Secondhand History, Biography & Ideas Bargain Book Box SP2784

Secondhand History, Biography & Ideas Bargain Book Box — 21 Books

Dava Sobel's Longitude — the book that made narrative popular science a commercial force in the 1990s — sits alongside Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance, one of the foundational works of Australian historiography, and Bill Gammage's The Broken Years, still the most moving account of Australian soldiers in the First World War. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature give the box genuine philosophical weight, and The Portable Nietzsche completes a remarkable philosophical shelf. Eric Newby's Slowly Down the Ganges and the Shackleton Ross Sea Party narrative bring two very different kinds of adventure into a box with unusual breadth.

1. The Tyranny of Distance — Geoffrey Blainey — This is the book that gave Australian history one of its most productive ideas — that distance from Britain and between settlements shaped Australian character, economy, and politics more profoundly than any other factor. Winner of the 1967 C. Weickhardt Award and still essential reading.
2. The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution — Barbara W. Tuchman — Tuchman was the finest American narrative historian of the twentieth century, and this late work traces the American Revolution through the lens of a naval encounter off the Dutch island of St Eustatius. The Independent called it "fresh and original."
3. Longitude — Dava Sobel — This is the book that proved popular science history could reach a mass audience — the true story of John Harrison, the self-taught clockmaker who solved the greatest navigational problem of the eighteenth century while the scientific establishment did everything it could to deny him the credit. Compulsive from first page to last.
4. Stalingrad — Heinz Schröter — Pan Giant Illustrated. This is the WWII bestseller written from the German side — Schröter's account of the most catastrophic defeat in German military history, written with the authority of a participant and illustrated throughout. Still one of the most immediate accounts of the battle.
5. King Rat — James Clavell — This is a novel drawn directly from Clavell's own experience as a prisoner in Changi's Japanese POW camp, and it reads accordingly — the fictional frame barely disguises the raw authenticity of lived imprisonment. Among the most powerful literary responses to the Pacific war, and the book that launched one of the great careers in popular fiction.
6. It Doesn't Take a Hero — General H. Norman Schwarzkopf with Peter Petre — The autobiography of the commander of Allied forces in the Gulf War — from his West Point years through Vietnam to Desert Storm. Schwarzkopf writes with the directness of a soldier and the self-awareness of someone who had time to reflect on what he had done.
7. The Portable Nietzsche — Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann — Kaufmann's translations remain the standard in English, and this portable edition gathers the essential Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner — in a single reliable volume. The best introduction to a thinker routinely misunderstood.
8. Charles Darwin — Gavin de Beer — A scientific biography of Darwin by a distinguished evolutionary biologist — someone equipped to assess both the man and the science with equal authority. De Beer writes the development of evolutionary theory from the inside out.
9. Sources of Australian History — Manning Clark — Clark is Australian history's most magisterial and contested figure, and this collection of primary sources — the documents through which Australia's colonial history speaks in its own voice — is a foundational scholarly resource.
10. Surface Raider — F.L. Farrell — A naval history account of surface raider operations, examining the German commerce-raiding campaigns that threatened Allied shipping during the Second World War.
11. Brown Men and Red Sand — Charles Mountford — Mountford was one of Australia's most important early ethnographers of Aboriginal culture, and this account of his expeditions into central Australia documents the country and its people with a respect unusual for its era.
12. Narvik: Battles in the Fjords — Peter Dickens — The story of the naval campaign at Narvik in 1940 — the Allied attempt to prevent Germany from securing Norwegian iron ore routes — told with the tactical detail and narrative tension the subject demands.
13. I Saw Tokyo Burning — Robert Guillain — An eyewitness account of Japan from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima by the French journalist who spent the entire war in Tokyo. The San Diego Union called it "a stunning book" — Guillain saw what no other Western journalist saw, and this is among the most valuable first-hand documents of the Pacific war.
14. The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War — Bill Gammage — This is the classic of Australian WWI history — Gammage drew on hundreds of diaries and letters to reconstruct the war as the men who fought it experienced it, and the result is both a historical document and one of the most affecting things in Australian literature.
15. Slowly Down the Ganges — Eric Newby — Newby was one of the great British travel writers, and this account of his journey along the Ganges — by boat, on foot, and by any available means — is among his finest work. Funny, observant, and consistently surprised by what India offers.
16. Polar Castaways: The Ross Sea Party (1914–17) of Sir Ernest Shackleton — Richard McElrea & David Harrowfield — The forgotten half of Shackleton's Endurance expedition — the support party stranded on the Ross Sea side, whose story of survival and loss is as extraordinary as the Endurance's own. A serious piece of polar historical scholarship.
17. The Invention of Power: Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West — Bruce Bueno de Mesquita — A political scientist applies game theory and rational choice analysis to the medieval struggle between papal and royal authority, arguing that this conflict was the crucible in which Western political institutions were forged.
18. The Dambusters Raid — John Sweetman — Cassell Military Paperbacks. Sweetman's account of Operation Chastise — the 617 Squadron bouncing bomb raids on the Ruhr dams in 1943 — is the most thoroughly researched single-volume account of one of WWII's most audacious operations.
19. The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith — Classic World Literature edition. This is the book that founded modern economics — Smith's systematic account of how markets work, why free trade benefits nations, and why the division of labour drives prosperity. Published in 1776 and still arguable on every page.
20. Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle — The Countess of Carnarvon — The current owner of Highclere Castle tells the story of its most remarkable chatelaine — Lady Almina, funded by the Rothschild fortune, who turned the castle into a hospital during WWI. For readers who want the real history behind the television series.
21. A Treatise of Human Nature — David Hume — Penguin Classics. This is Hume's masterwork — his systematic attempt to apply the methods of natural science to the study of human nature, examining belief, causation, personal identity, and moral judgement. Published when Hume was twenty-eight and still one of the most important works in the philosophical canon.