Collins Booksellers Spring Reading Guide 2014 August 2014 | Page 15

collins booksellers...let your mind wander 15 THe losT leGions of fromelles descenT inTo Hell Peter Barton RRP $32.99 Peter Brune RRP $35.00 Controversial and ground-breaking, this is the most authoritative book ever written on the battle of Fromelles - the worst day in Australia’s entire military history. This compelling and illuminating history dispels many a myth surrounding one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Great War. This is a well-researched account of one of the most traumatic calamities in Australian history - the Malayan Campaign, the fall of Singapore and the subsequent horrors of the Thai-Burma Railway. Unpicking the myths and legends of the war, Peter Brune goes to the heart of the Australian experience. Hell-BenT: ausTralia’s leap inTo THe GreaT war amBon Douglas Newton RRP $32.99 Roger Maynard RRP $35.00 Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Hell-Bent highlights the dire logic of a selfgoverning colonial Australia and the profound cost of the burden of empire. Douglas Newton’s HellBent captures the drama, naivety, and tragedy of the world’s catastrophic plunge into war in 1914. In February 1942 the Indonesian island of Ambon fell to the might of the advancing Japanese war machine. Key among the captured Allied forces was a unit of 1150 Australian soldiers known as Gull Force, who had been tasked to defend the island. The story of Ambon is one of both the depravity and the triumph of the human spirit. It is also one that’s not been widely told. Until now… THe anzac Girls menzies aT war Peter Rees RRP $29.99 Anne Henderson RRP $34.99 Anzac Girls is a story of extraordinary courage and humanity shown by a group of women whose contribution to the Anzac legend has barely been recognised in our history. Peter Rees has changed that understanding forever. In the months following his resignation as PM in late August 1941, Menzies swayed between relief at his release from the burdens of office as PM and despair that his life at the top had come to so little. This wonderfully insightful book shows how a failed and humiliated leader went on to become Sir Robert Menzies, a revered hero of the Liberal Party and Australia’s longest-serving PM. a kind of VicTory kokoda air sTrikes Craig Wilcox RRP $44.95 Anthony Cooper RRP $39.99 In 1899, on the eve of the Boer War, Captain Charles Cox from Parramatta took 100 Australian cavalrymen to train with the British army. But everything went wrong. The debacle ended with Cox volunteering his little command for the Boer War, with the British making him get the consent of his government and his men, and finally with a murder on a lonely farm in South Africa. Still, the newspapers said the venture was a success. The letters, together with newspaper reports that Charles Cox kept, form the basis of this richly illustrated book. The author of the bestselling Darwin Spitfires casts a forensic eye over the role that Allied air forces played – or failed to play – in crucial World War II campaigns in New Guinea. It is a story of both Australian and American airmen who flew and fought in the face of adversity – with incomplete training, inadequate aircraft, and from poorly set up and exposed airfields.