Island Home: A Landscape Memoir

by Tim Winton

Published 2015

My Review

This is a short book dealing with what has happened to the land and people in Australia from Tim Wintons viewpoint. One message that struck me was the failure of people to really appreciate the land.  Different chapters dealt with quite varied subjects, such as his boyhood memories of places and others describing places visited during adult years.

The chapter (power of place)  talking about writing was less interesting to read and I found myself keen to get to the whereas others were quite a pleasure to read.  Overall I enjoyed the book.

Rating 3/5

Book Publicity

'I grew up on the world’s largest island.' 

This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton’s beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how Australia's unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. 

Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country shapes us.

Into The Silence

The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
by Wade Davis

My Review

This was an intriguing book and, although I knew a bit about Mallory, it dealt in considerable detail and most insightful. The parts about the various characters lives prior to the attempts on Everest were very interesting and well written.  In particular the events of the first world war were quite eye opening for me as I was quite unaware of the culpability and absolute stupidity of the generals running the war and the extent of the carnage they caused.
 
It was the longest book I have read for  many a day and took a long time to read, but it never became tedious or heavy going.

rating 4/5

Book Publicity

A magnificent work of history, biography and adventure.

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly died of disease at the Front, one was hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.
In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.
For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Maverick Mountaineer

 

 

Maverick Mountaineer

by

Robert Wainwright

 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

 

My review

Interesting story of a very competent planner of mountain climbs and highly skilled.  Also an extremely good chemist
 
I did enjoy reading this and was quite interested in how advanced George Finch was as far as mountaineering equipment.  He made himself down clothing whilst all other climbers were in traditional woollen clothes and jackets.   He also used lots of layering with clothing to achieve levels of warmth.  Finch was a pioneer and advocate of using oxygen for Himalayan peaks much to the consternation of most others and had to fight hard to convince them.
 
A chunk of the book deals with the Everest expeditions of 1921  and 1922 and the rivalry with Mallory.  Because of the nasty nature of the English alpine club establishment George Finch was not asked to go on the ill fated 1924 expedition.  He was barred from the 1921 one and it was only because he was the best mountaineer living in England, although Australian by birth; a factor that also the stuffy establishment resented.

 

Book Publicity

The first full-length biography of George Ingle Finch - maverick Australian mountaineer, scientist, concert pianist and father of actor Peter Finch.

George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing. A World War I hero whose skills also helped save London from burning to the ground during the Blitz of World War II, he was a renowned scientist who was personally chosen by Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, to help lead his nation into the modern world.

With a private life torn by war and misguided by social norms, a reputation as an outsider among the British alpine climbing establishment, and some rough and ready 'colonial' habits, Finch was a brilliantly colourful character - so why has he vanished from the pages of history? In this first full-length biography, Robert Wainwright surveys the man who is now best known as the father of Academy award-winning actor Peter Finch - but who was so much more.

A Matter of Principle by Conrad Black

 

My Review

A Matter of Principle by Conrad Black
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Reviews I had read prompted me to buy the book, but it did not live up to expectations.

He is somewhat a right wing character and dismissive of anyone with views not aligned to his. I am not sorry that he was unable to get control of the Australian newspaper group Black mentions he was trying to buy; we already have more than enough newspapers pushing right wing views.

So much of the book at least to the point where I stopped reading, which was just over 100 pages of the 590, dealt with tedious financial matters, lots of name dropping of people who has met and about the meetings. When Black discussed what went on in the writing and editing of papers things were somewhat more interesting. However I decoded to give it away as a quite uninteresting book as I felt it was a waste of my time and I would be better off reading something else.


View all my reviews

Book Publicity

In 1993, Conrad Black was the proprietor of London's Daily Telegraph and the head of one of the world's largest newspaper groups. He completed a memoir in 1992, A Life in Progress, and "great prospects beckoned." In 2004, he was fired as chairman of Hollinger International after he and his associates were accused of fraud. Here, for the first time, Black describes his indictment, four-month trial in Chicago, partial conviction, imprisonment, and largely successful appeal.

In this unflinchingly revealing and superbly written memoir, Black writes without reserve about the prosecutors who mounted a campaign to destroy him and the journalists who presumed he was guilty. Fascinating people fill these pages, from prime ministers and presidents to the social, legal, and media elite, among them: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jean Chrétien, Rupert Murdoch, Izzy Asper, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Eddie Greenspan, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.

Woven throughout are Black's views on big themes: politics, corporate governance, and the U.S. justice system. He is candid about highly personal subjects, including his friendships - with those who have supported and those who have betrayed him - his Roman Catholic faith, and his marriage to Barbara Amiel. And he writes about his complex relations with Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, and in particular the blow he has suffered at the hands of that nation.

In this extraordinary book, Black maintains his innocence and recounts what he describes as "the fight of and for my life." A Matter of Principle is a riveting memoir and a scathing account of a flawed justice system.

The Kings Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

Book Details

One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century – amazingly he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue, whom one newspaper in the 1930s famously dubbed ‘The Quack who saved a King’.
Logue wasn’t a British aristocrat or even an Englishman - he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York into the man who was capable of becoming King.
Had Logue not saved Bertie (as the man who was to become King George VI was always known) from his debilitating stammer, and pathological nervousness in front of a crowd or microphone, then it is almost certain that the House of Windsor would have collapsed. The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy is the previously untold story of the extraordinary relationship between Logue and the haunted young man who became King George VI, written with Logue’s grandson and drawn from Logue’s unpublished personal diaries. They throw extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men – and the vital role the King’s wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played in bringing them together to save her husband’s reputation and his career as King.
The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy is an intimate portrait of the British monarchy at a time of its greatest crisis, seen through the eyes of an Australian commoner who was proud to serve, and save, his King.

My Review

After seeing the film I thought it would be interesting to read about Lionel Logue.  The book is not the story of the film, but a biography on his life, although of course it covers the episodes that are the film.  It is quite an easy book to read and I did not find it became tedious at all.  It is just about the right length for such a book.

Rating 3/5