Book picks similar to
Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself by Aaron Patrick
politics
non-fiction
australia
australian-politics
How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them
Barbara F. Walter - 2022
While violence has declined worldwide, civil wars have increased. This is a new phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of cases - the American and English civil wars, the French Revolution - historically it has been rare for people to organise and fight their governments. This has changed. Since 1946, over 250 armed conflicts have broken out around the world, a number that continues to rise. Major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya. Smaller civil wars are being fought in Ukraine, India, and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest.In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil war and the conditions that create it. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past. This urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.
Stone Cold: The extraordinary story of Len Opie, Australia's deadliest soldier
Andrew Faulkner - 2016
A cold-eyed killer who drank nothing stronger than weak tea, he fought with his bare hands, a sharpened shovel and piano wire. He was a larrikin who went by the book, unless the book was wrong. He set his own bar high and expected others to do the same.Stone Cold is the extraordinary story of one of Australia's most fearless fighters. It takes us into the jungles of New Guinea and Borneo and some of the fiercest battles of World War II. It goes to the cold heart of Korea, where Len emerged from the ranks to excel in the epic Battle of Kapyong and play a key role at the Battle of Maryang San. And it drops us into the centre of the American counterinsurgency war in Vietnam with Len's involvement in the CIA's shadowy black ops program, Phoenix.Action-packed and surprising, Stone Cold gives rich life to a warrior soldier and one of Australia's greatest diggers.
Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother's Letter to Her Son
Homeira Qaderi - 2020
Frightened and in pain, she was once forced to make her way on foot. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life.No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society.Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.
On Wings of Eagles
Ken Follett - 1984
The #1 International Bestseller now in trade paperback—with 16 pages of photos.Number-one bestselling author Ken Follett tells the inspiring, true story of the Middle East hostage crisis that began in 1979, and of the unconventional means Ross Perot used to save his countrymen.
Steve & Me
Terri Irwin - 2007
Leaving behind her wildlife rescue work in Oregon, Terri traveled to Australia, and there, at a small wildlife park, she met and fell in love with a tall, blond force of nature named Steve Irwin. They were married in less than a year, and Terri eagerly joined in Steve's conservation work. The footage filmed on their crocodile-trapping honeymoon became the first episode of T"he Crocodile Hunter, " and together, Steve and Terri began to change the world. In "Steve & Me, " Terri recounts the unforgettable adventures they shared -- wrangling venomous snakes, saving deadly crocodiles from poachers, swimming among humpback whales. A uniquely gifted naturalist, Steve was first and foremost a wildlife warrior dedicated to rescuing endangered animals -- especially his beloved crocs -- and educating everyone he could reach about the importance of conservation. In the hit TV shows that continue to be broadcast worldwide, Steve's enthusiasm lives on, bringing little-known and often-feared species to light as he reveals and revels in the wonders of our planet.With grace, wit, and candor, Terri Irwin portrays her husband as he really was -- a devoted family man, a fervently dedicated environmentalist, a modest bloke who spoke to millions on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves. "Steve & Me" is a nonstop adventure, a real-life love story, and a fitting tribute to a man adored by all those whose lives he touched, written by the woman who knew and loved him best of all.
Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic
Jason Chaffetz - 2019
Things were bad then, but during the Trump administration, liberals have reached a new level of hysteria and misconduct.Democrat anger has grown so irrational that it has burst through the constitutional guardrails which protect our institutions and our republic. While they constantly label the right “fascist,” the left imposes policies which suppress speech, limit freedom, and empower federal bullies. In Power Grab, Chaffetz pulls back the curtain on the world of hypocrisy, political intrigue, and procedural malfeasance that is Washington D.C. With stories you won't read anywhere else, he shows how the left weaves false narratives, drums up investigations in search of a crime, and refuses to direct congressional oversight towards its appropriate target: the government. Democrats weaponize nonprofit advocacy groups and monetize partisan anger to line the pockets of their political allies. They use “voter enrollment” as a smokescreen to hide their plans to destabilize free elections and seek to politicize federal agencies like the Federal Election Commission, the IRS, and the Department of Justice.It shouldn’t be this way. Democrats have abandoned the wisdom set forth in the Constitution for short-term political wins. Power Grab shows the lengths to which Democrats will go to maintain their grip on power, and how the only thing that will stop them is a return to our founding principles.
