Courage - Softcover

Courage looks for courage outside of the extremes of violence, endurance and fear, tracking it across cultural and historical divides to its less spectacular and deeper forms. It follows courage across the age-divide to children, and across the species-divide to animals. It seeks out courage in the parts of our public and private lives where we least expect to find it. This is a look at the ideas and practices of courage stripped of their rhetorical 'bling'. ""Courage"" not as a virtue to aspire to, but as an expression of human spirit-messy, explosive and morally ambivalent.

Maria Tumarkin is a Ukrainian-born writer, historian and an unapologetic refugee from Australian academia. Her eclectic nature has drawn her to an unruly array of subjects, including cosmopolitanism, ruins, history of sleep and erotic espionage. She is the author of Traumascapes. The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (MUP, 2005), which was shortlisted in the category for a first book of history in the 2006 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and daughter.