May New Titles from MUP

Swimming in a Sea of Death
A Sons Memoir
By David Rieff

Melbourne University Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $27.95, Paperback, 978-0-522-85544-9

Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer. Rieff's brave, passionate and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it means to confront death in our culture.

David Rieff is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of seven previous books, including the acclaimed At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention.

Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica
By Tim Jarvis

The Miegunyah Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $39.95, Paperback, 978-0-522-85486-2

*Screened in conjunction with a prime time ABC TV documentary, Sunday May 11, 7:30pm.

In Mawson: Life and Death in Antarctica, explorer Tim Jarvis relives Sir Douglas Mawson's extraordinary polar survival journey of 1912–13. Battling against ferocious blizzards and headwinds, Jarvis struggles to overcome extreme isolation, physical deprivation and his own self-doubt.

This beautifully designed and produced title from The Miegunyah Press features stunning cinematic photography throughout.

Tim Jarvis is an environmental scientist, explorer, film-maker and author of The Unforgiving Minute (2004).

A Good Death
An Argument for Voluntary Euthanasia
By Rodney Syme

Melbourne University Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $32.95, Paperback, 978-0-522-85503-6

In A Good Death, Rodney Syme argues for the end of the unofficial ‘conspiracy’ of silence within the medical profession and the decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia in Australia. Through Syme's determination to tell the stories of those who he has assisted to die with dignity, A Good Death also draws wider lessons of value for those who find themselves in a similar situation.

Rodney Syme has been in medical practice for forty-five years, primarily as a urological surgeon. He has been an advocate for physician-assisted dying for nearly twenty years, and the President of the Dying With Dignity Victoria for ten years.

A Family History of Smoking
By Andrew Riemer

Melbourne University Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $32.95, Paperback, 978-0-522-85488-6

A Family History of Smoking is a compelling memoir about two European families living through the last gasps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From great-grandfather David, who saw his family's fortunes decline with the gradual rise of anti-Semitism, to the ultra-modern, glamorous mother who held her family together through World War II, Andrew Riemer paints a beautiful portrait of a now vanished world that literally went up in smoke.

Andrew Riemer is a bestselling author and the Chief Book Reviewer of The Sydney Morning Herald

Sweet Sorrow
A Beginners Guide to Death
By Mark Wakely

Melbourne University Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $32.95, Paperback, 978-0-522-85513-5

With Mark as our guide, we are introduced to morticians and embalmers, rabbis and doctors, coffin makers and gravediggers. He reveals the fashions and the fads, the rituals and the deep emotion in a heartfelt and whimsical investigation into this timeless subject.

Mark Wakely is a Sydney-based writer, and a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National.

Remembered Gardens
Eight Women and their Visions of an Australian Landscape
By Holly Kerr Forsyth

The Miegunyah Press, Publication Date: May 2008   RRP: $45.00, Paperback, 978-0-522-85499-2

* New In Paperback

Beautifully illustrated, Remembered Gardens celebrates eight women's lives with more than two hundred photographs of some of Australia's foremost gardens. It is a rich commemoration of more than two centuries of gardening in Australia and of the role of women in establishing a rich gardening heritage. Australia's gardens would not be the same without them.

Holly Kerr Forsyth is a graduate of Ryde Horticultural College, Sydney, and has a PhD in history from the University of New South Wales. She is the author of The Constant Gardener (Miegunyah, 2007).

SNEAK PEEK: June 2008

I Lost My Love in Baghdad
By Michael Hastings

Publication Date: June 2008   RRP: $27.95

Searing, unflinching and revelatory, I Lost My Love in Baghdad is both a raw and brilliantly observed account of a hopeless war and a heartbreaking story of one life lost to it.

The Book of Dead Philosophers
By Simon Critchley

Publication Date: June 2008   RRP: $32.95

From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words (gasps) of modern-day sages, The Book of Dead Philosophers chronicles the deaths of almost 200 philosophers—tales of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, pathos and bad luck.