No comments about True Spirit: The True Story of a 16-Year-Old Australian Who Sailed Solo, Nonstop, and Unassisted Around the World.

5 comments about Rabbit-Proof Fence.

1. YES! This film's spirit and soul interested me and captured my own soul so much that I used it in my Sociology classes for a "culture" learning experience!!!!!!



2. The story is amazing. The writing however is ok. There are many things that need an explanation that aren't given one. If the book were two or three times as long it would be perfect.



3. I first saw the Miramax movie starring Kenneth Branagh, which was based upon this book. I was intrigued enough by the film to read this book. I was not disappointed. This book is certainly a testament to the human spirit. It also reveals the harsh, paternalistic and racist policies that the Australian government imposed upon its Aboriginal population.
   
   In 1931, the Australian government issued an edict that mandated that all Aboriginal and part Aboriginal children were to be forcibly removed from their homes and taken to special settlements where they were to be assimilated. There, while living in inhumane and degrading conditions, they would be taught to be culturally white, would be mandated to speak English only, and would be trained to be domestic help or laborers in white households.
   
   The author tells the reader the story of three young girls, Mollie, Gracie, and Daisy, who had Aboriginal mothers and White fathers. Ranging in age from nine to fifteen years old, the three girls were forcibly removed from their loving families and taken to a special settlement. The girls rebelled against this system, and, homesick, escaped from such a settlement. They left with iterally just the clothes on their back. Their only guide home would be a rabbit-proof fence that stretched for over a thousand miles across Australia.
   
   The girls Aboriginal heritage and survival skills would come in handy throughout their nearly nine week long trek across Australia, as they were forced to subsist on the land and the occasional kindness from strangers. They had to endure thirst, hunger, and danger, while avoiding being caught along the way by professional trackers, police on the lookout for them, and white settlers that were unsympathetic to their situation.
   
   This story is a most personal one for the author, as one of the girls, Molly, is the author's mother. Told in a straightforward, factual manner, it is an incredible story that is an indictment of the Australian government's racist policies against its Aboriginal people and its imperialistic self-proclaimed superiority over them.



4. The company who sent me "Rabbit Proof Fence" was thorough and quick within my quidelines. The price was
   reasonable and the book all it promised to be.



5. this is a great book. should be read by everybody. it's a nice reminder that we have lots of work to do.
   
   True story and it has been around for a while even made into a movie
   Read the book

No comments about Cooper's Creek: Tragedy and Adventure in the Australian Outback.

5 comments about Unreliable Memoirs.

1. Loved this book although it is not an easy read. The Aussie slang and the vocabulary made me run to the dictionary more than once. But I like that sort of thing. Clive James talks about his youth in Australia, mostly after his father died at the end of World War II. He ran rings around his mother and pretty much ran wild. Not an easy read vocabulary-wise, but worth the effort.



2. I have owned this book since it first came out, have read it multiple times over the years, and have all the subsequent four books in the Clive James autobiographical series (plus a few others of his). I hadn't planned to write this review, but having just read the five others on this page I feel the need to do something to help balance things out. The other five reviewers all appear to be Americans, which means they are unlikely to know much about Clive James, who is a household name in Britain and Australia. Nor are they likely to understand childhood in the old Empire in the times about which James is writing. And the comments from the mothers are a sad reflection of the way in which so many people now feel the need to shield their children from everything that could possibly cause them even the slightest harm. (I have two young sons and resolutely refuse, for example, to have them wear those dippy helmets when they are on their bikes.)
   
   You have to understand this book both in the contaxt of the place and of the times. People in Australia, and even to some extent in the US, did this kind of stuff in the 1940s and 1950s. The criticisms of James as a person are hopelessly misplaced. And I can understand the comment about the inside jokes, but I was brought up in Kenya in a British expatriate household in the 1950s and 1960s, so much of what he says rings true to me. Although I live in the US I also lived in London for a long time and well remember James' excellent TV column. This book is one of my ten favourite of all time. It is funny, poignant, self-effacing, and well written, and a valuable record of a time and a set of attitudes long gone (not always necessarily a bad thing). Anyone who takes it too seriously, or who reads it completely out of context, like several other reviewers on this site, will never really understand either the book or the author.



3. As a person unfamiliar with Australian geography and even less familiar with Australian cultural references, I merely liked this book. Clive James does a fantastic job in setting up many of the anecdotes he relates in the various chapters here. However, as an American who is merely semi-well traveled, I did not get many of the inside jokes. It is easy to see how funny this book could be if you really were tracking with the culture he grew up in.
   
