Spinning Tops Gumdrops

Spinning Tops and Gumdrops takes us back to childhood in colonial Australia. The delight of children at play is universal, but the pleasure these children experience as depicted through the book's photographs is through their 'imagination, skill and daring' rather than through possessions. Children play quoits and jacks, hide and seek, cricket with a kerosene tin for a wicket, dress ups and charades. They climb trees, run races, and build rafts to sail on the local waterhole. The photographs show children happily absorbed in the play of their own making. Being a child in colonial Australia was also tough. It was a time when school yard disagreements were sorted out with fists and 'the loss of a little claret'. A time when children could view public hangings and premature death was frequent, especially taking the very young and vulnerable though dysentery, whooping cough or diphtheria. The lasting impression left by the contemporary accounts, photographs, etchings and paintings of colonial children in Spinning Tops and Gumdrops is their possession of qualities of resilience, self-sufficiency and acceptance of their lot. Perhaps it was through lack of choice, or of knowing no other. Nevertheless, these were qualities that put them in good stead for the challenges many faced in their adulthood. Interestingly, these are qualities on which contemporary society still places a high value, but which today seem a little more elusive.

Convicts and bushrangers, pirates and princes, they ave all had a part to play in Australia's past. The history of the Indigenous Australians goes back for over 60,000 years, a length of time that is so vast it is difficult to comprehend. Find out the stories of all these people in this book, and discover how they have left their mark on today's Australia. How much do you really know about Australia? Did you know that the whole continent is on the move, or that Aussies were the first to use penicillin? Dip in anywhere throughout this series to find masses of mini articles on everything you could want to know about Australia.

Covering the life of Josephus Henry Barsden from his birth in 1799 through his childhood to 16 years of age, the Barsden memoirs describe events from a Sussex smugglers’ inn, a convict ship to the colony of New South Wales, sealing and whaling expeditions to Van Diemen’s Land, and Barsden’s participation in a Tahitian civil war. The author assesses the value of memoirs, and of these memoirs in particular to students of history in respect to the transnational paradigm. He tests the historicity and veracity of their contents, and provides an engaging exegesis and graphical supplement of its contents. Of central importance is Barsden’s account of the Battle of Fe’i Pi, which was in many respects the Pacific’s equivalent to the contemporaneous Battle of Waterloo, such was its lasting impact on Pacific geopolitics. This was no ordinary childhood, and poses many questions about a transnational adolescent’s impact on major events. A fascinating read for scholars and students of Australian, Pacific, and British Colonial History, written with academic rigour but accessible to non-specialists.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta's first book is "more powerful than any coming-of-age novel" —The Washington Post Bad Haircut explores the themes that have fascinated Perrotta throughout his career: suburban rituals and mores; sports and religion; the cheerful cheesiness of American consumer life; public tests of manliness; and the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary people, parents, and teenagers alike. Perrotta has continued to explore these subjects in novels from Election to The Abstinence Teacher. The ten rich stories here are linked by a single protagonist: Buddy, an adolescent suburban New Jersey boy who is truly seeing his world for the first time and already finding it both mysterious and lacking. Whether he's out on a Boy Scout trip with his mother and discovering that his mother actually knows—and has a history with—the man inside the battered foam hot dog costume in "The Weiner Man", feeling the first glimmer that sex might actually be possible for him in "Thirteen", or finding himself swept along on a prank gone very wrong in "Snowman," Buddy is both a recognizable American boy and a trademark Perrotta hero. Bad Haircut is a moving, spare book from a writer who, even this early in his career, had an assured sense of the complexity of his characters' emotional landscapes.

As Miriam Martin stood at her father's graveside, she recalled the complex story of her parents' marriage. Her mother's family migrated from the Mid-West in 1887 on the expanded line of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad from Kansas City to San Diego. Miriam's grandfather was looking to find the "golden fruits, the gardens of this sunset land." It was there in San Diego County, on a windy summer day on the beach, that her mother, Suzanna, met her father, Victor. She was 13. He was 20. By the time Suzanna was 14, they had been secretly married. Suzanna still lived at home, meeting Victor on weekends. Miriam couldn't help but smile as she recalled the story she had been told about how the secret was revealed. But she also knew that the happiness her parents had at the beginning was short-lived. Victor, a pharmacist, and his family had the only pharmacy in San Diego, and he was a prominent citizen of the city. Yet all his education and charm could not overcome his alcoholism, and Miriam (called Merry by her beloved father) was caught in the middle of her parents' stormy relationship. Miriam's story unfolds against the backdrop of California's earliest days, when most residents lived a rural life. And when "the town of San Diego reeked of newness, with its crude dirt streets and sparsely placed wooden buildings. Strange trees called palms flanked the roadway." Yet it was growing day by day as Easterners and Mid-Westerners made their way to Southern California's sunny shores.

Time and again, New York Times bestselling author Karen White has proven herself to be the “ultimate voice of women’s fiction.”* Now, you can revisit the beginning of her signature style in two of her earliest novels—completely revised and together in one volume for the first time. In the Shadow of the Moon When Laura Truitt first sees the dilapidated plantation house, she’s overcome by a sense of familiarity. Inside, the owner claims to have been waiting for years and offers an old photograph of a woman with Laura’s face. Soon afterwards, when a lunar eclipse inexplicably thrusts Laura back in time to Civil War Georgia, she finds herself fighting not just for her heart, but for her very survival… Whispers of Goodbye Alone and with nothing left to fear, Catherine deClaire Reed answers her sister’s desperate plea and travels to the cold comfort of her home in Reconstruction Louisiana. But Elizabeth is nowhere to be found. No one—including her husband—has seen her for days. Now, Catherine must search for her sister in a place where secrets wait behind every closed door...