Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

"An award-winning travel memoir from China documents how the author, a girl from the Altai Mountains, joined a Kazakh family of camel, sheep and cattle herders during their winter pasture migration from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains"-- Provided by publisher.

We talk about people behaving like sheep, which assumes that sheep all behave in the same way. That has not been my experience. Some are affectionate, others prone to head-butting. Some are determinedly self-sufficient, others seek our help when they need it. And some can be trusted to lead the f...

In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organisation now known as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the 'wise gals' by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humour and even quicker intellige...

This is a true story about two boys, Istvan and Frici, who live two kilometres but worlds apart in Romania. One is Catholic, one is Jewish; one grows up on a farm, the other in the affluent part of town. Life is routine and secure, the future seems predictable and each boy knows his place. Yet wh...

The very funny true story of three children recruited by their parents to work for ASIO in the 1950s. Growing up in the 1950s, the three Doherty children were trained by their parents to memorise car number plates, to spot unusual behaviour on the street and, most important of all, to avoid drawi...

Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder sometimes all at once and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of goodies for h...

He did what he needed to survive . . . the story of Sandakan's most notorious POW. At the Australian war crimes trials that followed World War II, one prosecution witness stood out: he was Sergeant-Major Bill Sticpewich. During Sticpewich's three years inside the infamous Sandakan POW camp, hundr...

Two Australian scientists played a vital yet largely unknown role in the Allied victory in the Second World War. Almost eight decades later, Wizards of Oz finally tells their story. In this fast-paced and compelling book, Brett Mason reveals how two childhood friends from Adelaide - physicist Mar...