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For an Australian author like Richard Flanagan, there is material enough for a great novel just telling of the lives and suffering of Australian prisoners of war during World War 2.  Even more so considering his father was just such a prisoner on the Burma railway, something Flanagan speaks of 'imbibing' while growing up. Instead he settles for a broader and more difficult panorama. Alongside the adept before and after descriptions of Australian soldiers - of love affairs and guilty confusion - we are also taken into the minds of Japanese officers and Korean soldiers and dystopian post-nuclear Japan. Somehow it all rings as true as his depictions of Melbourne society and Tasmanian poverty. The heat of Adelaide is pitched against the humidity of Siam and the unresolved heroics of an Australian surgeon against the inconclusive brutality of Japanese prison commander. It is not a triumphant book or a cheery one, and it offers little hope except that sometimes people surviv...

About two years ago I started working with HammondCare, having been unfamiliar with the name and the story behind it. I was aware of a Sydney suburb called Hammondville which often appeared in traffic reports, something like - 'traffic is banked up all the way to the Hammondville toll'. I was also very familiar with Arthur Stace, the man famous for writing his one-word sermon, Eternity, around Sydney and beyond hundreds of thousands of times from the 1930s to 1967 when he died - at Hammondville. I had always thought his life one of Sydney's great stories and a powerful touch point of faith and culture, recognised also by those who have written about him in poems and songs, created paintings, produced documentaries and operas and even featured his word in the millennium fireworks and the Sydney Olympic opening ceremony. What I have discovered, as is revealed in Faith in Action HammondCare , is that the story of Rev Bob Hammond and the charity he founded is just as ...

Please click on any book cover to purchase or pre-order   Having killed Lincoln and Kennedy in previous books, US Fox News anchor and best-selling author Bill O'Reilly has announced his next book, Killing Jesus to be published on September 24. As the calendar approaches Easter, there will no doubt be the usual flurry of new Jesus books released and discussed but ironically the timing of O'Reilly's new title is aimed at the biggest bookselling season of them all, Christmas. And while O'Reilly as an author is relatively unknown outside North America, as are his books, he still ranks as the world's sixth richest author grossing $24 million last year. But Killing Jesus may well gain him a broader, global audience and no doubt that is part of his motivation in writing the book. His now tried and true formula is to allow co-author Martin Dugard to do the pain-staking work of research around the killing of a famous historical figure while he comes on board...