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    The Land Before Avocado
    The Land Before Avocado
    The Land Before Avocado
    Ebook249 pages3 hours

    The Land Before Avocado

    By Richard Glover

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be - and just how far we have come.

    'It was simpler time'. We had more fun back then'. 'Everyone could afford a house'.

    There's plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like?

    In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It's a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing.

    It's the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s.

    Let's break the news now: they didn't have avocado.

    It's a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes - often enshrined in law - towards anybody who didn't fit in.

    The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago.

    Most of all, it will make you realise how far we've come - and how much further we can go.

    PRAISE

    Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s. For a start, he deftly reclaims the book's title fruit from those who have positioned it as a proxy for all that is wrong with today's supposedly feckless and spendthrift young adults. Rather than maligning the avocado (and young people), he cleverly appropriates the fruit as an exemplar of how far we have come since the 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review

    'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay

    'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb

    PRAISE FOR FLESH WOUNDS

    'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times

    'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The

    Australian

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateNov 1, 2018
    ISBN9780733339813
    The Land Before Avocado
    Author

    Richard Glover

    Richard Glover has written a number of bestselling books, including Love, Clancy, The Land Before Avocado, Flesh Wounds and The Mud House. He writes regularly for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Washington Post, as well as presenting the comedy program Thank God It's Friday on ABC Local Radio. To find out more, visit www.richardglover.com.au

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    Reviews for The Land Before Avocado

    4/5

    44 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Absolutely brilliant. I laughed so hard, I cried… in public.
    • 4/5
      A cross between a memoir and social history of Australia between 1965 and 1975 Glover's book asks the question "Were things really better then?" and brings plenty of evidence to answer that with a firm "no!". However the argument is made with a very light touch with plenty of humour and examples. For those of us who grew up then there's plenty to remember - the unreliable cars and the awful food had me laughing out loud, the drinking, smoking and prejudice were more sobering memories. A good read for young and old alike.
    • 4/5
      entertaining, but light
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully funny, and strangely evocative and accurate, "history" of Australian life in the 1970s.I want all my young adult children to read this and compare their life with the life of their parents at a similar age. I also want all the curmudgeons who are convinced that the world is going to pot to read it and repent.
    • 4/5
      Technically I grew up in the 80’s, having been born in the early 1970’s, but so much of what Glover writes evokes memories of my childhood, from the pineapple ‘hedgehog’ cheese and onion appetisers, to the unbelted, smoke filled, weaving, courtesy of the ubiquitous cask wine in the bar fridge, car trips. I laughed aloud often at the nostalgic absurdity of it all.However, The Land Before Avacado is also a sobering reminder of how far we have come as a culture. The status quo for baby boomers and most of Gen X would be inconceivable to today’s generations who can drink gourmet coffee (with smashed avacado toast) in the comfort of their own home, or by the roadside, any day of the week. Tongue in cheek aside, many advances are sobering, from the drastic reduction of the road death toll, thanks to the introduction of drink driving and seatbelt laws, to laws protecting the employment status of pregnant women.Glover also shares facts that will likely shock most readers who are convinced by their Facebook feeds that crime is at an all time high, when, in fact, the commission of serious crimes has more than halved across the board in the last fifty years.While the nostalgic remembrances in The Land Before Avacado, appeal directly to those over the age of 40, I feel compelled to recommend to this to anyone over the age of twenty, many of whom could benefit from a little perspective.Oh, and I am so going to cook the Spicy Meat Ring!
    • 4/5
      A book for our adult children, to show how lousy life was in the 1970s and how much baby boomers achieved in improving it.

    Book preview

    The Land Before Avocado - Richard Glover

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