Scribe Publications: New Releases Section

Bereft

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging across Australia. Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men, and train travel is severely restricted. There are rumours it is the end of the world.

In the NSW town of Flint, Quinn Walker returns to the home he fled ten years earlier when he was accused of an unspeakable crime. Aware that his father and uncle would surely hang him, Quinn hides in the hills surrounding Flint. There, he meets the orphan Sadie Fox — a mysterious young girl who seems to know more about the crime than she should.

A searing gothic novel of love, longing and justice, Bereft is about the suffering endured by those who go to war and those who are forever left behind.

Rainbow Pie: a redneck memoir

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

Rainbow Pie is a coming-of-age memoir wrapped around a discussion of America’s most taboo subject — social class. Set between 1950 and 1963, Joe Bageant uses Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of his rambunctious Scots–Irish family to chronicle the often-heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass.

Combining recollection, stories, accounts, remembrance, and analysis, the book offers an intimate look at what Americans lost in the massive and orchestrated post-war social and economic shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society. Along the way, he also provides insights into how ‘the second and third generation of displaced agrarians’, as Gore Vidal described them, now fuel the discontent of America’s politically conservative, God-fearing, Obama-hating ‘red-staters’.

These are the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America’s urban and suburban heartland: the ones who never got a slice of the pie during the good times, and the ones hit hardest by America’s bad times, and who hit back during election years. Their ‘tough work and tougher luck’ story stretches over generations, and Bageant tells it here with poignancy, indignation, and tinder-dry wit.

The Vitamin D Solution: a 3-step strategy to cure our most common health problem

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

Vitamin D deficiency is the most common medical condition in the world. Recent research indicates that 23 per cent of Australians have some degree of vitamin D deficiency, including up to 43 per cent of young women. As a result, they may suffer from chronic health conditions, ranging from daily annoyances such as fatigue and pain to life-threatening illnesses. But few people know why vitamin D is so important and what they can do to avoid the myriad ailments associated with its deficiency, including osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

There is no better person to demystify this vitamin and showcase its place in human health than author Michael F. Holick, PhD, MD — the father of modern vitamin D research. With more than three decades spent studying the relationship between vitamin D, limited sun exposure, and human wellbeing, Dr Holick shares his findings on how combining the natural curative properties of the sun along with small lifestyle changes can help everyone to live a substantially healthier life.

Armed with a three-step plan incorporating safe amounts of sun exposure, the right supplementation, and eating foods rich in vitamin D, Dr Holick provides prescriptive advice for anyone — from relatively healthy people to those suffering from chronic or even fatal diseases — on how to easily rebuild and maintain optimal levels of this essential hormone.

Rich with anecdotes and entertaining case studies, The Vitamin D Solution also presents research from around the world to serve as a wake-up call on the importance of this potentially lifesaving hormone.

Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

Ramona Koval has been praised as a master of the interview genre, renowned for engaging writers in conversations that are incisive, provocative, and often funny.

In this new collection, Speaking Volumes: conversations with remarkable writers, she shares the most fascinating interviews from her 2005 book Tasting Life Twice, along with brand-new ones with some of the most important writers of our times.

Through Koval, we are privy to the extraordinary minds of Joseph Heller, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, David Malouf, P. D. James, John Mortimer, Ian McEwan, Amos Oz, Gore Vidal, Harold Pinter, John le Carré, Barry Lopez, Malcolm Bradbury, William Gass, Judith Wright, Les Murray, Fay Weldon, A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, André Brink, John Banville, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, and Anne Enright, among others.

The Flight of the Intellectuals

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

It created a worldwide furore when Tariq Ramadan was barred from US entry to accept a prestigious appointment at Notre Dame University. After all, as a major profile in The New York Times Magazine observed, Ramadan is one of the Muslim world’s most charismatic and influential figures, with a long career at prominent European universities advocating peaceful coexistence with the West.

But in a gripping portrait, Paul Berman — ‘one of America’s leading public intellectuals’ (Foreign Affairs) — details Ramadan’s disturbing ties to radical Islam, especially through his grandfather, the founder of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the founding ideology behind al-Qaeda. And Berman notes a troubling tendency among Western liberals — and many Western journalists — to overlook Ramadan’s questionable tenets in the rush to embrace a moderate.

By comparing Ramadan’s own writing with his coverage in the press, Berman touches on many of today’s most important issues — the debate over the veil in French schools, contemporary anti-Semitism, anti-feminism, and the presence of home-grown Islamic fundamentalism in the West — and presents a stunning commentary about the media’s inability to detect dangerous ideas in contemporary society.

Climate Wars: the fight for survival as the world overheats: New edition

2010-08-30T00:00:00Z

From one of the world’s great geopolitical analysts, here is a terrifying glimpse of the none-too-distant future, when climate change will force the world’s powers into a desperate struggle for advantage and even survival.

Dwindling resources. Massive population shifts. Natural disasters. Spreading epidemics. Drought. Rising sea levels. Plummeting agricultural yields. Crashing economies. Political extremism. These are some of the expected consequences of runaway climate change in the decades ahead, and any of them could tip the world towards conflict. Prescient, unflinching, and based on exhaustive research and interviews, Climate Wars promises to be one of the most important books of the coming years.