The optimistically titled Everything You Need to Know about the World, by Simon Eliot (Allen & Unwin, $14.95 pb, 192 pp), explicitly models itself on the Web. The title has the brashness of a twelve-year-old boy, but what of the content? ‘I’ve created my own world,’ Eliot writes. ‘It’s a cobweb of stuff. A lot of it I found out on the Web – that other worldwide Web they say is big enough to hold all the world’s information. The rest of the information in this book is a result of my own information.’ Eliot’s web is rather loose, moving from bodily functions to heroes, stories, explorers, inventions, animals, bodies (again), language quirks and more. One detail escaped the fact-checkers, concerning the origin of the saying ‘mind your own beeswax’. (Beware the Web as a research source, Simon.) The factoids, anywhere between a sentence and a page in length, are delivered in an energetic, even urgent, style, but do I really need to know the Swahili for shit?

Novelists are apt to tiptoe around the subject of sex, but in non-fiction there is no point in being mysterious. The ‘S’ Word: A Boy’s Guide to S*x, P*berty and Growing Up (UQP, $24.95 pb, 160 pp), by fiction writer James Roy, makes its pitch to the young male reader with a clever combination of candour and charm. Roy also employs a tone that is neither too worthy nor simplistic, offset with some gently humorous illustrations. Roy writes like a favourite uncle, talking unblushingly about the mechanics of conception, intercourse, masturbation, safe sex and so forth. Fictional e-mails to a character called Richard the Wise allow Roy to sympathetically explore these and other topics. Issues about girls, friendship, dating and relationships follow, though for the target age group, it is these later chapters that are likely to be more useful and perhaps could have received greater emphasis. Still, the user-friendly style and tolerant tone of The ‘S’ Word makes it a welcome addition to a thinly populated shelf.

What’s interesting about Finding Heroes: Be Inspired by Stories of Amazing Journeys, by Jon Carnegie and Jim Stynes (Allen & Unwin, $19.95 pb, 120 pp), is the way that stories from popular culture are used to illustrate the ‘you can make it if you try’ theme. Films including The Wizard of Oz, The Lion King, Shrek, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are examined to illustrate the challenges that adolescence holds in store. Interestingly, in all cases, it is the film over the book, which suggests something about the status of reading and literature. Carnegie is founder of the Carnegie Education Centre, ‘designed to inspire young people currently experiencing difficulties in the traditional private school system to develop the self-esteem and self-motivation required to be able to achieve their full potential’. Stynes was the AFL recruit from Ireland who cost his team a place in the grand final, yet returned to be a seemingly unbreakable player. He is the co-founder of the Reach Foundation, which last year involved over 40,000 personal development workshops for people aged eight to eighteen. I have not seen the two in action, but this book feels very much like the companion to the programme, shaped around a seven-stage classic hero’s journey, couched in more pragmatic ways. There is little levity or irony, and in places – the short section on bullying, for example – it seems simplistic and inadequate. It will appeal strongly to educators and may be best used as part of a structured programme.

When it comes to true-life journeys, there are few more heroic than the one described by Doris Pilkington in Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence. In Home to Mother (UQP, $16.95 pb, 98 pp), the story is retold for primary-school readers. Pilkington’s mother Molly was a child when, with two other girls, she escaped the detention camp at Moore River to walk home to the Jigalong Depot, a distance of 1600 kilometres. They did it without maps, shoes or any kind of motivational speech, answering their own need for home and family. Home to Mother pares back nearly everything but the fundamental drama of the journey, leaving aside to some extent the wider problem of the ‘stolen generation’ and the mechanisms of control. I wonder if the book underestimates the reader’s ability to handle a more complex history. Home to Mother works as a story, in terms of the girls’ courage, perseverance and their attachment to family. Also included is a map and glossary of Aboriginal words.

