She’s had a career in the military, academia, media, literature and beer brewing. Called everything from a ‘six two transvestite Sheila’ by former football great Sam Newman on national TV, ‘the grunge queen’, by former QLD Premier Wayne Goss, a ‘witch’ by a Sunshine Coast pastor (Karen is convinced the consonant was misheard) and a ‘left-wing loopy academic with no testosterone’ by an irate radio listener in Tasmania, and a crusading, sycophantic, pedantic and myopic academic dwelling in an ivory tower, by a Courier Mail reader, Dr Karen Brooks is, to say the least, polemical. However, the hundreds of emails and letters she receives each week from readers of her books, columns and articles, as well as TV viewers and radio listeners attest to the fact that what she has to say about society, culture and young people today is striking a very loud chord.

When Dr. Petrina Barson was a medical student, she found that compassion was not emphasised in her training and, at worst, considered dangerous to a doctor’s ability to be objective. She knew that, as a doctor, she didn’t want to lose her compassion to fit the prevailing attitudes, and went on to make a study of compassion, teaching compassion cultivation to both medical students and the broader community.