'C'mon, Aussie c'mon!' the catch phrase of many a sporting event downunder. Understand them or not - the Australians speak a unique English filled with Dundee accents, quirky phrases and fantastic vocabulary. Few are the dobbers, bludgers and two-pot screamers - the average Aussie (o-zee) is welcoming, hospitable and full of a sense of humour. Though you might just need this book to understand the jokes. for every social situation, here's the language you're going to heartravellers can avoid embarrassing moments and awkward misunderstandings with clear vocabulary listshousehold names, politics, sports - the book is full of the melee of Aussie interestsunderstand a little of the original cultures through the introductory chapters to Aboriginal and Torres Strait languages

Computer users who favor Macintosh products are truly enthralled with their machines. But after reading Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders, even the most zealous may be hard-pressed to defend the company that produces them. Here, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Jim Carlton chronicles the missteps that have befuddled the fallen giant of Cupertino between the initial and current regimes of cofounder Steve Jobs. Carlton combines a keen sense of observation with a slew of previously undisclosed facts to produce a damning history that will leave many wondering how the firm has managed to survive.

Xenophobia: An irrational fear of foreigners. Xenophobe's Guides: Small books that show the more you know the less you fear. Xenophobe's motto: Forewarned is forearmed.

Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman—self-described little man, city boy, and Jew—first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.

But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff—their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.

More amazing adventures follow—but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope—a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. —Mary Park

Inviting Disaster, by technology and history writer James R. Chiles, is an unusual book: it appeals to the macabre desires that keep us riveted to highway accidents, while knowledgeably discoursing on the often preventable mistakes that caused them. At its heart are colorful stories behind more than 50 of the most infamous catastrophes that periodically chilled the advance of the industrial age. There are both those well remembered (the 1986 Challenger explosion, for example) and those now largely forgotten (a 1937 gas explosion at a Texas school that killed 298). But along with lively depictions of these deadly devastations and white-knuckle calamities—the U.S. battleship Maine, Apollo 13, and Three Mile Island among them—Chiles offers an informed analysis of the unfortunate chain of events that brought them about. And by grouping like incidents to show how fatal "system fractures" eventually developed through a combination of human error and mechanical malfunction, he also suggests how we might sidestep such tragedies in the future. In so, doing he fashions these spectacular accounts of failed planes, trains, ships, bridges, dams, factories, and other conveyances and facilities into a cautionary tale about technological progress. —Howard Rothman

Offers a detailed, fact-filled examination of the Airborne Task Force, complete with exclusive photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and an extensive interview with the commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, General John Keen. Original."

A penetrating look inside an armored cavalry regiment—the technology, the strategies, and the people... profiled by Tom Clancy.

His first nonfiction book, Submarine, captured the reality of life aboard a nuclear warship. Now, the #1 bestselling author of Clear and Present Danger portrays today's military as only army personnel can know it.

With the same compelling, you-are-there immediacy of his acclaimed fiction, Tom Clancy provides detailed descriptions of tanks, helicopters, artillery, and more—the brilliant technology behind the U. S. Army. He captures military life—from the drama of combat to the daily routine—with total accuracy, and reveals the roles and missions that have in recent years distinguished our fighting forces.

Armored Cav includes:
Descriptions of the M1A2 Main Battle Tank, the AH-64A Apache Attack Helicopter, and moreAn interview with General Frederick FranksStrategies behind the Desert Storm accountExclusive photograph, illustrations and diagramsPLUS: From West Point cadet to Desert Storm commander, an interview with a combat cavalry officer on the rise.