Did you know that, prior to European settlement, Aboriginal groups traded a wide variety of goods across thousands of kilometres? John Nicholson’s books are scrupulously researched, and Songlines and Stone Axes (Allen & Unwin, $29.95 hb, 32 pp) is no exception. The book is the first in a planned series of five titles on Australian transport, trade and travel. Nicholson has already written about, and illustrated books on, our land use (and abuse), natural history, government, architecture, prison history and more. He is the master of the telling fact, the moment that reveals a larger pattern. Pearl shells from Broome, for example, were traded to desert groups, and as far away as the Cape York Peninsula and the Great Australian Bight. These shells could be for either symbolic or practical use. The book reveals that Aboriginal societies in many parts of Australia used trade to enhance their social and ceremonial worlds. The book also allows Nicholson to draw a range of canoes, showing the diversity of craft used to facilitate exchange. Nicholson engages us with the artful balance of text and image, but the text illustrates another strength: Nicholson’s ability to speak directly to the reader, to take us into his confidence and share with us his own sense of excitement for the subject. Songlines and Stone Axes will enlarge the reader’s understanding of Aboriginal and Australian societies, and lays a promising foundation for the series.

Text Publishing’s first move into Young Adult publishing is We Are the Weather Makers ($19.95 pb, 276 pp), a young adult version of Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers (2005). This version is addressed at teenage readers and doesn’t pull punches in showing the causes and the consequences of climate change. Neither does it scrimp on the science. We Are the Weather Makers kicks off with a startling metaphor of the atmosphere as the ‘Great Ariel Ocean’, a phrase originally coined in 1903: ‘it conjures in the mind’s eye the currents and layers that create the weather far above our heads, and which is all that stands between us and the vastness of space.’ With that simple image we can begin to grasp the consequences of carbonhungry ways of living. Flannery’s conclusion dwells on the controversial question of nuclear power generation, taking his cues from James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis. But here he fails to answer the question of how to manage nuclear waste. It is just one of many issues the book opens up for discussion and debate. I can see We Are the Weather Makers working well for both the school and private reader. The book is both clearly instructive and a call to action.

Trawling in similar waters, yet somehow missing the bigger picture, Disaster, by Kate McAllan (Scholastic, $14.95 pb, 198 pp), is a catalogue of disasters that will satisfy the gloomiest soul. Fires, floods, droughts, trains, ships, storms and tsunamis: it’s all here. But what does it show besides the fact that ‘stuff happens’? McAllan has toiled hard to cover disasters from several hundred years, in nations rich and poor. She uses eyewitness records (Pepys at the Great Fire of London, or a farmer surviving a flood in Mozambique, for example) to humanise events. Perhaps it is the scale of events, each piled on top of the next, that leaves me weary. The book is marred by wooden writing, and is light on illustration.

Allen & Unwin continue to expand their user-friendly It’s True series with two new titles. These deal with topics close the heart of young readers: sport and bushrangers. What’s cool about Sport Stinks, by Justin Kemp and Damian Farrow (Allen & Unwin, $11.95 pb, 96 pp), is that it focuses on sports science and spares us the usual flag waving and ‘one week at a time’ clichés. They explain a plethora of sports science and technology: why women make better ultra-distance swimmers than men; how blood doping works, and why it’s so hard to detect; and the history of the bicycle. The writers are sports scientists and radio presenters on Melbourne’s 3RRR. They can put across the telling fact concisely and with wit. Heath McKenzie’s illustrations add the visual bounce to make Sports Stinks a clear winner.

Nasty, brutish and short might best sum up the life of the Australian bushranger. Author John Barwick (Bushrangers Lost Their Heads, Allen & Unwin, $11.95 pb, 96 pp) doesn’t miss the chance to let the reader know what perils lay in store for the bushranger. This suitably bloodthirsty collection of résumés mostly climax in hangings, beheadings or being shot in the course of normal duties. Barwick is keen to separate myth from fact, reminding us that Captain Thunderbolt was the horse thief formerly known as Fred Ward, and that the Wild Colonial Boy was a Dubliner, and not from Castlemaine. But Barwick is by no means a pedantic spoilsport. He renders the many instances of escape, pursuit and capture with brio, making the brief lives bristle with detail. Both titles have a quiz, plus references to books and, yes, websites.