The Making of Julia Gillard (Jacqueline Kent)

The Making of Julia Gillard

Jacqueline Kent

Blurb: Julia Gillard has always been an exceptional figure in Australian politics, widely admired by her adversaries as well as in the electorate. And now she is also an exceptional figure in Australian history: the first woman to be this country's Prime Minister.

The path to power has been far from smooth. Gilard's career has been marked by pitched battles with jealous rivals and powerful factions. But as she herself has observed, 'I am proof that a woman can thrive in an adversarial environment.'

Drawing on interviews with friends and foes - and with Julia Gillard herself - award-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent gives us the first thorough account of Gillard's career before she challenged for the top job. It describes her Adelaide childhood, her time as a fiery student activist, her battles to get into Parliament, and her relationships with the important men in her political life: Simon Crean, Kim Beazley, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd.

The Making of Julia Gillard is an insightful and immensely readable account of this remarkable woman.

ISBN: 9780670073191 (Paperback)

Year: 2009

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 325 (Non-Fiction)

Links

1. Author's official site

2. Publisher's page

3. Review of the book

4. Buy from Borders

5. Video on the book

Our First President (Michael Thornton)

Our First President

Michael Thornton

Blurb: It's early 1995. An ambitious Liberal wants to be Australia's Prime Minister, a Labor Minister wants to restore his party to its true values, and a newspaper editor sees the National Party as giving him the top job.

Each to further his own aims, the three men plot to put a woman in the Lodge - temporarily. Yet out first woman PM surprises everyone with her skills.

Our First President is about the shape of Australian politics in 1995: GATT, the GST, rorts, the republic, from Western Victoria to the wheat fields of Western Australia, from London to Los Angeles.

Most of all, Our First President is Australian.

ISBN: 0959662448 (Paperback)

Year: 1994

Publisher: Escape Books

Pages: 360 (Fiction)

Links

1. Google books page

2. National Library of Australia catalogue for book

3. Buy from ebay

Inventing a Nation (Gore Vidal, foreword Bob Carr)

Inventing a Nation

Gore Vidal with a Foreword by Bob Carr

Blurb: Inventing a Nation is Gore Vidal's testament to the America he loves and mourns, to its continued promise and troubled future.

Vidal, a master stylist of American literature and one of the most acute observers of American life and history, turns his immense literary and historiographic talent to a portrait of the first three presidents of the United States, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

Vidal's splendid and percipient prose animates key moments of decision in the birth of the American nation, and we come to know these men in new ways - their opinions of each other and the wider world, and their concerns about creating viable democracy. Vidal brings America's founding fathers to life and illuminates the force and weight of the documents they wrote, the speeches they gave, and the institutions of government they fashioned.

As one of Australia's leading politicians, Bob Carr, writes in the introduction to this special Australian edition: 'In these shining pages Gore Vidal answers a question that puzzled George Washington himself: what has gone wrong with America?'

ISBN: 052285138X (Paperback)

Year: 2003

Publisher: Melbourne University Press

Pages: 198 (Non-Fiction)

Links

1. Article on the book

2. Buy from Amazon

3. Author's Wikipedia page

4. Google books page

5. Article on the book

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (Bob Woodward)

The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008

Bob Woodward

Blurb: As violence in Iraq reaches unnerving levels in 2006, a second front in the war rages at the highest levels of the Bush administration. In his fourth book on President George W. Bush, Bob Woodward takes readers deep inside the tensions, secret debates, unofficial backchannels, distrust and determination within the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies and the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq. With unparalleled intimacy and detail, this gripping account of a president at war describes a period of distress and uncertainty within the U.S. government from 2006 through mid-2008.

The White House launches a secret strategy review that excludes the military. General George Casey, the commander in Iraq, believes that President Bush does not understand the war and eventually concludes he has lost the president's confidence. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also conduct a secret strategy review that goes nowhere. On the verge of revolt, they worry that the military will be blamed for a failure in Iraq.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strongly opposes a surge of additional U.S. forces and confronts the president, who replies that her suggestions would lead to failure. The president keeps his decision to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from Vice President Dick Cheney until two days before he announces it. A retired Army general uses his high-level contacts to shape decisions about the war, as Bush and Cheney use him to deliver sensitive messages outside the chain of command.

For months, the administration's strategy reviews continue in secret, with no deadline and no hurry, in part because public disclosure would harm Republicans in the November 2006 elections. National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley tells Rice, 'We've got to do it under the radar and screen because the electoral season is so hot.'

The War Within provides an exhaustive account of struggles of General David Petraeus, who takes over in Iraq during one of the bleakest and most violent periods of the war. It reveals how breakthroughs in military operations and surveillance account for much of the progress as violence in Iraq plummets in the middle of 2007.

Woodward interviewed key players, obtained dozens of never-before-published documents, and had nearly three hours of exclusive interviews with President Bush. The result is stunning, firsthand history of the years from mid-2006, when the White House realises the Iraq strategy is not working, through the decision to surge another 30,000 U.S. troops in 2007, and into mid-2008, when the war becomes a fault line in the presidential election.

The War Within addresses head-on questions of leadership, not just in a war but in how we are governed and the dangers of unwarranted secrecy.

ISBN: 9781921470103 (Hardback)

Year: 2008

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 487 (Non-Fiction)

Links

1. Buy from Amazon

2. Foreign Affairs look at the book

3. The Washington Post's in depth look at the book

4. Article on the book

5. Good reads page for the book