Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd – förlag

"Dear Reader – This is not a book about coping with unbelievable busyness. It’s a book about making it stop.What if I told you that a lot of what keeps you unbelievably busy is not only pointless, but avoidable, nonsensical and entirely driven by your own fears, insecurities and ego? You’d probably want to slap me, if you could find the time, right?Don’t worry, I was once just like you: exhausted, harried, overcommitted and flummoxed as to what to cut back on. I’m not completely cured, but for the first time in years I have room to breathe and to think about what kind of life I really want to live. And I have Buddhism to thank for this.In this book I’ve compiled the teachings, ideas and practices that got me to this point. Buddhism helped me dig deep to discover why I was determined to do so much, and why I was so afraid to stand still and be alone with myself. It’s not hippy-trippy stuff, believe me. Buddhism is just as relevant and practical in our modern world as it’s ever been.As crazy as it sounds, I’m asking you to add one more thing to your list today: read this book, and let it help you free yourself from the grind of your unbelievable busyness. Live the peaceful life you know you deserve and be the person you want to be.Meshel Laurie is a television and radio presenter, newspaper columnist, podcaster and official ambassador of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She is the author of The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny and Buddhism for Break-ups."

The orchestra has tuned, the lights in the hall have dimmed, and the conductor’s baton signals the downbeat for the beginning of the romance. Settle back – it’s telling you something…The history of classical music is littered with murder, adultery, bigamy, fraud, sado-masochism, riches, poverty, gluttony, nervous breakdowns, bizarre behaviour and terrible, terrible toilet humour (Mozart was the prime exponent of the latter). Classical music –nice? Not at all. It’s the most immediate expression of mental and emotional extremes: often deceptive, sometimes dangerous and frequently a discomforting revelation.Swooning documents the all too human flaws in the lives of the great composers by loosely following the sequence of emotions as experienced in a love affair – one that doesn’t work out, of course.In this fully revised and updated edition, Christopher Lawrence leads us through the listening experience, from anger and Beethoven to sadness and Tchaikovsky, triumph and Wagner and freedom and Mozart – it’s all here in this whimsical guide to the conduct of a romance, with some handy hints on how to make it more, well, harmonious.One of Australia’s favourite radio personalities, Christopher Lawrence boasts a career spanning more than 40 years of broadcasting. He is best known for his work with ABC Classic FM, presenting the network’s Breakfast and Drive programs between 1994 and 2001. Three of the Swoon CDs that evolved out of his Breakfast program broke sales records in the Australian classical music industry, each achieving Platinum status.As an orchestral and opera recording producer Christopher has been awarded an International Emmy for Performing Arts, three ARIA Awards, a Churchill Fellowship, and the Editors’ Choice Award at the Cannes Classical Awards in France.Christopher has written three best-selling books: Swooning; Hymns of the Forefathers, based on his documentary series about the history of hymns seen on ABC TV; and Swing Symphony. He can be heard on ABC Classic FM from 9 a.m. to midday presenting Mornings.

A public intellectual known for his deeply humane approach to social and urban issues, Hugh Stretton’s thinking has influenced Australian public debates for many decades. Fundamentally, Stretton wanted to make Australia fairer. His book The Political Sciences was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a work of near genius. His Ideas for Australian Cities was a groundbreaking intervention in urban studies and progressive thinking on social reform. This collection of Stretton’s writing, compiled by Australia’s leading urban historian, Graeme Davison, includes highlights from these and a wide range of other works, offering a definitive selection on history and politics, urban planning, and social and economic development. Whether criticising Paul Keating or defending life in the suburbs, Stretton was an eloquent original. Robert Manne writes that Hugh Stretton may have been Australia''s most distinguished post-war social scientist. With great intelligence and subtlety, Hugh’s lifelong thinking offers an alternative to the neoliberal orthodoxy that took hold in the Anglophone world from the early 1980s and which, since the global financial crisis, has begun to lose its grip. The time is ripe for a collection.

Mercenary Mum is the true story of Neryl Joyce, a young single mother who went from working at her local Woolworths to serving as a soldier in the Australian Army’s elite Close Personal Protection Unit. She later left the army to become a high-risk security contractor, where she was responsible for protecting high-threat targets from assassination and opportune attack in Iraq.Vividly and powerfully, Joyce takes us on a journey through the battlefields of Iraq. She suffers the loss of close friends on the infamous Route Irish. She reveals what it’s like to be a woman in a brutal man’s world, and a victim of sexual abuse. And she tells how she survived all this to return home to her son.Mercenary Mum is the unforgettable and inspiring story of one woman’s fight for her career, for her family and for life itself.Neryl Joyce served as a commissioned officer in the Australian Army in its close personal protection unit, then worked as a private security contractor in Iraq. After retiring from the security business, she and her husband moved to Christmas Island to manage a detention centre. Neryl currently lives in Perth.

‘Tom stands among our great artists . . . a writer whose writing life parallels, exemplifies and is one of the crowning achievements of the Australian literature that came into being in our lifetime.’—Richard FlanaganFor five decades Tom Keneally has been one of Australia’s most loved literary figures. Celebrated as one of the world’s finest writers and known especially for the Booker Prize–winning Schindler’s Ark, he is also respected for his humanitarianism and commitment to republicanism and other causes. The breadth and richness of Keneally’s life and work is brilliantly explored in this engaging authorised biography.Beneath Keneally’s warm and garrulous exterior is a complex man once intermittently troubled by depression and anxiety. The prolific author and popular raconteur has known many ‘dark nights of the soul’. His commitment to Catholicism once led him to train for the priesthood, but serious doubts left him unable to fulfil that ambition. Instead, he became a haunted writer – and then an uninhibited storyteller. The result of deep research and unique interviews with Keneally himself, Interestingly Enough is the definitive account of the life of an extraordinary Australian.‘A true humanitarian . . . who possesses a special sensitivity and love for the human experience.’—Steven Spielberg‘Every country needs a Tom Keneally – but we’ve got him!’—Bryan BrownStephany Evans Steggall has written biographies of Colin Thiele, Ivan Southall and Bruce Dawe, and she is the author of Status and Sugar, a history of the Australian Society of Authors. She holds a PhD in Australian Literature from the University of Queensland, and in 2013 was awarded the Hazel Rowley Fellowship.