Nevil Shute

Gideon Haigh

On the Beach

Make way for this defiantly idiosyncratic, hilariously illuminating compendium of curiosities you never knew you wanted to know! How do you flirt in Turkish? How do you dump someone in Japanese? What are the names of all the animals ever sent into space? These are just some of the fun and insightful oddities that made Gideon Haigh's The Uncyclopedia a hit overseas. The first ever encyclopedia for the curious, The Uncyclopedia is a compendium of illuminating knowledge and a delight for all inquisitive readers. As proved by Schott's Original Miscellany and the enormous rise in popularity of quiz and trivia nights, arcane knowledge and non-essential facts have never been so popular. At last in one convenient volume, everything for knowledge-hungry readers: --Lists of Norse gods --Suicide notes of the famous --All anyone needs to know about --How to toast in 10 languages? --A list of all the men to walk on the moon --Twenty Latin mottoes --Fortune-telling techniques Neither trivial nor essential, yet always engaging and illuminating, The Uncyclopedia is the reference book referred to purely for the purposes of amusement -- and readers just can't put it down!

The Uncyclopedia

Inciclopédia

Veteran journalist Gideon Haigh assesses the future of news media in light of the internet's effects on traditional forms of publishing and broadcasting. In the last decade, customary news media have crumbled before the effects of the internet on advertising, circulation and viewership. In the next decade, they will be supplemented, if not supplanted, by new news media. In this insightful, informative and candid survey of possible futures, veteran journalist Gideon Haigh considers the options for his industry and his craft. Who wins? Who loses? What are the implications for practitioners, professionals, politicians and the public? Gideon Haigh is the author of twenty-six books. The five sections that comprise The Deserted Newsroom first appeared as individual pieces in Crikey's Brave News World series.

Penguin Special

The Deserted Newsroom: Penguin Special

In May 1977, the cricket world woke to discover that a 39-year-old businessman called Kerry Packer had signed thirty-five elite international players for his own televised World Series Cricket. The Cricket War, now published with a new introduction and afterword, is the definitive account of the split that changed the game on the field and on the screen. In helmets, under lights, with white balls and in coloured clothes, the outlaw armies of Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd fought a daily battle of survival. In boardrooms and courtrooms, Packer and cricket's rulers fought a bitter war of nerves. A compelling account of top-class sporting life, The Cricket War also gives a unique insight into the motives and methods of the tycoon who became Australia's richest man.

The Cricket War

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member. These days, ‘Doc’ Evatt is remembered mainly as the hapless and divisive opposition leader during the long ascendancy of his great rival Sir Robert Menzies. Yet long before we spoke of ‘public intellectuals’, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation’s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evatt’s innovative and empathic decision in Chester v the Council of Waverley Municipality, which argued for the law to acknowledge inner suffering as it did physical injury, Gideon Haigh rediscovers the most brilliant Australian of his day, a patriot with a vision of his country charting its own path and being its own example – the same attitude he brought to being the only Australian president of the UN General Assembly, and instrumental in the foundation of Israel. A feat of remarkable historical perception, deep research and masterful storytelling, The Brilliant Boy confirms Gideon Haigh as one of our finest writers of non-fiction. It shows Australia in a rare light, as a genuinely clever country prepared to contest big ideas and face the future confidently. 'Gideon Haigh has always been an exquisite wordsmith, and he proves here that he is also an intuitive historian and acute biographer with a masterful control of the broad sweep and telling detail’ AFR Books of the Year 'Here is a master craftsman delivering one of his most finely honed works. Meticulous in its research, humane in its storytelling, The Brilliant Boy is Gideon Haigh at his lush, luminous best. Haigh shines a light on person, place and era with the sheer force of his intellect and the generosity of his words. The Brilliant Boy is simply a brilliant book.' Clare Wright, Stella-Prize winning author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka ‘Gideon Haigh has a nose for Australian stories that light up the past from new angles, and he tells this one with verve, grace and lightly worn erudition. I couldn’t put it down.’ Judith Brett, The Saturday Paper ‘An absolutely remarkable, moving and elegant re-reading of the early life of an extraordinary Australian. Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's finest writers and thinkers … mesmerizing … one of the best Australian biographies I have read for a long time.' Michael McKernan, Canberra Times

Doc Evatt and the Great Australian Dissent

The Brilliant Boy

In January 2024, in a period of personal crisis, Gideon Haigh abruptly started writing the story of the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed, finally facing how it had shaped the rest of his life. Seventy-two hours later he stopped. Dark, raw and revealing, My Brother Jaz is how it feels to lose someone, and yourself, even as the rest of the world turns, and you struggle to keep up.

