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The Man with the Golden Typewriter

31/12/2015

 
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Fergus Fleming (editor): Bloomsbury Publishing $29.99
 
TO TENS of millions of fans James Bond is a suave, invincible Hollywood spy with a cultured British accent, an eye for a beautiful woman and an unerring ability to hunt out anyone who threatens the security of the West. Well before the arrival of the big-screen version, however, Bond was born in print.
A new compilation of correspondence both to and by intelligence-operative-turned-writer Ian Fleming traces this evolution from the unveiling of the first of his eventual 14 Bond books through the negotiation of several Bond film deals and concludes shortly after Fleming’s death, aged 56, 12 years later. It reveals the insecurities, frustrations and embarrassment of the author, despite his growing stature as one of the greatest ever espionage novelists, and provides an insight into a man who valued accuracy of detail so intensely that no feedback, no matter how trifling, was brushed aside.
Writing frantically over a few weeks each January-February while on retreat from deep-winter Britain to his Jamaican property, “Goldeneye”, Fleming produced a new Bond best-seller every year; two, in fact, had been completed in his final months and were published posthumously. In addition, he created children’s tale Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and wrote non-fiction works The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
The “golden typewriter” of anthology editor Fergus Fleming’s title is simultaneously a reference to the extravagant purchase made by his Uncle Ian as reward for having completed his first full manuscript – Casino Royale – in the northern spring of 1952 and a play on the name of one of the later Bond books.
If there is any slight fault in this collection it is that the correspondence is arranged by project rather than chronologically, producing an at-times disjointed and occasionally repetitive read; this, though, is more than offset by the intimacy of the conversations between Fleming and his publishing colleagues, readers, friends and wife Ann.

Passage to Pusan

18/12/2015

 
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Louise Evans: PB Publishing $19.99
 
HISTORIANS sometimes refer to Australia's involvement in the North-South Korea conflict in the 1950s as the “forgotten war”. To entire generations these days, however, that period is not merely forgotten; it is completely unknown.
The little many Australians do know revolves mostly around the characters ‘Hawkeye’ and ‘Hotlips’ and their surgical-tent colleagues in the US TV comedy series M*A*S*H.
In reality, for three years Australian soldiers fought under the United Nations flag to help defend the southern half of that country from what it – and the broader democratic world – viewed as communism’s relentless expansion.
Oddly, in half a century dominated by books about two world wars and Vietnam, few have been published to record Australia’s military participation in Korea.
One brand-new exception is a family biography by Sydney journalist Louise Evans, whose uncle was transferred from occupational duties in Japan to the front line on the neighbouring Korean Peninsula.
Evans’ book begins where many traditional stories end: with the death of its hero. In Passage to Pusan, the killing of Private Vincent Joseph Healy in March 1951 leaves a chronic wound in the heart of his struggling working-class mother and siblings and drives Thelma Healy to steel herself for a harrowing personal pilgrimage in which she retraces her late son’s movements by sea a decade later to finally lay flowers on his grave. In reconstructed and stabilised post-war Pusan, ‘Thellie’ is reunited at last with her beloved eldest boy, observing at the same time the state of a region still battling to recover from bitter fighting.
This text and its accompanying images puts into context not only one but three wars in Asia, set against Australia’s economic and social circumstances of those times, describing in bare-bones detail the confronting everyday life of the Healy family in suburban Brisbane and the upbringing that prompted three brothers from a single household to enlist for army service.

Napoleon's Last Island

11/12/2015

 
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Tom Keneally: Random House Australia $32.99
 
TWO hundred years and two months ago, a momentous (and, to that point, unimaginably preposterous) event occurred on a pinprick of rock in the south Atlantic Ocean: dethroned French emperor Napoléon Bonaparte – the Great Ogre, the Tyrant, who had rampaged across Europe and already escaped once from exile – was incarcerated again.
In the hands of the Royal Navy after his rout at Waterloo and forced flight from Paris, Bonaparte, then aged 47, was shipped to arguably the most isolated outpost at that time under British control. The inhabitants of tiny St Helena were simultaneously astounded, appalled and intrigued when on October 17 1815 the prize captive and his entourage were ushered onto their 17-by-10-kilometre sliver of land.
His miserable banishment there would not succeed entirely, however. Bonaparte’s spiteful jailers, intent on seeing him endure a lonely and deprived subsistence, had not foreseen the companionship he would find in an unlikely playmate and ally: 13-year-old Lucia Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Balcombe. Caught midway between childhood and adolescence, Betsy was irreverent, quick-witted and challenging – an alluring combination to a man wearied by being fawned over endlessly and tiptoed around.
Thomas Keneally’s enthralling, educative and at-times-heartwrenching novel – part fiction, largely fact – celebrates both the youthful pranks and the profound tenderness that passed between the pair as Betsy honed her love-hate regard for the liquorice-eating, compassionate, attentive man she teasingly called “Boney” and would go on to remember always as “Our Great Friend”.
An excellent companion book, also released in recent weeks, is Sydney writer Anne Whitehead’s Betsy and the Emperor. When read as a follow-up to Keneally’s novel it verifies that many of the outlandish escapades described therein did indeed occur and expands on the Balcombe family’s later wanderings, including to Australia, where the grand-daughter of one of Betsy’s younger brothers was Dame Mabel Brookes.

Legacy

4/12/2015

 
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Tim Cahill: Harper Collins $39.99
 
GROWING up in Sydney, Tim Cahill had one aim in life: to play professional soccer. At the time he imagined that would be, at best, with one of the country’s top domestic sides.
The four-year-old with tears streaming down his cheeks as he lined up for his first game could not have imagined that his dream would one day see him move between England, the US and China and travel all over the world.
For Cahill’s working-class parents and older brother, Sean, supporting that single-minded ambition demanded enormous commitment and financial devotion.
Cahill first represented not Australia but his mother’s homeland, Samoa, at the age of 14.
At 17 he was sent by his family to England on the slim hope of being invited to trial with a lower-level club. Within weeks he was weighing up three separate contract offers from the Second and First divisions and, most remarkably, the UK’s Premier League. Loyalty saw Cahill choose the least impressive of the three, Millwall in London, on a salary of £250 a week. There he went on to make 241 appearances as Millwall earned promotion and, almost inconceivably, faced up to the mighty Manchester United in the final of the FA Cup.
The pinnacle of his decade-plus in England was an eight-year stint in the midfield for Everton in Liverpool.
As part of the so-called ‘golden generation’ he became the first Socceroo to score in a World Cup, leading Australia’s impressive run in 2006. He openly admits that making himself available for Australian selection has always been his priority.
Cahill’s candidly written and emotionally transparent autobiography is not, he explains, an end-of-career retrospective; now, at 35, a key member of Shanghai Shenhua in China and continuing to line up for Socceroo duty, he hopes to play on for at least a few more years.

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    — VB 2020

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