Books of the Month - Non-Fiction

Transform your life and your career with the four steps to adapt effectively to change: Engage, Accept, Activate, Release. 'A powerful playbook to lead change.' Dominic Price, Atlassian After the global pause in 2020, we returned to a world that feels faster, looser, and less structured - our professional boundaries have been erased, social and cultural norms are shifting rapidly, and at the same time, we're facing profound developments in artificial intelligence. We're facing more change more often, and we're applying a mindset that is simply outdated and no longer fit-for-purpose. In Adapt, work futurist and award-winning author Andrea Clarke offers a fresh perspective. Rather than retreat from change or resist it, Clarke argues that we must engage with it continuously - learning not just how change unfolds, but how we can shape it. With four simple yet powerful principles, she shows how to move from merely reacting to change to anticipating and influencing the future. Whether you're navigating a business or seeking more stability in your personal life, Adapt will equip you with a new way to master change in an unpredictable world. Our ability to reconcile the past few years - and make sense of what lies ahead - depends entirely on our capacity to adapt.

A User-Friendly Guide to Optimising your Neurochemicals Do feelings of low mood, lack of energy, or a struggle to focus stop you from living your best life? Neuroscientist Tj Power offers a ground-breaking approach to overcoming common mental health challenges. DOSE is an acronym for the four key chemicals that live within our brain and body: Dopamine Oxytocin Serotonin Endorphins These chemicals have very specific functions which have evolved within us through human history. Yet we overlook how feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress are directly linked to imbalances in our brain chemistry, triggered by rapidly changing, modern lifestyles. In this accessible and empowering book, TJ Power explains how your brain works and offers straightforward, no-nonsense solutions that will transform your mental health for a happier, healthier and more productive life. So, join the DOSE revolution and let The DOSE Effect begin!

Australia's Test Cricket Captain in conversation with remarkable leaders and achievers - from Julia Gillard to Dennis Lillee. When Pat Cummins unexpectedly became Australia's 47th Test Captain at age 28, he inherited a team with a long and storied history, but also one on the cusp of reinvention. It was the beginning of a personal leadership journey for him; a unique moment of challenge and pressure that would see him become a seasoned captain, and in his private life, become a father and husband but also lose his mother to cancer. Inspiring, revealing and deeply personal, TESTED is an exploration of the remarkable place where challenge, crisis and opportunity meet, and how it's only in the moments when we are tested that we discover what we are made of.From a charity leader to Australia's first female Prime Minister, a Test cricket great to a ground-breaking scientist, an Indigenous leader to a bestselling author and podcaster, Pat interviews eleven extraordinary people whose own stories of challenge, adversity, perseverance and resilience - navigating moments of crisis and doubt, seizing once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, creativity and giving back - have inspired him.TESTED is a book of insight and hard-earned wisdom about how the power of resolve to make decisions, big and small, and see them through, is at the heart of all our stories.

DINNERS for every night of the week from Australia's favourite cook Australia's favourite home cook, Nagi Maehashi, is back to solve the perennial problem of what's for dinner tonight ... and every night. Following on from her record-breaking first cookbook, Dinner, Nagi brings us Tonight with more than 150 brand-new foolproof, flavour-packed recipes, 800 variations on those recipes and 3000 possible combinations that match formulas (including the world-famous Charlie sauce) with different ingredients. There are crave-worthy crowd-pleasers - try slow-baked Italian meatballs in a rich tomato sauce with bubbling melted cheese or fall-apart Asian chicken cooked in a sticky-sweet soy glaze. Some dinners can be cooked in 20 minutes, and others can be made using only pantry staples.

How did a shy Polish immigrant kid - Karl Sven Woytek Sas Konkovitch Matthew Kruszelnicki - evolve into the fabulously eccentric Dr Karl? The only child of Holocaust survivors who fled to Australia in 1950, Karl has always forged his own destiny in an idiosyncratic way. Before he became one of the world's favourite scientific storytellers, he ambled through a convoluted cacophony of a career. In the 1960s, he got his start as a physicist at the Port Kembla Steelworks and promptly joined the Steel Industries Auto Club, racing modified rally cars on Wollongong's deserted back roads. In the 1970s, he entered his self-described 'drug-crazed hippie years', making a living as a long-haired, dope-smoking taxi driver. After he applied to be a NASA astronaut in the 1980s and 'failed', he ended up live broadcasting the first space shuttle launch on Triple J instead. Unexpectedly, that blasted off his media career, and from there it was a stratospheric rise from radio to TV, books, newspapers, speaking, podcasts and the internet. Karl's story teaches us that you don't have to know all the answers, as long as you ask the right questions.

Conflict is an inevitable part of life, according to this ancient Chinese classic of strategy, but everything necessary to deal with conflict wisely, honorably, victoriously, is already present within us. Compiled more than two thousand years ago by a mysterious warrior-philosopher, THE ART OF WAR is still perhaps the most prestigious and influential book of strategy in the world, as eagerly studied in Asia by modern politicians and executives as it has been by military leaders since ancient times. As a study of the anatomy of organizations in conflict, THE ART OF WAR applies to competition and conflict in general, on every level from the interpersonal to the international. Its aim is invincibility, victory without battle, and unassailable strength through understanding the physics, politics, and psychology of conflict.

Do you ever look around you and think you're the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague's abrasive manner get your back up? Do you ever get the feeling you're surrounded by idiots? You are not alone. Swedish behavioural scientist and runaway bestselling author Thomas Erikson is here to help, and will inform and entertain you in equal measure. Available in English for the first time, Surrounded by Idiots, presents his simple model based on four personality types (Red, Blue, Green and Yellow). When you understand the psychology of each you can adapt your communication style to handle anyone more easily and get the best out of the people you have to deal with - be it at work, in public or at home. Thomas Erikson guarantees that after reading this book the number of idiots around you will be drastically reduced and you will have a better understanding of everyone around you.