My Brother Jaz

Gideon Haigh's new book covers all the great figures and major issues of cricket, by collecting all his best writing about the game. There are profiles of players past and present - Bradman, Ranjitsinhji, Benaud and Sobers from the past, Steve Waugh, Shane Warne and Wasim Akram from the present. He covers the big issues in the game: sledging, match-fixing, Kerry Packer, Zimbabwe, umpiring. He writes about cricket's best writers - Swanton, C.L.R. James - and ponders the game's most halcyon and unique aspects: slow bowling, captaincy, the essence of good batting. Haigh has now established himself as one of the finest writers on the game - author of one acknowledged masterpiece, Mystery Spinner, a comic classic, Many a Slip - and one of its most most shrewd commentators, who gets widely reviewed both by the cricket media and the national press. This book is likely to attract the same attention.

Game for Anything

For many of us, it's where we spend more time and expend greater effort than anywhere else. Yet how many of us have stopped to think about why? In The Office: A Hardworking History, Gideon Haigh traces from origins among merchants and monks to the gleaming glass towers of New York and the space age sweatshops of Silicon Valley, finding an extraordinary legacy of invention and ingenuity, shaped by the telephone, the typewriter, the elevator, the email, the copier, the cubicle, the personal computer, the personal digital assistant. Amid the formality, restraint and order of office life, too, he discovers a world teeming with dramas great and small, of boredom, betrayal, distraction, discrimination, leisure and lust, meeting along the way such archetypes as the Whitehall mandarin, the Wall Street banker, the Dickensian clerk, the Japanese salaryman, the French bureaucrat and the Soviet official. In doing so, Haigh taps a rich lode of art and cinema, fiction and folklore, visiting the workplaces imagined by Hawthorne and Heller, Kafka and Kurosawa, Balzac and Wilder, and visualised from Mary Tyler Moore to Mad Men, from Network to 9 to 5-plus, of course, The Office. Far from simply being a place we visit to earn a living, the office emerges as a way of seeing the entire world.

A Hardworking History

Office

Wasim Akram

The official biography of Wasim Akram one of the world's greatest cricketers.

A Memoir

Sultan

In the last three years, cricket has changed more completely than in the preceding three decades, revolutionised by a racy new format, Twenty20, and a glamorous new competition, the Indian Premier League. How did India come to run world cricket? How did clubs owned by billionaires and Bollywood stars begin to shove international competition aside? How did money unite players and divide administrators, amid allegations of massive corruption? Gideon Haigh has followed cricket's biggest story since Kerry Packer's 'World Series' from the beginning: Sphere of Influence is the result. This insightful collection brings the struggle to save cricket's soul into sharp and disturbing focus.

Writings on Cricket and Its Discontents

Sphere of Influence

A generation ago in Australia, abortion was a crime. It was also the basis of one of the country's most lucrative and longest-lasting criminal rackets. The Racket describes the rise and fall of an extraordinary web of influence, which culminated in the landmark ruling that made abortion legal, and a public inquiry that humiliated a powerful government and a glamorous police force. With forensic skill and psychological subtlety, Gideon Haigh brings to life a story of corruption in high places and human suffering in low, of murder, suicide, courtroom drama, political machinations, and of the abortionists themselves: among them a multi-millionaire philanthropist, a communist bush poet, a timid aesthete and a bankrupt slaughterman. It is the story, too, of Bertram Wainer, abortion's crash-through-or-crash campaigner, and the moral issue he bequeathed which still divides Australians.

How Abortion Became Legal In Australia

Racket

Meet Moof, Womble, Castaway, Churchyard and One Dad, a dog called Six Bits and a van known as the Bog Roll Express. Every summer weekend, the parks of Australia turn themselves over to countless thousands of club cricket matches. One of those clubs is the Yarras. This is the inside story of their most memorable season, told by the vice-president, chairman of selectors, newsletter editor, trivia-night quizmaster, karaoke impresario and club greyhound shareholder, Gideon Haigh. The Vincibles is about playing for love, winning with grace, losing with humour, valuing your community, and other anachronistic notions. It features 69 ducks and 257 dropped catches.(Not that we're counting.) The spirit of cricket isn't dead. It's just upped and moved to the suburbs.

