Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Americas

Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti - war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefi eld, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians' war - which sealed the fate of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.

The dramatic story of the Cuban Mafia in America told in full for the first time - soon to be a major motion picture starring Benicio del Toro and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. The Corporation is a unique and true American gangster story that has never been fully told: the true story of the Cuban Mafia. The leader of 'The Corporation', Jose Miguel Battle Sr. (El Padrino), was known as 'The Godfather'. He had been President Batista's bag man, bringing him his cut from the gambling casinos when the Mafia ran Cuba.

On the last, cold Sunday of February 1859, Daniel Sickles shot his wife's lover in Washington's Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. This is the story of that killing and its repercussions. Thomas Keneally brilliantly recreates an extraordinary period, when women were punished for violating codes of society that did not bind men. And the caddish, good-looking Dan Sickles personifies the extremes of the era.

A deeply felt meditation on race, sex and American culture - at once incendiary and icy, mischievous and provocative, celebratory and elegiac. The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's Black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation.

Bill was massive. He had power, intelligence, and unmatched courage. In performance and character he stood above all the other 200,000 Australian horses sent to the Middle East in the Great War. But as war horses go he had one serious problem. No one could ride him but one man - Major Michael Shanahan. Some even thought Bill took a sneering pleasure in watching would-be riders hit the dust. Bill the Bastard is the remarkable tale of a bond between a determined trooper and his stoic but cantankerous mount. They fought together.

The Korean War was a 20th Century conflict that has never ended. South Korea, a powerhouse economy and dynamic democracy sits uneasily alongside North Korea, the world’s most secretive, belligerent, unpredictable and repressive totalitarian state. Today, tensions simmer and occasionally flare into outright violence on a peninsula dense with arms, munitions and nuclear warheads. Cameron Forbes, acclaimed author of Hellfire, tells the story of the war and Australia’s involvement in it in a riveting narrative.

On November 22, 1963, the 35th president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and his wife Jackie were taking part in a presidential motorcade through Dallas. Thousands lined the streets cheering; others hung out of windows to catch a glimpse of the much-loved First Lady and President. Suddenly, the unthinkable happened. Three shots rang out. In front of the world, John F. Kennedy was fatally wounded. Lee Harvey Oswald was caught. But did he pull the trigger? Who really killed JFK?

The Beat Generation was a revolutionary group of American writers in the late 50s and early 60s who fused an open approach to literature with a bohemian lifestyle. Immortalised through Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, their relaxed, gritty, and candid writing continues to inspire anyone drawn to the unconventional.

Few years can justly be said to have transformed the earth: 1914 did. In July that year, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain and France were poised to plunge the world into a war that would kill or wound 37 million people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot ancient political systems and set the course for the bloodiest century in human history.

In the harsh Libyan desert in the middle of the second world war, Private Jim Moody, a signaller with the First Australian Machine Gun Battalion, found a starving puppy on a sand dune. Moody called the dog Horrie. Much more than a mascot, Horrie's exceptional hearing picked up the whine of enemy aircraft two minutes before his human counterparts and repeatedly saved the lives of the thousand-strong contingent.

On 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in present-day Turkey to secure the sea route between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. After eight months of terrible fighting, they would fail. Turkey regards the victory to this day as a defining moment in its history, a heroic last stand in the defence of the nation's Ottoman Empire.

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. They came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. There were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled them.

Steve Sailah from ABC Radio Affairs interviewed six Australians who took part in a young nation's first major military campaign at Gallipoli in 1915. There original Anzacs have since passed on, but their stories remain fresh - the stories of naive young men eager to defend the Mother Country but who had no concept of the horrors they would encounter and the wretched conditions they would endure.

Every now and again America confronts its demons, walks away from deep internal division, and strives towards justice. Barack Obama: The Movement for Change tells the story of a visionary leader who refuses to be limited by America's history and determines instead to change it.

The dramatic story of The Cuban Mafia in America told in full for the first time - soon to be a major motion picture starring Benicio del Toro and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio. The Corporation is a unique and true American gangster story that has never been fully told. The true story of The Cuban Mafia.

Does free speech have limits? Can torture be justified? Who is really in charge of your rights? Every day we are confronted with news of foreign governments who refuse to acknowledge liberties that we in the Western world take for granted. But civil liberties are nearly always under threat, no matter where you live. Tom Head traverses the globe in order to provide a clear introduction to what civil liberties are and why they're worth defending.

Where were you when America elected Barack Obama? Kate Jennings was in New York, eyes wide open, completing her take on an amazing time: "the run-up to the election... a time when every day felt like a year and we became slightly crazed from worry but also mesmerised, unable to switch off the cable news stations, obsessively tracking the DOW, VIX, LIBOR spreads, polls in red states. So much at stake. American Revolution is a dazzling and perceptive look at the United States between hope and despair.

Armistice is a three-part series from Conversations bringing to life the stories of Australians who went to the Western Front and connecting them to the family folklore of their descendants. The Great War came to an end a century ago, with the signing of the armistice between the Allies and the German Empire, but its aftershocks reverberate through so many Australian families, even now. So many of the men who went to the front didn’t come back, and those who did were changed forever.