GREAT SOCIETY – A NEW HISTORY By Amity Shlaes HarperCollins 2019 ISBN 0061706426 ISBN-13 9780061706424 RRP: $44.95 (HB) By Anne Henderson Stand-up US comedian Charles Fleischer is credited as the originator of the now well-worn line: “If you remember the ’60s, you really weren’t there.” Well, historians and archivists are another matter. Many were there and kept [...]
STAYING WITH THE COUNTRY – A LIFE OF JOHN McEWEN John McEwen: The Right Man, Right Place, Right Time by Bridget McKenzie Connor Court Publishing ISBN: 9781922449412 RRP $24.95 Reviewed by Paul Henderson John McEwen wrote an autobiography after he retired, but there have been few books written about him. One of those is the [...]
PRISON JOURNAL VOLUME 1 – The Cardinal Makes His Appeal By George Cardinal Pell Ignatius Press, Freedom Publishing 2020 ISBN 978-1-62164-448-4 (PB) ISBN 978-1-64229-142-1 (eBook) RRP: $39.95 (PB) By Anne Henderson For Catholics of 1950s Australia, the formal prayers said as the Rosary were very familiar. Families knelt in homes at night and together prayed the [...]
SIGNATURES – LITERARY ENCOUNTERS OF A LIFETIME By David Pryce Jones Encounter Books 2020 ISBN (HB) 9781641770903 RRP: $43.50 (HB) By Anne Henderson It’s a plain looking hardback – dark red with gold lettering and no dust jacket. The kind of book you might dig out of your grandparents’ library a half a century and [...]
HOW AND WHEN MIGHT LABOR GOVERN The Write Stuff – Voices of Unity on Labor’s Future Nick Dyrenfurth and Misha Zelinsky (editors) Connor Court Publishing 2020 ISBN:9781922449429 RRP: $29.95 (pb) By Keith Harvey The Write Stuff – Voices of Unity on Labor’s Future is a significant book to understand the ALP today. Edited by the [...]
The Truth of the Palace Letters: Deceit, Ambush and Dismissal in 1975 by Paul Kelly & Troy Bramston MUP 2020 ISBN: 9780522877557 RRP: $29.99 (pb) Reviewed by Gerard Henderson The strength of The Truth of the Palace Letters: Deceit, Ambush and Dismissal in 1975 is that it demolishes two seemingly conflicting conspiracy theories. The first [...]
You Shouldn’t Have Joined: A Memoir by Peter Cosgrove Allen & Unwin 2020 ISBN: 9781760878528 RRP $49.99 (hb) Reviewed by Paul Henderson “You shouldn’t have joined” is an excellent autobiography by Sir Peter Cosgrove. It is well written, covers a variety of topics and deals with a number of people who crossed his path. Cosgrove points [...]
Friends & Enemies – A Life in Vogue, Prison & Park Avenue by Barbara Amiel Pegasus Books 2020 ISBN10 1472134214 ISBN13 9781472134219 RRP - $65.99 (hb) - $34.99 (pb) by Anne Henderson Like its author, Barbara Amiel’s recently published Friends & Enemies – A Life in Vogue, Prison & Park Avenue is gutsy, candid, cutting, acute in [...]
Ernest Bevin – Labour’s Churchill by Andrew Adonis Biteback Publishing 2020 ISBN: 978 1 78590 598 8 RRP - $42.24 (hb) Reviewed by Anne Henderson In the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II, one of the most significant figures was the UK Foreign Secretary, Labour’s Ernest Bevin. Without his efforts at the many negotiating [...]
Diary of an MP’s Wife – Inside and Outside Power By Sasha Swire Little, Brown 2020 ISBN10 1408713411 ISBN13 9781408713419 RRP: $49.99 (HB) By Anne Henderson There are various acidic assessments in Sasha Swire’s now published diaries – take your pick of some that give a flavour: “Truth is those Patersons really piss me off” [...]
