Young children love to be with you!

But as parents, grandparents or carers, most of us struggle at least a little to get down to their level and engage with them and their world. What do we say? How do we play? What do we do if they don’t stay and play? Others can do this better, can’t they?

Playtime explains how children learn and communicate through play, and what easy things you can do to make this a happy and rewarding experience for you both. Whether you’re looking at house numbers while out walking, inventing a new kind of hat or cutting up a banana together, there are ways to make the most of valuable time with your child.

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This book includes all sorts of games and ideas for children aged 1-5, as well as babies. Mother and daughter Elspeth and Fiona Richards show you how to:

• incorporate play into your daily routine
• make use of simple toys and materials
• discover what captures your child’s attention

Play is so much easier once you know what your child loves to do!

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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2. Perfect Memory Training: All You Need to Get It Right Every Time – Fiona McPherson
3. Beautiful Death – Fiona McIntosh

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

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But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.

It’s time to fall in love with food again.

Links and Further Reading

• Read a free extract
• Watch Michael Pollan discuss In Defense Of Food

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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1. Allergy-Safe Family Food: Managing Allergies, Food and Health – Suzanna Paxton
2. You: Being Beautiful – Mehmet Oz & Michael Roizen
3. It’s Never Too Late to Change Your Mind – Dr Michael J Valenzuela

For many women the emotional aspects of pregnancy are far more taxing than the physical ones. There’s no shortage of studies into the health of the foetus and the physical state of its incubator. But how women FEEL during pregnancy is largely ignored. It’s just pregnancy right? They’ll cope. Unfortunately not everyone does.

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This wise and very funny book is the result of hundreds of interviews with sympathetic professionals and pregnant chicks generous enough to reveal how they stayed sunny-side up despite spending nine months in tracky daks the size of North Korea. It is the essential survival guide to staying sane during pregnancy – a time when complete strangers think it’s OK to grope your groin when it’s tempting to eat not just for two but for three or four and when even the most ginormous underpants fit better back-to-front.

There are also plenty of practical tips for how to cope if:

• You don’t glow so much as sweat a lot, and become freakishly hairy and veiny;
• Your pregnant bum is the size of a campervan’s and your cankles rival those of Babar the elephant’s;
• You’re so overwhelmed by everything you’re supposed to do and not do that you’ve spent the past week lying in the foetal position eating nothing but folic acid-less Bounty Bars;
• You think every twinge or kick is a sign of miscarriage or triffid-strength mutation;
• You’re so vague you just microwaved your mobile phone and forgot the removing-your-undies stage of going to the loo;
• You’ll commit murder if one more pregnancy book or web site assumes your partner is a spouse, a he or actually exists;
• Your idea of pregnancy exercise is shuddering violently at the thought of one day introducing a baby’s head to your precious vagina; and
• Everyone keeps cackling witchily while saying you’ll never sleep, shag or have a life ever again.Attack of the Fifty-Foot Hormones

also includes Emma Tom’s hilarious pregnancy diary which reveals what happened after the former motorbike-riding rock chick was unexpectedly diagnosed with an SLF (which turned out to be ridiculous medical jargon for a Single Live Foetus).

Links and Further Reading

• Emma Tom’s Website

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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1. The Draft – Emma Quayle
2. One Foot Wrong – Sofie Laguna
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During the violent financial disruptions of recent years, three men have stood out as beacons of judgement & wisdom: Warren Buffett, George Soros & Paul Volcker.

Buffett is renowned as a canny stock-market investor, Soros as an astute reader of shifting global tides, and Volcker as a regulator and policy-maker. Each has more than fifty years of deep involvement in the markets, and all are sceptical of Wall Street frenzies. They have seen too many cycles of boom and bust to trust blindly in free-market dogmatism.

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With the benefit of his own deep understanding of financial markets, and drawing on his interviews with Buffett, Soros and Volcker, Charles R. Morris brilliantly analyses the careers of these three men. He distils their wisdom and experience, and shows how their insights can help us to navigate the treacherous financial terrain ahead.

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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1. Don’t You Know Who I Used to Be – Julia Morris
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A leading neuroscientist and New York Times-bestselling author of Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot distills the research on the brain and serves up practical, surprising, and illuminating recommendations for warding off neurological decline, cognitive function, and encouraging smarter thinking day to day.

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In Think Smart, the renowned neuropsychiatrist and bestselling author Dr. Richard Restak details how each of us can improve and tone our bodyas most powerful organ: the brain.

As a renowned expert on the brain, Restak knows that in the last five years there have been exciting new scientific discoveries about the brain and its performance. So heas asked his colleagues many of them the world as leading brain scientists and researchersaone important question: What can I do to help my brain work more efficiently? Their surprising and remarkably feasible answers are at the heart of Think Smart.

Restak combines advice culled from cutting-edge research with brain-tuning exercises to show how individuals of any age can make their brain work more effectively. In the same accessible prose that made Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot a New York Times bestseller, Restak presents a wide array of practical recommendations about a variety of topics, including the crucial role sleep plays in boosting creativity, the importance of honing sensory memory, and the neuron- firing benefits of certain foods.

In Think Smart, the awise, witty, and ethical Restaka (says the Smithsonian Institution) offers readers helpful suggestions for fighting neurological decline that will put every reader on the path to building a healthier, more limber brain.