   This, however, is more of the reader's problem rather than the writer's. The tales related range from sadly familiar (dead father, incredibly caring mother, indifferent son) to some of the truly funniest writing imaginable (trying to tackle a world class rugby player; a chapter entitled The Sound of Mucus). James is really great. There are stories in here that everyone can relate to and it is all told in a way that is sharp in sensational details and vague on everything in between. If I could dump my memories into a book, this is probably what it would be like; only less funny and more stupidly written.
   
   Broaden your horizons and read the book. It is a short read and will have you looking something up in Wikipedia at least once every few minutes.



4. I was told that as a mother of a young boy I needed to read this book. I anxiously awaited for it to arrive in the mail a few weeks ago but have yet to finish it. I lost interest. I thought it was hard to get through with all of the Australian slang. It did make me smile the couple of times I could understand it. Who knows, maybe I will finish it when I run out of other things to read!



5. I bought this book because it was well reviewed by many credible reviewers and was said to be "laugh out loud" funny. Perhaps I should have been suspicious when such a tiresome cliche was used. This is a fairly typical story of a young boy in a time when children could run loose and endanger their own and others' lives. This one happens in Australia and follows the author through our equivalent of grade school to college, living with his widowed mother. Most of the very young years are tales about how he and his friends did incredibly stupid things while the adults were either very dense or just assumed that dangerous play was the best way to weed out the keepers. Happily, this book was written before we publically pilloried authors for "improving" the story. Nonetheless, I really found the whole thing quite boring and began to hope he would kill himself. As he went off to school, I found it funnier, but only made it up to a smirk, not even a chuckle. However, I did finish the book.
   I think that this book would have been enjoyed more by someone who had been less cautious as a child and wasn't a mother now. Forgive me, I know this is genderist, but I could see many men recognizing themselves in this book and maybe they are the people who were laughing. It wasn't me.

No comments about Scapegoats of the Empire.

1 comments about A Boy's War (An Omf Book).

1. "A Boy's War" tells of a six-year old Australian boy, son of a missionary, who went off to Chefoo boarding school in China in 1939 and didn't see his parents again until 1945. World War II intervened and he was interned by the Japanese in Weihsien camp in Shandong province, China.
   
   This is a brief book of 170 pages, but Michell covers a lot of ground. He tells about his life at the boarding school as the clouds of war gather and Japan conquers more and more of China. Then, he endures two years of internment with more than one thousand other foreigners at Weihsein. The internees were rescued dramatically by American partroopers at the end of the war and young David undertakes an epic journey back to Australia by ship where he is reunited with his family. The author concludes by telling us about his 1985 return visit to Weihsein.
   
   This is a missionary's story and the author affirms his faith, although not in a way that will offend the non-religious. The boy was fortunate in having many surrogate parents during his years of isolation, of whom one of the most important was Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner (recall "Chariots of Fire?") who lived and died at Weihsein. John Birch -- who inspired the radical political organization, the John Birch Society -- is a minor character in the book as he too was a "mish kid" in pre-Communist China.
   
   Weihsien camp in China has generated a great deal of literature. Rarely have so many talented people resided together in such close quarters. "Shantung Compound" is a sociology classic by Langdon Gilkey and "The Call" by John Hersey is one of my favorite novels. "A Boy's War" is a brief introduction to missionary life in China and the experiences of foreigners trapped by war.
   
   Smallchief

5 comments about Trackers: The Untold Story of the Australian Dogs of War.

1. If you like the ability of dogs and information concerning the Vietnam war, this book is for you. Loved this book. Didn't know the Australians were this involved in helping us Americans in the war effort. Thank you Australia.



2. Peter Haran has the knack of writing in an warm way that engages the reader, easily drawing them into his story. I hadn't know anything about the Australian dogs in Vietnam before I picked up this book and the honest story of a man and his madcap companion is brilliant.



3. I first read this book a few weeks before I joined the Australian Defence Force as a dog handler. I found that I couldn't put it down once I started. The story is a firsthand account of what it was like for Aussie trackers and their dogs during the Vietnam war. The bond a dog and handler share is one of the strongest. The book unearthed many emotions and cemented my decision to take up this wonderful career. I have read it many times since, and loaned my copy to many others, every time the same feelings as the first time I read it - happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, excitement, the list goes on ... only now I can imagine how I would feel if my dog and I were in Vietnam during the war. READ IT!



4. What a fantastic book! I had no idea dogs played a role like this in the war. Whether your interested in war, working dogs or just want to read a great story i would recommend this book. Pete describes perfectly the innocent nature of a dog even in these extreme circumstances. I can't say enough good things about Tracker's so just pick it up and enjoy.....



5. wonderfully written book of the australian involvement of tracker dog teams in vietnam...thousands of allied lives were saved through the relationship built by the tracker dogs and handlers, together with the scout, sentry, mine, tunnel, booby trap, and other military working dog teams...over 4,000 dogs and in excess of 10,000 handlers kept our troops safe....the lives of our allied military forces depended on the trust built between handler and dog....