A Suburban Cricket Season

Vincibles

For all the glamour and new-found wealth that has come to cricket thanks to the IPL, the sport has rarely faced such an uncertain future. The gold standard of cricket - Test matches - is being sidelined in some countries by the shorter forms of the game. While the sport is being transformed, administrators are struggling to keep pace with it all. Yet, despite all of this, the sport's essential elements remain in place: great games are played, new stars rise up and old stars step back and retire. In this new collection of writing, Gideon Haigh takes the pulse of the game today, and in particular looks at the decline of the sport in Australia, where the once all-conquering men in the 'baggy green' suddenly found themselves struggling to impose themselves on their opponents.

The Changing World of Cricket

Uncertain Corridors

Nine? Eleven? Bah! Bosh! Give us tens, and in plenty! At last, a book that has never before existed, by the only author to have written it. Gideon Haigh's The Tencyclopedia-a tribute to the thrall of the decimal. Here, grouped as never before, Ten Affairs, Aunts, Masses, Mice, Methods, Plans, Principles and Penises. Here, as you have never seen them, Ten Indian Traffic Signs and Ten Flags That Feature Weapons. Here, as you have never read them, a History of Airline Food in Ten Paragraphs and a History of Chopper Read in 10 Chapters. Ten Tens in the Tencyclopedia 1. Ten Anagrams of American Presidents 2. Ten Avatars of Vishnu 3. Ten National Flags That Feature Weapons 4. Ten Slurs of the Dutch 5. Ten Indian Traffic Signs 6. Ten Fictional Mice 7. Ten Works Not Written by Coleridge 8. Ten Bildungsromans 9. Ten Philanthropic Enterprises of Andrew Carnegie 10. Ten Pirates

The Tencyclopedia

A thoughtfully written narrative about abuse, family and overcoming, This is How I Will Strangle You also looks at the psychology behind memory and abuse.

This Is How I Will Strangle You

Gideon Haigh's Australian Cricket Anecdotes

In Gideon Haigh's latest book, one of cricket's finest writers turns his subject Inside Out, examining those aspects of cricket that distinguish it from other games, from the centenary of Sir Donald Bradman and the cult of the baggy green cap to the threat and promise of the Twenty20 revolution. This is cricket not only as it is played, but as it is seen, run, commercialised, codified, promoted, politicised and also written about by others, with a detailed introduction to the distinguished literary traditions of which Gideon Haigh now forms part.

Writings on Cricket Culture

Inside Out

One of The Times' 50 Greatest Sports Books In May 1977, the cricket world awoke to discover that a thirty-nine-year-old Sydney Businessman called Kerry Packer had signed thirty-five elite international players for his own televised 'World Series'. The Cricket War is the definitive account of the split that changed the game on the field and on the screen. In helmets, under lights, with white balls, and in coloured clothes, the outlaw armies of Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd fought a daily battle of survival. In boardrooms and courtrooms Packer and cricket's rulers fought a bitter war of nerves. A compelling account of the top-class sporting life, The Cricket War also gives a unique insight into the motives and methods of the man who became Australia's richest, and remained so, until the day he died. It was the end of cricket as we knew it – and the beginning of cricket as we know it. Gideon Haigh has published over thirty books, over twenty of them about cricket. This edition of The Cricket War, Gideon Haigh's first book about cricket originally published in 1993, has been updated with new photographs and a new introduction by the author.

The Story of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket

In May 1977, the cricket world woke to discover that thirty - nine - year - old Sydney businessman Kerry Packer had signed thirty - five international stars for his own televised 'World Series'. The Cricket War, revised and updated in this edition, is the definitive account of the split that changed the game on the field and on the screen. In helmets, under lights, with white balls and in coloured clothes, the outlaw armies of Ian Chappell, Tony Greig and Clive Lloyd fought a daily battle for survival. In boardrooms and courtrooms, Packer and cricket's rulers fought a bitter war of nerves. It was the end of cricket as we knew it - and the beginning of cricket as we know it.

Gideon Haigh

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