This seems a good day to begin a diary.Thus begins, on Wednesday 27th April 1910, this 74-page account of the life of Henrietta Petrea McManamey, at her home in Woodford, NSW. Ettie, the 42-year-old wife of Woodford Academy headmaster John McManamey, was inspired to begin her journal not through a creative urge to have her words recorded for posterity but 'As an aid to memory ..., ' because she had mislaid an undershirt. This small exercise book contains an all-too-brief glimpse of Ettie that reveals an intelligent, acutely observant and engaging personality, freely expressing her most personal feelings and opinions in the privacy of its pages, before her death in 1913.The few years covered (1910 to 1912) were eventful, both locally and nationally. The Edwardian era was brief and King Edward VII's death in 1910 marked the end of a decade of national prosperity and peace, that included development of a Federated nation, the granting of suffrage to... Views: 625
From "a master of the historical novel" (Newsweek), whose fiction "unfolds with the urgency of a thriller" (The New Yorker), the tumultuous—at once witty and sad—chronicle of George W. Bush's second term, as his aspirations toward greatness are thrown into upheaval by the twin catastrophes of Iraq and KatrinaLandfall has at its center a president whose high-speed shifts between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify those around him—including his acerbic and crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush; the desperately correct but occasionally unbuttoned Condoleezza Rice; the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld; and the caustic observer Ann Richards (Bush's predecessor as governor of Texas). A gallery of political and media figures, from the widowed Nancy Reagan to the philandering John Edwards to the brilliantly contrarian Christopher Hitchens, bring the novel and the era to life.The story is... Views: 625
What happens when an adoring young bride is met on the doorstep of her new home by her husband's former mistress? Frank, Rose and Nony are about to find out. It is 1924 and the British rule Malaya. Frank is a colonial administrator in a remote district deep in the jungle. Rose is the innocent young bride he's just brought out from England. Nony is the native mistress he'd previously abandoned, along with their four children. When Rose arrives in Malaya, she knows nothing of her new husband's past. But how long can she remain ignorant? Frank, Rose and Nony soon become entangled in vines of secrecy and lying, they are snagged by thorns of bribery and blackmail, and caught in sticky webs of bluff and counter-bluff. Something must give between them: but what? Views: 625
