Collins Booksellers Spring Reading Guide 2014 August 2014 | Page 15
collins booksellers...let your mind wander
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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.