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Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

 
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Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

The High Mountains of Portugal

19/8/2016

 
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Yann Martel: Text Publishing $29.99
 
WHAT common thread links a chimpanzee, a long-extinct Iberian rhinoceros and an early 1900s automobile clad in elephant hide? All three are part of the disparate menagerie of characters that populates storyteller Yann Martel’s latest release.
From the author best known for the phenomenally popular Life of Pi, Martel’s new novel is in fact a series of three novellas that, although independent, share key elements.
The action begins in Lisbon in December 1904 as Tomás Lobo, still mourning the death of his beloved Dora and little Gaspar, sets out in search of a mysterious religious artefact created in Angola and carried to Europe via the slave colony of São Tomé. Using the diary of a 17th-Century priest, Father Ulisses Pinto, as inspiration, he winds his way along the plateau that separates his homeland from Spain to a cluster of isolated rural villages in the northernmost reaches of Portugal, encountering events perhaps bizarre, perhaps imagined along the way.
The second act takes place in Bragança, the focal point of Porugal’s northeastern province. It is New Year’s Eve 1938 and Dr Eusebio Lozora is working late in his hospital office, finalising paperwork for autopsies completed in recent days. Suddenly an elderly woman appears with her husband’s body packed neatly in a suitcase, demanding to know not how the man died but how he lived. Can the doctor provide the answer she seeks?
The third and final chapter stretches from Ottawa, Canada, to Oklahoma City, US, and then to Tuizelo, Portugal, in the early 1980s as freshly widowed Senator Peter Tovy embarks on a search for meaning of his own. Upending his routine existence, Tovy returns to the village of his Portuguese grandparents, taking with him the most unlikely of travelling companions.
Spanish-Canadian Martel will speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival next weekend.

Our Vietnam Nurses

12/8/2016

 
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​Annabelle Brayley: Penguin $34.99
 
AS THE civilian casualties kept coming, their bodies shredded, Janet Glasson remained on her feet – for up to 32 hours in a single shift at times. Theatre nurse Glasson was on duty at Long Xuyen hospital in January 1968 when the North Vietnamese launched one of the major campaigns of the Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive, against the South.
Yet, if not for an episode of Love Child on TV last month, few young Australians would realise this country had medical representation in Vietnam. In all, 300-odd Australian – some enlisted, some not – were involved between 1962 and 1973, complemented on the frontline by first-aid-trained soldiers known as medics.
Now, half a century later, Annabelle Brayley relates with sensitivity and careful detail the stories of 22 individuals who worked on the ground in Vietnam or on a fly-in fly-out basis from airforce bases in Malaysia and the Philippines.
She records Pam Bell’s acceptance of medivac pilots’ orders to execute nursing staff on their planes if shot down, the lack of essential medical supplies in chronically over-crowded wards with multiple patients in every bed and the unsuitability of stiff formal dress uniforms in the tropical heat.
She documents, too, the experiences of Australians receiving their first passports, the shocked reactions of those touching down at the airport in Saigon to find the tarmac blanketed by military aircraft and the disenchantment years later of nurses denied government recognition of their active service.
Brayley also describes heartwarming incidents: June Miinchow and Di Lawrence meeting their future husbands in Vietnam and former midwife Terri Roche discovering that her perfume offered reassurance to wounded soldiers unable to see.
With Vietnam Veterans Day to take place next Thursday – 50 years to the day since the Battle of Long Tan – this book acknowledges the extraordinary efforts of Australia’s wartime medical teams.

Out of the Ice

5/8/2016

 
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Ann Turner: Simon & Schuster $29.99
 
DR LAURA Alvarado has just completed a long, dreary over-winter stay in Antarctica and is looking forward to spending a few weeks in leafy inner Melbourne when word of a new opportunity arrives. Rather than speeding towards a comfortable summer on mainland Australia, Laura finds herself heading off to a tiny, barely inhabited former Norwegian outpost between the Antarctic ice-shelf and Argentina’s southernmost tip.
On South Safety Island her task is to carry out a thorough environmental impact assessment of an abandoned whaling station, Fredelighavn, in response to a request to have it opened to tourists. For the duration, her temporary home will be the neighbouring British base, Alliance – a tightly bonded, secretive community in which, it is quickly apparent, she is very much an unwelcome outsider.
With her sole survey partner’s posting delayed by illness and Fredelighavn off-limits to her Alliance hosts, Laura is forced to begin her study alone.
Distressed by thoughts of wholesale whale slaughter and haunted by a lifetime of personal loss and grief, she struggles to hold her nerve in the ghostly settlement. Although the deployment of her friend Kate as a backup scientist is comforting, signs of human interference compound Laura’s unease: freshly smoked cigarette butts inside one of the houses, abnormal aggression among colonies of seals and penguins, a shadowy figure moving between blubber rendering vats and, most disturbing of all, an eerily pale-skinned boy seemingly trapped behind a thick, impenetrable ice-wall and screaming for help.
What is the evasive Alliance team’s covert mission? Are the unexplained happenings at Fredelighavn related to this, or is her mind betraying her, exhausted by too many months in the field?
Laura’s investigations take her from South Safety to Nantucket in the US, then Venice, Italy, as she strives to free an explanation from the unyielding ice.

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