This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class
Elizabeth Warren - 2017
Senator from Massachusetts and bestselling author offers a passionate, inspiring book about why our middle class is under siege and how we can win the fight to save it
Senator Elizabeth Warren has long been an outspoken champion of America’s middle class, and by the time the people of Massachusetts elected her in 2012, she had become one of the country’s leading progressive voices. Now, at a perilous moment for our nation, she has written a book that is at once an illuminating account of how we built the strongest middle class in history, a scathing indictment of those who have spent the past thirty-five years undermining working families, and a rousing call to action. Warren grew up in Oklahoma, and she’s never forgotten how difficult it was for her mother and father to hold on at the ragged edge of the middle class. An educational system that offered opportunities for all made it possible for her to achieve her dream of going to college, becoming a teacher, and, later, attending law school. But now, for many, these kinds of opportunities are gone, and a government that once looked out for working families is instead captive to the rich and powerful. Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal ushered in an age of widespread prosperity; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan reversed course and sold the country on the disastrous fiction called trickle-down economics. Now, with the election of Donald Trump—a con artist who promised to drain the swamp of special interests and then surrounded himself with billionaires and lobbyists—the middle class is being pushed ever closer to collapse.Written in the candid, high-spirited voice that is Warren’s trademark, This Fight Is Our Fight tells eye-opening stories about her battles in the Senate and vividly describes the experiences of hard-working Americans who have too often been given the short end of the stick. Elizabeth Warren has had enough of phony promises and a government that no longer serves its people—she won’t sit down, she won’t be silenced, and she will fight back.
An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair
Miles Goslett - 2018
'A compelling, authoritative insight into possibly the most controversial death in Britain this century' Observer. 'Masterful ... This book made me proud of my trade as a journalist' Daily Mail. 'This searing excavation of the mysterious death of Dr David Kelly is investigative journalism at its best. It is brave, relentless, dazzlingly revealing' Peter Oborne. In March 2003 British forces invaded Iraq after Tony Blair said the country could deploy weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice. A few months later, government scientist Dr David Kelly was unmasked by Blair's officials as the assumed source of a BBC news report challenging this claim. Within days, Dr Kelly was found dead in a wood near his home. Blair immediately convened the controversial Hutton Inquiry, which concluded Dr Kelly committed suicide. Yet key questions remain: could Dr Kelly really have taken his life in the manner declared? And why did Blair's government derail the coroner's inquest into Dr Kelly's death? In this meticulous account, award-winning journalist Miles Goslett shows why we should be sceptical of the official story of what happened in that desperate summer of 2003.
The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate
James Rosen - 2008
Mitchell, the central figure in the rise and ruin of Richard Nixon and the highest-ranking American official ever convicted on criminal charges.As U.S. attorney general from 1969 to 1972, John Mitchell stood at the center of the upheavals of the late sixties. The most powerful man in the Nixon cabinet, a confident troubleshooter, Mitchell championed law and order against the bomb-throwers of the antiwar movement, desegregated the South’s public schools, restored calm after the killings at Kent State, and steered the commander-in-chief through the Pentagon Papers and Joint Chiefs spying crises. After leaving office, Mitchell survived the ITT and Vesco scandals—but was ultimately destroyed by Watergate. With a novelist’s skill, James Rosen traces Mitchell’s early life and career from his Long Island boyhood to his mastery of Wall Street, where Mitchell's innovations in municipal finance made him a power broker to the Rockefellers and mayors and governors in all fifty states. After merging law firms with Richard Nixon, Mitchell brilliantly managed Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and, at his urging, reluctantly agreed to serve as attorney general. With his steely demeanor and trademark pipe, Mitchell commanded awe throughout the government as Nixon’s most trusted adviser, the only man in Washington who could say no to the president.Chronicling the collapse of the Nixon presidency, The Strong Man follows America’s former top cop on his singular odyssey through the criminal justice system—a tortuous maze of camera crews, congressional hearings, special prosecutors, and federal trials. The path led, ultimately, to a prison cell in Montgomery, Alabama, where Mitchell was welcomed into federal custody by the same men he had appointed to office. Rosen also reveals the dark truth about Mitchell’s marriage to the flamboyant and volatile Martha Mitchell: her slide into alcoholism and madness, their bitter divorce, and the toll it all took on their daughter, Marty.
