Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box SP2685

Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box — 17 Books

Anchored by a remarkable breadth of Australian history and memoir — Blainey on Victoria, Kerr on the Dismissal, Hazel Hawke on her own remarkable life, Sylvia Lawson on the cultural revolution that was the Bulletin — this box ranges outward to take in Hobsbawm's essays on resistance and revolution, Heyerdahl crossing ancient seas on a reed boat, Livingstone reconsidered, Lincoln recalled, and a British businessman facing execution in Tehran. History as it should be: personal, political, surprising, and never less than urgent.

1. Anthony Reid — Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680: Volume Two: Expansion and Crisis Volume Two of Reid's magisterial two-part work — one of the most important works of Southeast Asian history ever written. The Australian historian reconstructs the economic, social, and political transformation of the region with extraordinary depth and clarity.
2. Jane Howard — Margaret Mead: A Life A thorough and sympathetic biography of the pioneering American anthropologist whose fieldwork in Samoa and New Guinea changed how the Western world thought about culture, gender, and childhood — and whose conclusions have been debated ever since.
3. Eric Hobsbawm — Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz Hobsbawm — the great Marxist historian — turns his attention to the uncelebrated: jazz musicians, labour militants, bandits, and ordinary people who pushed back against power. Characteristically brilliant and surprising. A second Hobsbawm also appears in this box (see entry 17).
4. Sylvia Lawson — The Archibald Paradox How did J.F. Archibald's Bulletin — a scrappy little colonial weekly — become the journal that shaped Australian national identity and launched the careers of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, and a generation of artists? Lawson's answer is a landmark of Australian cultural history: rigorous, original, and compulsively readable.
5. Thor Heyerdahl — The Tigris Expedition Heyerdahl built a reed boat in Iraq and sailed it through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea to demonstrate that ancient Mesopotamian civilisation had the maritime capacity to reach Africa and India. Another extraordinary voyage from the man who crossed the Pacific on Kon-Tiki.
6. Hazel Hawke — My Own Life Hazel Hawke was far more than the Prime Minister's wife — a qualified social worker, a public advocate for children and families, and a woman who faced the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease with extraordinary dignity and openness. A warm and honest memoir.
7. Roger Cooper — Death Plus Ten Years Cooper was a British businessman arrested in Iran in 1985 and sentenced to death on espionage charges. He spent more than five years in Evin Prison before finally being released. His account of captivity, survival, and the politics of his imprisonment is tense, darkly witty, and remarkable.
8. Gerstle Mack — Paul Cézanne Mack's substantial biography of Cézanne — first published in the 1930s and long a standard reference — traces the painter's difficult life, his tortured relationship with his work, and the slow recognition of his revolutionary importance to the history of art.
9. Oliver Ransford — David Livingstone: The Dark Interior Ransford looks behind the legend of the great explorer and missionary to find a more complicated and troubled figure — a man whose single-mindedness drove him to extraordinary feats and at the same time destroyed his family and alienated his companions.
10. William Hanchett — Out of the Wilderness: The Life of Abraham Lincoln A biographical account of Lincoln's emergence from frontier poverty to the Illinois bar to the presidency — focused on the formation of the character that would hold the Union together through its greatest crisis.
11. Alan Lambourn — The Treatymakers of New Zealand: Heralding the Birth of a Nation An examination of the Treaty of Waitangi and the figures — Māori chiefs, British officials, missionaries — who negotiated New Zealand's founding document in 1840. A significant contribution to the history of a still-contested moment.
12. Geoffrey Blainey — Jumping over the Wheel Blainey's history of Dunlop in Australia — one of his several corporate histories — becomes, in his hands, a window onto Australian economic and industrial development across the twentieth century. A second Blainey also appears in this box (see entry 13).
13. Geoffrey Blainey — Our Side of the Country: The Story of Victoria Australia's most celebrated popular historian on the state that formed him — from the gold rushes through Federation to the present. Blainey at his most accessible and affectionate, without sacrificing any of his analytical rigour.
14. Sir Walter Crocker — Travelling Back: The Memoirs of Sir Walter Crocker Crocker was one of Australia's most distinguished diplomats and public servants — he served as Governor of South Australia and spent decades navigating the postwar international order. His memoirs are a significant document of mid-century Australian public life.
15. John Kerr — Matters for Judgment Sir John Kerr's own account of why he dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975 — still the most dramatic and contested moment in Australian constitutional history. Whatever one thinks of his actions, this is an essential primary document for anyone seeking to understand what happened and why.
16. Henry Lawson — In the Days When the World Was Wide: Poetical Works (Australian Classics) The collected poetry of Henry Lawson — "The Man from Snowy River" aside, arguably Australia's most beloved writer — gathered in a single volume. Mateship, hardship, the bush, and the working man: the emotional core of Australian literary identity.
17. Eric Hobsbawm — Revolutionaries Hobsbawm's essays on revolutionary movements and figures across the modern world — a companion piece of sorts to Uncommon People (entry 3), and another demonstration of his unmatched ability to make political history feel alive and immediate.