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Bloody SaturdayShanghai's Darkest Day by Paul French
Category: Classics | Series: Penguin Specials Ser.
Saturday, August 14, 1937--that summer Shanghai was expecting to be hit by a typhoon of "violent intensity." The typhoon passed, but what did strike Shanghai was a man-made typhoon of bombs and shrapnel that brought aerial death and destruction such as no city had ever seen before. The clock outside Cat ...Show more
Choosing Openness: A Lowy Institute Paper: Penguin Special: Why global engagement is best for Australia by Andrew Leigh
Category: Business | Series: Penguin Specials
Across the developed world, global engagement has become a major political fault line. Populists say that we should hunker down in the face of difference, that trade is a zero-sum game, and that foreign investment will cost us in the long run. They say openness is the cause of the growing income gap. Th ...Show more
Coal Face by Tom Doig
Category: Australiana | Series: Penguin Specials
On 9 February 2014 a fire took hold in the Hazelwood coal mine near Morwell in Victoria; it wasn't brought under control until 25 March 2014. How was this small town affected by this huge disaster?
Condemned to Crisis: A Lowy Institute Paper by Ken Ward
Category: Politics | Series: Penguin Specials
It is often said that no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. Yet the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran is just the latest in a long line of crises that have marred relations between Canberra and Jakarta. Does Australia really need to do more to strengthen its ties with Ind ...Show more
Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy For A City: Penguin Specials by Xu Xi
Category: Non-Fiction | Series: Penguin Specials: the Hong Kong Ser.
Xu Xi's body of work witnesses her turbulent love affair with her home-city of Hong Kong. In this probing memoir, she unravels her recently finalised decision to leave the city for good. She critiques a Hong Kong that has, in her eyes, lost its way. And yet, it is only out of the city's enduring presenc ...Show more
Does Cooking Matter? (Penguin Special) by Rebecca Huntley
Category: Food & Wine | Series: Penguin Specials
Drugs Don't Work: A Global Threat by Sally C. Davies; Mike Catchpole; Jonathan Grant
Category: Health | Series: Penguin Specials Ser.
Resistance to our current range of antibiotics is the new inconvenient truth. If we don't act now, we risk the health of our parents, our children and our grandchildren. Antibiotics add, on average, twenty years to our lives. For over seventy years, since the manufacture of penicillin in 1943, we have s ...Show more
Dying for a Chat: Penguin Special by Ranjana Srivastava
Category: Non-Fiction | Series: Penguin Specials
We put much store in freedom of choice, but when it comes to our own medical diagnosis and treatment, are we equipped to make the best decisions? And are healthcare professionals properly prepared to guide us? Alarmingly, oncologist and award-winning writer Ranjana Srivastava says they're not, and peopl ...Show more
Embarrassed Colonialist by Sean Dorney
Category: Politics | Series: Penguin Specials Ser.
Forty years after independence, Papua New Guinea is the largest single recipient of aid from Australia. Yet Australians seem to be largely ambivalent about the country. Few Australians know the history of our colonial rule in PNG and our long ties to the country are quickly being forgotten. PNG expert S ...Show more
End of the Road?: Australia's love affair with the car industry, its current difficulties, and why we shouldn't rush into a divorce by Gideon Haigh
Category: Non-Fiction | Series: Penguin Specials
Australia is one of just thirteen countries in the world equipped to take a car from design concept all the way to a showroom - a remarkable achievement in a market so small. Yet the industry has few friends, and many vociferous critics who argue that the country should not make cars at all. In this eng ...Show more
Flock of Brown Birds by Ge Fei
Category: Fiction | Series: Penguin Specials Ser.
In this avant garde novella, memory and time are subjective. A writer named Ge Fei retreats to the beautiful solitude of the Waterside to finish his novel inspired by the Revelations of St. John. He perceives ominous and portentous signs in the natural landscape around him, particularly in a flock of br ...Show more
From Despair to Hope by James Arvanitakis
Category: Philosophy | Series: Penguin Specials
A few days before the terrorist attacks in Paris, a car bomb exploded in Beirut killing dozens. Though this may happen on the other side of the world, deep divisions emerge that are exploited for political expediency. Strangers are no longer people reading quietly on the bus, but potential threats. How ...Show more