The coming lunch hour author talk will be held on the 1st Wednesday of February, from 1 pm at Parramatta City Library and Sharyn Killens will talk about her book ‘The inconvenient child‘.

Born to a blonde white Australian mother and a black American serviceman father in 1948, during a time when what society thought, mattered, Sharyn Killens was the Inconvenient Child.

Placed in neglectful foster care at birth, at 19 months old, baby Sharyn was rescued by visiting African American champion boxer Freddie Dawson and taken to live in a ‘party house’ in Sydney’s red light district of Kings Cross. But at age five, her absent elegant mother abandoned her in a convent–orphanage, where she suffered years of abuse at the hands of a cruel nun.

By fifteen, as a runaway teenager on the streets of Kings Cross, she was arrested and sentenced to notorious Parramatta Girls Home; a reformatory where girls were stripped of their dignity and punished frequently. She was then transferred to Hay Girls Institution; an experimental disciplinary centre – in truth, a hard labor prison for young girls.

Throughout, her solace was her love of music and her burning ambition to become a singer as she battled for her mother’s love and approval, and her black American father’s denied identity.

Sharyn has become a popular singer and an established entertainer later on. She went to America to search her roots. She has written her life stories in her book ‘The inconvenient child‘ which was published last year and available for loan at Parramatta City Library. Sharyn’s author talk will certainly be a very interesting one.

Title: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Author: Jon Ronson

Golda’s Pick
Walking through walls, reading minds, turning invisible, it all sounds like something out of Harry Potter. Well this is no tale of fiction or magic. Attempting these feats were the really life pursuits of some of the most powerful military men in the US Army. 

Jon Ronson is a journalist with the amazing ability to extract the most interesting and often hilarious details about the little know military unit called the First Earth Battalion. From its early beginnings in the 1979 to the implications this unit has had on the way the War of Terror has been fought, Ronson traverses the history of this ‘special’ military unit and the characters that it has attracted over its three decade history.  

I really enjoy this type of non-fiction; quirky, irreverent and fascinating. Ronson is a master of research, digging up the most interesting details from the past and utilising the immense trust he managed to develop in those he interviewed. What is most impressive is the respect and real affection Ronson demonstrates towards the people he interviews and whose stories help make this book so captivating. It is very easy to be cynical and poke fun at the people in stories such as this but what Ronson is able to capture is the ideology behind this movement which can only be described as charmingly hopeful. He shows that despite having some of the most horrific implications, the men who stared at goats were visionaries who dared to image a different future for the US Army.