Based on 250 original interviews and hundreds of thousands of previously unpublished documents and tapes, The Strong Man resolves definitively the central mysteries of the Nixon era: the true purpose of the Watergate break-in, who ordered it, the hidden role played by the Central Intelligence Agency, and those behind the cover-up.
A landmark of history and biography, The Strong Man is that rarest of books: both a model of scholarly research and savvy analysis and a masterful literary achievement.
O! Jackie
Mercedes King - 2012
As a faithful wife devoted to an unfaithful husband, Jackie knew humiliation well. Living in the public eye intensified her disgrace. Through the years, Jack Kennedy's lustful escapades grew in carelessness and frquency. When his trysts with Marilyn Monroe threaten to become public, Jackie must decide how far she'll go to save the presidency and her marriage.
True Crime: Chilling Investigations Of Some Of Our Histories Most Unfamiliar True Crime Stories
Travis S. Kennedy - 2015
When a crime has been committed, it is essential for the perpetrator to be punished. In that way, although the family of the victims won’t always be able to make sense of what happened, they will still understand that nobody is above the law. Publicizing the criminal’s modus operandi is sometimes good - the citizens will be well aware of their tactics and they can take better care of themselves. On the other hand, it can also be bad, because “would be” criminals and serial killers are also watching and they might like the idea. Such was the case of Eddie Seda. Other than him, 4 others wreaked havoc in different places, at various times: There was the man who killed prostitutes in his own home (with his family in it), a man who claimed to have killed 600 hundred women when only 3 victims were verified, a father who brought his son to “hunt” some humans, and a husband who killed his wife when she learned of his lies. How did they do it? And how did the law authorities catch them? Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn...
True Crime – What Drives a Killer to the Edge?
True Crime – A Day of Hunting in Leonia
True Crime – Kendall and His House of Horrors
True Crime – Try Harder: 2nd Zodiac
True Crime – The Prankster Killer
True Crime – Lori's Husband
Much, much more!
Conversations With Myself
Nelson Mandela - 2010
Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela's personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons during his twenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the postapartheid transition; private recorded conversations; speeches and correspondence written during his presidency--a historic collection of documents archived at the Nelson Mandela Foundation is brought together into a sweeping narrative of great immediacy and stunning power. An intimate journey from Mandela's first stirrings of political consciousness to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself illuminates a heroic life forged on the front lines of the struggle for freedom and justice.While other books have recounted Mandela's life from the vantage of the present, Conversations with Myself allows, for the first time, unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right
Jeff Sparrow - 2018
Everywhere, outsider politicians rail against ‘the elite’.Yet, with a few notable exceptions, the populist mood has benefited reactionaries rather than reformers. The status quo might be in crisis, but the emerging voices are those of hate and violence. Where is the progressive alternative?In Trigger Warnings, Jeff Sparrow sympathetically but critically examines key progressive ideas. How does a billionaire position himself as anti-elitist? Are the culture wars worth fighting? What's at stake in the battles over political correctness? Should progressives defend it — and, if so, how?Sparrow traces the evolution of the Left and Right to explain the origins of this strange evolution, untangling some of the thorniest controversies of our time and arguing that the future needn't only belong to nihilists and bigots.
A Life in Frocks: A Memoir
Kelly Doust - 2010
For as long as she can remember, Kelly Doust has been passionate about clothes. They are her first, and most enduring, love affair to date. Like many women, she adores the playfulness of fashion and its endless ability to transform. She loves the ritual and drama of getting dressed, assuming different identities in different outfits, and exploring the many facets of her personality. She buys far too many glossy magazines, and puzzles over how she can spend half her life shopping and yet still find herself with nothing to wear. Over the years, clothes have comforted her, given her confidence, lured lovers, made her invisible, secured jobs, aged her, and given back her youth. And yes, they have betrayed her. This is one woman's charming analysis of her fascinating relationship with what she wears.
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
Hyeonseo Lee - 2014
Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.She could not return, since rumours of her escape were spreading, and she and her family could incur the punishments of the government authorities – involving imprisonment, torture, and possible public execution. Hyeonseo instead remained in China and rapidly learned Chinese in an effort to adapt and survive. Twelve years and two lifetimes later, she would return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea, on one of the most arduous, costly and dangerous journeys imaginable.This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life – not once, but twice – first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit.