it is told in an episodic fashion.

 

Enjoy a master storyteller who takes you to unexpected places!

 

Parental anxiety has reached epidemic proportions. We feel an overwhelming need to protect and fix our baby from the moment of birth, yet we often do not know what to do. We get frustrated and stressed, and when this overwhelms us, the whole family is at risk.

How can we catch stress early before parenting habits are first created?

Dr Leon Levitt is an experienced GP and obstetrician, with great success in easing the path for parents through these early months and years. With practical examples from his practice, he presents important principles, rules and strategies to better navigate and enjoy the journey.

He offers a complete paradigm shift in approach to babies. The newborn baby’s progressive, neurological development is completely different from the baby after four months, and therefore requires a different parental mindset.

For the baby in the first four months, the golden rule is First Calm Down. Dr Levitt describes the true goals of parenting and gives practical approaches to colic, reflux, feeding and sleep. This child behaves according to inherited automatic reflexes, so the parents are freed from the need to ‘fix’ the distressed baby, and can learn to meet the baby’s needs in the moment.

Seven strategies are explored, encouraging parents to withdraw from the specific issue with their baby and instead use one or more of these broad approaches to bring back calmness, control and joy.

The book concludes with a guide to common medical issues parents have with their baby.

This is a crime fiction story with a difference. Red Coltrane would love nothing more than to be a champion relay runner. But that dream disappeared when motor neurone disease took hold of his body. Red also has an intellectual disability, and he lives in supported accommodation with three other variously disabled men, including Johnny, whose prime means of communication is to hum. But today Red's life has just become even more difficult.

He's been charged with murder, and police suspect he is the serial arsonist who has been torching Melbourne's churches. Red thinks he knows what's going on, but his inability to communicate means his version of events may forever remain a mystery.

When he stumbles across some information that he knows he shouldn't possess, Red becomes sure that the only way to stop the fires is to find the arsonist. That search will take all of Red's resolve, and will force him to rely more than he ever thought possible on his housemates and on the one person he's sure won't let him down, his long-term carer and hero, Pedro.

How has sport, starting as the happy games of childhood, become branded as an endless competition of 'winning' and 'losing'? Why is the public apparently 'unperturbed' with humiliating so many people? It can 'cost' five thousand 'losers' to produce one 'winner' - sport, a 'weapon of mass destruction'.

Will to Win tries to explain why millions trek weekly to its myriad global chapels/stadiums for worship, blessing and succour, and how it spreads its tentacles across the globe, and floods daily media. And how it has the confidence to believe its 'winners' can teach the community how to become 'successful' in business and life. This book is a work of reflection by a social scientist.