Links and Further Reading

• Richard Restak’s Website

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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2. Great Australian Eulogies – Richard Walsh
3. The Greatest Show on Earth – Richard Dawkins

Forty years ago, Buzz Aldrin became the second human – minutes after Neil Armstrong – to set foot on a celestial body other than the Earth. The event remains one of mankind’s greatest achievements and was witnessed by the largest worldwide television audience in history. In the years since, millions more have had their earth-centric perspective changed forever by gazing at the iconic photograph of Aldrin standing on the surface of the Moon with the blackness of space behind him. He described what he saw as ‘magnificent desolation’.

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The flight of Apollo 11 made Aldrin one of the most famous people on the planet, yet few people know the rest of the story. In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin not only gives us a harrowing first-person account of the lunar landing that came within seconds of failure, as well as the ultimate insider’s view of life as one of the superstars of America’s space program, he also opens up with remarkable candour about his more personal trials – and eventual triumphs – back on Earth. From the glory of being part of the mission that fulfilled President Kennedy’s challenge to reach the Moon before the decade was out, Aldrin returned home to an Air Force career stripped of purpose or direction, other than as a public relations tool that NASA put to relentless use in a seemingly nonstop world tour. The twin demons of depression and alcoholism emerged – the first of which Aldrin confronted early and publicly and the second of which he met with denial until it nearly killed him.

As an adventure story, a searing memoir of self-destruction and self-renewal, and as a visionary rallying cry to once again set our course for Mars and beyond, Magnificent Desolation is the thoroughly human story of a genuine hero.

Links and Further Reading

• SMH Interview
• Watch an interview with Buzz Aldrin discussing Magnificent Desolation

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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There is a glut of wine guides out there, but wine writer Campbell Mattinson and co-author Gary Walsh reckon that most people buy them for the sections on red wine, and that it’s a trickier area to navigate. So this will be the first guide of its kind in Australia: one for those wanting to know the best quality and best value red wines available.

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‘The top 20 wines under $20′ section will be welcomed happily in the current economic climate. Mattinson and co-author Walsh also keep a focus on local and organic wines as well as established wines. The Big Red Wine Book 2009/2010 edition, is the perfect gift for wine buffs as well as those without wine knowledge but a love for a good drop.

Links and Further Reading

• Winefront

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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The Murray holds a special place in the hearts of Australians, beloved for its natural beauty, its integral role in agriculture, its colourful history and as a favourite holiday destination. But a look beyond the spectacular vistas and picturesque paddleboats reveals a river stripped of its splendour by long years of drought and misuse.

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Every politician in the country has a view on how to fix the Murray, but Allan has sought out those who know it best those who live and work beside it. Travelling along the river from Goolwa to beyond Albury, we meet the woman who’s swum its entire length, the owner of the country’s smallest paddleboat, the last river-trader, as well as those who fish the river’s waters, farm on its banks, or who are fighting to preserve it. Their stories are as diverse as the Murray itself, but their message is the same: there’s still plenty to celebrate about life on the river. Riverfolk is an uplifting tribute to an Australian icon.

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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An unforgettable story of growing up in a Mafia world of random violence, wealth, glamour, and sex – a unique ‘insiders’ view of the most notorious criminal organisation in the world.

The Scarpas were a Mafia dynasty led by Greg Scarpa Sr, so notorious for his addiction to violence and murder that he was nicknamed ‘The Grim Reaper.’ His son, Gregory Jr., a promising young athlete, worshipped his ruthless and manipulative father, and slowly he was drawn into his father’s dark world. What no one but father and son knew was that for thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Scarpa Sr. was an informant, working intimately with FBI handlers. For decades, his connection to the FBI – including the much-publicized agent Lin DeVecchio – protected him, granting him a virtual license to kill. However, when faced with arrest in the late 1980s, Scarpa asked his son to leave his wife and children, and take the fall for his father.

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In 1995, after years in prison, Gregory Jr. was transferred to Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and re-indicted on superseding charges. There he was imprisoned alongside Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and made a deal with the government to get information from Yousef in exchange for leniency. A year later, he furnished the feds with detailed intelligence on what would eventually result in the September 11 attacks. But, incredibly, Gregor’s desperate warnings were unheeded, and he was sentenced to forty-years-to-life in isolation at the notorious ADMAX, the most secure federal prison in the country, in Florence, Colorado. There, he would supply the FBI with intelligence on Oklahoma City bomber and fellow prisoner Terry Nichols. Again, his contribution was ignored, and Gregory remains at ADMAX, where he believes he will one day be murdered.

This is an unforgettable story of growing up in a Mafia world of random violence, wealth, glamour, and sex. A world where a man’s word is both everything – and nothing.

Links and Further Reading

• Mafia Son Website

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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In Between the Assassinations, Aravind Adiga brings to life a chorus of distinctive Indian voices, all inhabitants in the fictional town of Kittur…His new book sizzles with the same humour, anger, and humanity that characterized The White Tiger. On India’s south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut, lies Kittur – a small, nondescript every town.

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Aravind Adiga acts as our guide to the town, mapping overlapping lives of Kittur’s residents. Here, an illiterate Muslim boy working at the train station finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist; a bookseller is arrested for selling a copy of The Satanic Verses; a rich, spoiled, half-caste student decides to explode a bomb in school; a sexologist has to find a cure for a young boy who may have AIDS. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town and a group portrait of ordinary Indians in a time of extraordinary transformation, over the seven-year period between the assassinations of Prime Minister Gandhi and her son Rajiv.

Keenly observed and finely detailed, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of voice and imagination.

Links and Further Reading

• Watch an interview with Aravind Adiga

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

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