John Birmingham and Dirk Flinthart have learned the hard way how to be civilized, successful and cool. Now they make it easy for the uninitiated Australian Male to achieve unimagined heights of sophistication, expertise and personal magnetism. In this book they answer questions many men are just too embarrassed to ask, How do you swallow a sword? How do you dress well without looking like a complete goose? And how do you talk intelligently about Salvador Dali, Copernicus and Simone de Beauvoir without sounding like a pompous git? In tackling these and hundreds of other seirous subjects, Birmingham and Flinthart enlist the aid of experts as diverse as Alex Buzo, Paul Barry, Len Evans and Helen Wellings.
Author
John Birmingham grew up in Ipswich, Queensland and was educated at St Edmunds Christian Brother's College in Ipswich and the University of Queensland in Brisbane. His only stint of full time employment was as a researcher at the Defence Department. After this he returned to Queensland to study law but he did not complete his legal studies, choosing instead to pursue a career as a writer. He currently lives in Brisbane. While a law student he was one of the last people arrested under the state's Anti Street March legislation. Birmingham was convicted of displaying a sheet of paper with the words 'Free Speech' written on it in very small type. The local newspaper carried a photograph of him being frogmarched off to a waiting police paddy wagon. Birmingham has a degree in international relations.