1 comments about Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture.

1. There are very few writers who have been able to respectfully penetrate the aboriginal culture and still preserve what is sacred. Rose's book immerses the reader into another reality, and she does so without superficial glorification or gratuitous pandering. Much better known in Australia than in the US (where the number of the books available about aboriginals is limited), this book is the best I've found. I recommend it to the reader who wants to get past the tour guide/New Age fare and into a much more authentic point of view.

5 comments about UNRELIABLE MEMOIRS.

1. What can I possibly add to what has been said by the other reviewers? This book is short in length and long in content. *EVERYBODY* whom I know and who has read the book has claimed to have laughed out loud while reading it in a public place. That's 5 people, myself included. Years after reading it, I still recall with great amusement the stories about James' alter ego, the Flash of Lightning. And although this is a book about James, it also is a subtle homage to his mother, or at least it read that way to me. Such is James' command of language, he can turn his experiences into everyone's experiences, even if you haven't lived through similar situations. A wonderful read.



2. "Unreliable Memoirs" is Clive James' description of his upbringing in a Sydney suburb lasting up to the time of his university education. I was expecting it to be funny but wasn't quite prepared for the raw emotion and literary skill displayed on virtually every page.
   
   To me this is the most impressive of James' autobiographical writing. He has a gift for describing childhood and a kind of relentless honesty which is hilarious and provides something of a turbulent rollercoaster ride for the reader, as he describes the trauma of being a single child to a single parent in the aftermath of the Second World War.
   
   I felt a little left behind by many of the historical and literary references James makes but this is more than made up for by the relish with which he uses the English language. For example, he describes a friend's mother giving him buttered bread covered with hundreds and thousands as like "eating a slice of powdered rainbow".
   
   "Unreliable Memoirs" made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end - I wish I had read it years ago.



3. One of the funniest books you'll ever read. Especially recommended for anyone who has ever been a kid, Australian, in love, in lust, in trouble, at university or has had a head that sticks out at the back.



4. For those of you who have visited Australia in recent years , it may come as a shock to you that Clive James was the man who discoverd it . Jumping from captain Cooks ship ,when the hostile crew had threatened to eat him if he risked another witism . He discovered that the land was free from parking meters . " Well boil mi billy can , cobbers , this is the place for me " . So young clive tried his hand at acting, but was disillusioned ,when James coburn was cast as the aussie in the great escape . " He sounds more real than you Clive " . "Strewth i'll have a lash at journalism " . The rest is history . A raft back to blighty . A year as an assistant to clark kent , then unexpected fame as a latex puppet on spitting image . Its all here the unreliable memoirs, of the boy from Melbourne ,The land bought by Batman .



5. This would have to be the best offering from Clive James that I have read. His acerbic wit makes for great reading. I found this text on a bookshelf in a beach holiday house and was immediately captivated. I lost count of the amount of times that I not only laughed out loud, I snorted with appreciation and had to wipe tears from my eyes (much to the consternation of those around me) He captures the innocence of childhood with fleeting glimpses of maturity like no one has before, proving that he is not just a television presenter but a Rhodes Scholar to boot. If I could give this book more than 5 stars I would. It would be a shame to tell you more because this is a book that just has to be read to be believed!

5 comments about A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict.

1. I've been on a kick lately where I'm reading lots of "books about books," and/or "books about reading," which led me to pick this one up. The subtitle "Confessions of a Book Addict" is an apt one, as this is essentially a rambling memoir whose only unifying theme is the author's love of books. And while it does delve into the rarefied (and often grubby) realm of book collecting and collectors, that's not really the focus. Actually, other than the author's lifelong love of books and telling a good story, there is no real focus -- which really isn't a problem, since Baxter is able to maintain the breezy entertaining cadence of born raconteurs. And although like many raconteurs, his stories sometimes veer in unexpected directions and digressions, they are rarely unwelcome ones.
   
   
   Baxter (a sometime fiction writer and noted film biographer) begins at the beginning, outlining his drab and dreary Australian childhood. Like so many bored kids, he found an outlet in books, films, and eventually pulp magazines. As a teen and young man, he grew up something of a science-fiction fanboy, joining the inner circle of Australia's minuscule sci-fi community, while working a dreary job for the national railroads. After some initial forays into writing (including bios for a porn mag), he heads to London, where his love affair with books turns him from a consumer into a collector. The reader tags along with Baxter as he hobnobs with the weird-but-true characters of the used book trade in London, before he heads off to Roanoke, Virginia to teach, then Los Angeles, and eventually Paris, accumulating and then shedding books along the way.
   
