New World History

The story of the emergence and dominance of two brilliant Australian soldiers who commanded the most effective armies in defeating the Germans and the Turks in the Great War. Monash and Chauvel is a gripping narrative history that follows the extraordinary campaigns of the two most outstanding battlefield commanders of the First World War across all the Allied armies: John Monash and Harry Chauvel.

Two Harvard undergraduates must decide how to juggle their travails in Cambridge with the increased tensions in Europe. As they endure the horrors of the Western Front, William clings to the hope that he may somehow find answers about his past.

On July 16, 1945, just weeks before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the surrender of Japan and the end of WWII, the US unleashed the world's first atomic bomb at the Trinity testing site located in the remote Tularosa Valley in New Mexico. In The First Atomic Bomb Janet Farrell Brodie explores the history of the Trinity test and those whose contributions have rarely been discussed—the men and women who constructed, served, and witnessed the first test—as well as the downwinders who suffered the consequences of radiation.

In November 1956, a unified Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh came into being. In February 2014, Parliament bifurcated it to create two Telugu-speaking states: Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Old History, New Geography provides the context, text and subtext to the bifurcation, which continues to be contentious and controversial.

This telling of the 2019 Tour de France is a supplement to our two-volume The Story of the Tour de France. Volume one told the story of the Tour's origins and each edition of the race from 1903 through 1975. The 2019 edition was filled with surprises with young riders taking control of the race. Every day had something happen that confounded the experts. The winner did not emerge until Mother Nature surprised everyone in late July with snow and ice. With just three stages to go, mud, hail, and ice on an Alpine road changed everything.

In March 1945 Reg Cleworth, a navigator on PBY Catalina seaplanes flying out of Darwin, went missing in action. No details were ever given about the incident that took his life, nor the reason his plane went down. For Reg’s younger brother, Robert, the news came as a prophecy fulfilled. The last time they saw each other, Reg confided in Robert, ‘I don’t think I’m coming back’.

There was a place far worse than Changi - Singapore's Outram Road Gaol. Deprivation here was so extreme that there really was a fate worse than death. Stubborn Buggers is the story of 12 Australian POWs who fought and survived the battle for Malaya, then captivity and slave labour, followed by the unimaginable hardships of Outram Road Gaol.

It is a story of how they dealt with the brutality of the Japanese military police, the feared Kempeitai.

There's no doubt that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past few decades, the world has embraced "progress", and we're living with the resultant clicking, beeping, anxiety-inducing frenzy. But a creative backlash is gathering steam, helping us cope with the avalanche of data that threatens to overwhelm us daily through our computers, tablets, and smartphones.

A unique collection of poignant, horrific, sad and sometimes dryly humorous stories and yarns from the bloody battlefield of Gallipoli. This is not a history, nor is it an individual soldier's story. Rather Jim Haynes has done what he does so well and pulled together the many yarns and stories and verses written about Gallipoli - everything from the firsthand accounts of being recruited to memories of ordinary soldiers written from the trenches and accounts of the aftermath.

In a world where computers are everywhere, there is still one last frontier to be conquered - the brain. An age-old enigma, the three pounds of flesh in between our ears has perplexed philosophers and neuroscientists alike. With hopes of further understanding the brain and redefining the world of neuromedicine, scientists are beginning to connect the brain with computers, unlocking remarkable opportunities.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind.

This is the ultimate book of lists throwing light on the "firsts" of planet Earth. The origin of man, the birth and death of civilizations, wars and empires, the beginning of the universe - all this and more is covered in this comprehensive journey in to the past, present and future. And Madan makes it all so enjoyable. With his easy flowing style and ready humor, he turns a complex voyage in a time machine into a walk in the park.

The largest structure ever built was not made by humans, but by incredibly tiny organisms known as coral polyps. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, these small organisms have put together a collection of nearly 3,000 reefs, known as the Great Barrier Reef, which form a collective stretching across 130,000 square miles. Scientists have counted about 1,500 different fish species that use the reef, and it's estimated that 1.5 million birds use the site.

Australia's Greatest Escapes is a collection of stories about the most hazardous aspect of the prisoner of war experience - escape. Here is all the adventure, suspense, and courage of ordinary Australians who defied their captors; men who tunneled to freedom, crawled through stinking drains, or clawed a passage beneath barbed wire in a desperate attempt to flee captivity.

We live in a world transformed by scientific discovery. Yet today science and its practitioners have come under political attack. In this fascinating history spanning continents and centuries, historian David Wootton offers a lively defense of science, revealing why the Scientific Revolution was truly the greatest event in our history. The Invention of Science goes back 500 years in time to chronicle this crucial transformation, exploring the factors that led to its birth and the people who made it happen.

In 1979, the idea of an oral history based project on the administration of Papua New Guinea germinated at the ABC, driven by Tim Bowden and Daniel Connell. This massive undertaking involved the recording of 350 hours of tape recorded interviews with Australians and Papua New Guineans who had been involved with Australia's colonial administration which ended with self government and independence in 1975.

The final months of 1914 were the bloodiest interval in a famously bloody war, a killing season. They ended with the First Battle of Ypres, a struggle in West Flanders, Belgium, the importance of which has been too long over-looked – until now. Robert Cowley’s account of this crucial period describes how German armies in France were poised to sweep north to capture the Channel ports and knock England out of the war – and were only held back by a brilliant improvisation from a cobbled-together handful of desperate British, French and Belgium troops.

The journey that takes Mark Jacobson around the world began when a friend bought a lamp at a rummage sale and was told that it was made from the skins of Jews. While he didn't believe the story, he sent it to Mark, saying, "You're a journalist, you figure out what it is." This is the first known discovery and investigation of such an artifact.

This book offers a series of problems in thinking that require no special knowledge and no mathematics. The problems are designed to let readers find out about their personal style of thinking, its weaknesses and strengths, and the potential methods that they never use. Being right is not always important - an error can lead to the right decision.

A short essay by Hugh Schonfield which tries to clarify the question of whether there is any evidence of the existence of a Gospel written in Hebrew.