Books written by Bettina Arndt
Read information on all Bettina's recent books.
The Sex Diaries
The Sex Diaries is an astonishing expose revealing how ordinary couples negotiate their sexual supply. Ninety eight couples spent up to a year keeping diaries which showed in intimate detail who wanted sex, who didn’t and how they dealt with mismatched libido. The result is a challenging, thought-provoking analysis of desire, showing how men and women cope with their distinctly different sexual drives. Women lie in bed worrying the hand will come creeping over. Men spend their lives groveling for sexual favours. The gap between them in bed becomes a chasm. Through the power of his-and-hers diaries, we see what happens day by day, night by night, as the couples negotiate their way through this sexual minefield.
The immensely personal stories which emerge from the diaries are quite extraordinary. They will make you laugh out loud, wince in self-recognition, recoil in horror and green with envy. The result is a rich tapestry of sexual experience, which added to Bettina’s incisive, challenging new ideas, will make this new book a talking point around the world.
The Sex Diaries is published in Australia by Melbourne University Publishing and is available in all good bookstores. Visit www.mup.com.au for further details. In late July, Hamlyn is publishing The Sex Diaries in the UK - this means it will be available from Amazon UK.
Private Lives
A book about her experiences – and yours
A frank and thought-provoking exploration of the changing world of men and women. A collection of essays on a wide range of personal matters, from how she felt when her husband died to an honest appraisal of the myth of Australian mateship; from the experience of being a step-parent to a man's relationship with his penis; what divorce does to children and from feeling at ease with your body to what executive jobs do men's health and sex lives.
Published: Penguin, 1986, ISBN 0140088504
All About Us
A collection of columns written by Bettina when she was living in New York in the late 1980s – published in The Age. She writes about public issues and private – some extremely private. Issues that are argued in the bedroom, the boardroom, in the kitchen and the court.
"It would seem, at times, you were writing exclusively for me," – Mother of two, 30, Melbourne.
"Thank you for your thoughtful, amusing and incisive description of my relationship with my wife in yesterday’s Age," – Male, Wodonga, Vic.
"I have come to the conclusion that here is a rare person who writes with clarity but displays outstanding common sense," – Male psychologist, Kenmore, Qld.
Penguin, 1989. ISBN 0140128573 (0-14-012857-3).
Taking Sides
Men, women and the shifting social agenda.
Taking Sides is both a look at where we are now and a glimpse of where we might be going. – a challenging collection of writing about the social and sexual issues of our time. The subjects are wide-ranging - from sexual consent and infidelity, to violence and pornography, changing workplace rules, domestic work, boy's education, men's issues, feminism – and as always, Bettina is incisive, funny, sometimes scathing and critical, but always compassionate and not afraid to delve into areas that the less courageous fear to explore.
Random House, 1995. ISBN 0091830583.
Arndt's Story: The Life of an Australian Economist
by Bettina Arndt, Peter Coleman, Peter Drake, Selwyn Cornish.
"H.W. Arndt has been Australia's leading scholar of Asian economic development for over thirty years"
- Former World Bank President James D Wolfensohn.
The year of Heinz Wolfgang Arndt's birth, 1915, was not a good time for a German boy to be born. His country was soon to be defeated in a great war, his school years were shadowed by the rise of Hitler. Yet when Heinz's long-buried Jewish background led his academic father to lose his chair in chemistry and flee to Oxford, Heinz followed. As Heinz put it, the calamity of Hitler's rise to power led him to ‘the incredible good fortune of an Oxford education and a life spent in England and Australia.'
Heinz Arndt was a man inexhaustible energy and optimism, who returned from months behind barbed wire interned in Canada to write a historical classic—The Economic Lessons of the Nineteen-Thirties. He seized the opportunity of an unexpected job offer to set off with his young family for Sydney where he quickly established himself as a leading authority on the Australian banking system, embarked on his fifty year career as a gifted university teacher and enjoyed the first of many vigorous forays as a public intellectual. But it was at the ANU that Heinz took the bold step which led him to become the Grand Old Man of Asian Economics. In 1966, just after the Sukarno coup and the year of living dangerously, he determined the time had come to study the Indonesian economy. It took all his charm, persistence and formidable intellect to persuade the Indonesians to open their doors to him. The result was a world leading centre of Indonesian economics.
This biography of Bettina's father, HW Arndt includes two personal chapters written by Bettina.
Published by Asia Pacific Press, 2007 ISBN 0731538102 ( 0-7315-3810-2).