   One has to accept that a lot of the authors and personalities he encounters and discusses aren't exactly household names -- especially for American readers. But the point is not name-dropping (well, maybe that's a little bit of the point), but to recall the bon mots and funny moments he's has around the literati and the scrubby "runners" who formed the backbone of the pre-internet used book trade. And as Baxter ages, the anecdotes shift from bidding on books off the back of a cart in a filthy London back lane, to the high tech book trade now conducted on Albiris and eBay. Collectors of any ilk will thrill along with Baxter as he recounts finding treasure troves of rarities in places overlooked by others -- hope springs eternal! And even if you're not a collector, it's hard not to smile at his colorful descriptions of such disparate scenes as outback movie theaters, '70s orgies (not something I expected in a book about books!), the peculiar nature of Paris bookshops, and the proper decor of one's office in a small Southern college.
   
   To be sure, this is a book by a book lover and for other book lovers. That said, it's not 100% about books by any stretch, and the meandering prose has its dead spots. But on the whole, it's a pretty entertaining memoir, full of unexpected scenes and insights.



2. The book is a mixture of tidbits about famous collectors, the author's coming of age in Australia, obscure collectibles/authors, and whatever else came to the author's mind. Maybe a hardcore collector could keep up with this account.
   I gave it up after 118 pages. I love books and was interested in the Australian descriptions, but became discouraged by the disjointedness of the book.



3. This was a terrible disappointment. More of a memoir than anything about book-collecting, it was so disjointed it is hard to say what it was about or what the point was. There seemed to be no context or fabric to the book.
   
   There were, however, HUNDREDS of references to obscure authors, actors, film-writers, magazines and books. There were pages at a time where I was completely lost because I had no idea about whom the author was speaking, but he wrote as if the person was well-known to the reader.
   
   Baxter leads the reader around the world from his beginnings in Australia, thence to Britain to the US and ending in France. Again, there is no context. He would flip from a reference to the obscure artist, to an anecdote about himself or some bookseller or collector and then perhaps mention how he had acquired a book.
   
   If viewed as a book about collecting books, you will not learn much. If viewed as a memoir, there was little that was interesting about the author's life and there was precious little about his life other than acquisitions.
   
   There were a very few nuggets about what makes a book valuable or diminishes its worth to a collector, but they were too few and far between.
   
   If you could not tell by now, I can not see much reason to read this book. I think Mr. Baxter flattered himself to think that either he or his collection would be of general interest.



4. I am a book collector and I enjoy my passion very much. Many people would say I'm obsessed but it only takes a book like this one to remind myself that I'm in the minor leagues.
   
   Part memoir and part peek into the world of book collecting, Baxter tells of his youth in the wilds of Australia where, like many of us, he delved into the world of comic book and science fiction collecting. He matured along the way with an interest in Graham Greene before dumping that collection and moving onto other literary interests.
   
   And he did not stay in the wilds of Australia forever. He travelled and made his way up in the world of film and publishing. Baxter has had the fortune as a film critic, writer and collector to meet a number of interesting people, from the writers he collected to eccentric bookmen like Martin Stone. The book has a definite British flavor, though Baxter has made some forays into the United States. Still, any book collector will see things he recognizes in Baxter's experiences and, in some cases, things we wished we could have experienced ourselves.
   
   Let's face it, a person with a passion for book collecting will feel some jealousy when reading of some of Baxter's finds and encounters. Unfortunately, most of us do not have the means and/or opportunity to do some of the things Baxter has done. But this does not totally diminish the fun in seeing how he was able to come to have the experiences he had and it makes for a great read for anyone interested in books.



5. 
   
   I rated this book 5*'s but not in the normal fashion.The title got my attention as I like "books about books";of which there are a varied lot.To start with,this book is well titled;A Pound of Paper,how unpretentious can you get?
   Now, as to my rating:
   As an overall book,I enjoyed it at times,at other times I found it a drag,I skipped a lot;but still couldn't put it down.
   I rated it 5*'s;but only by adding up 5 single *'s:
   1*-As a biography,for anyone who knows the author;I had not
   heard of him.
   1*- Stories about experiences of buying books and searching
   for 1st.editions,inscribed tomes,etc.
   1*-Telling what makes a bibliophile "tick".I noted many of
   the same traits in myself.
   1*- Description of book buying and selling in France.
   1*- For the three appendicies.
   Each of these areas was overshadowed by his experiences;but so many writers and books were of no interest to me and the whole of Sci-Fi leaves me cold as I don't tend to read much of it;although one with that interest would probably rate the book a 5*,for that material alone.Also,the book is heavily slanted to British and Aussie books and hardly mentions anything else.This is understandable as this was where he lived and where his interests lie.
   Nevertheless any bibliophile will enjoy the book and it is really a 5*.I plan to keep it ,mainly for the appendicies.