Captain Jin Li is a Chinese Special Forces Soldier who is part of a Chinese Invasion force that moves into Cairns on the tail of Cyclone Karen. The Australian Prime Minister is on holiday in Hawaii and no-one else notices that the Country has been invaded. Communications are down and the roads blocked by floods. Captain Jin befriends Andy and his son Jude in Cairns. When the Chinese decide to pull out, Australia is still blissfully unaware that they have been invaded. Captain Jin decides to defect, and stay in Australia, so he asks Andy, Jude, and local First Nations boy Jason for help. They head for Darwin in Andy’s car, closely followed by a Chinese Hit Squad. Papua New Guinea boys Tibu, and his Sniper Pal Tibu travel through time from WW2 Rabaul to bring Captain Li’s Parents out of China. They are joined by two Thai Monks, all of whom have to deal with Chinese Hit Squads wherever they go. Which includes the Adelaide Hills.
Completely updated for the twenty-first century, this reference presents definitions and origins of thousands of words, idioms, catchphrases, slogans, nicknames, and events from TV, literature, music, comic strips, and computer games.
"Red Scared! offers valuable lessons from the vault on how to identify Communists, media reports on the jolly side of Stalin, guidelines for bomb shelter chic, and much more. As they did in their other lively pop-culture histories, Teenage Confidential and Wedding Bell Blues, Michael Barson and Steven Heller once again bring the nearly forgotten details of American culture into full relief with Red Scared!"--BOOK JACKET.
A New York Times bestseller, this is the “outstanding” (The Atlantic), insightful, and authoritative account of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Drawing on newly declassified documents and thousands of pages of unpublished material, The Age of Eisenhower tells the story of a masterful president guiding the nation through the great crises of the 1950s, from McCarthyism and the Korean War through civil rights turmoil and Cold War conflicts. This is a portrait of a skilled leader who, despite his conservative inclinations, found a middle path through the bitter partisanship of his era. At home, Eisenhower affirmed the central elements of the New Deal, such as Social Security; fought the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy; and advanced the agenda of civil rights for African-Americans. Abroad, he ended the Korean War and avoided a new quagmire in Vietnam. Yet he also charted a significant expansion of America’s missile technology and deployed a vast array of covert operations around the world to confront the challenge of communism. As he left office, he cautioned Americans to remain alert to the dangers of a powerful military-industrial complex that could threaten their liberties. Today, presidential historians rank Eisenhower fifth on the list of great presidents, and William Hitchcock’s “rich narrative” (The Wall Street Journal) shows us why Ike’s stock has risen so high. He was a gifted leader, a decent man of humble origins who used his powers to advance the welfare of all Americans. Now more than ever, with this “complete and persuasive assessment” (Booklist, starred review), Americans have much to learn from Dwight Eisenhower.
Who were the Reds under the bed? Why did ASIO snoop on several members of this migrant family struggling to set up a new life in Australia? ASIO maintained a vast library of files on half a million citizens, most of whom were never a threat to Australia's security. Through meticulous research, Michael Komesaroff has been able to sift through a multitude of records which were kept on his family, and discover why. This is not only an account of one family's activities, but more broadly, a history of the widespread fear of the presence and influence of communist sympathisers in Australia in the twentieth century. 'A well researched and absorbing record of a respected family, highlighting its pursuit by ASIO. A great read.' - Bernard Rechter, former director of the Monash University Centre for Jewish Civilisation 'Michael Komesaroff's painstakingly researched but entertainingly written book dives deeply into two intriguing worlds - that of his Lithuanian/Ukranian Jewish migrant family, and that of the intelligence bureaucracy that conducted substantial surveillance on a generation of family members. Its focus illuminates - more clearly than many encyclopaedic accounts of the secret world - the dangers of mistaking dissent for disloyalty.' - Rowan Callick, author of 'Party Time: Who Runs China, and How'
Hollywood history is more than just colorful. It's dripping with red. As World War II ends, a new boogieman emerges: the Red Menace. When a scandal accuses Tinseltown of being riddled with Communists, MGM writing department head Marcus Adler needs to keep his reputation beyond reproach. Unfortunately in Hollywood, nobody's past is spotless. While the House un-American Activities Committee prepares to grill the brightest stars in town, gossip columnist Kathryn Massey is doing everything she can to shed the FBI informer mantle she carried during the war. Desperate to avoid tangling with a notorious mobster, Massey may have to take on J. Edgar Hoover himself to secure her freedom. The war killed Gwendolyn Brick's dream of opening her own store, but valuable secrets can creep into the strangest of places. From behind the perfume counter at Bullocks Wilshire, Brick makes a shocking discovery that could revive her dream and change multiple lives for good. In postwar Hollywood, there are reds in the beds, the sharks are circling, and it's feeding time. "Reds in the Beds" is the fifth installment in the Hollywood's Garden of Allah saga, a series of historical novels set in Hollywood's heyday. If you like authentic and richly-detailed history, compelling and memorable characters, and seeing fiction and history seamlessly woven together, then you'll love Martin Turnbull's authentic portrayal of the City of Angels.
"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
How political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade: “One of the most readable and damning accounts of that period.” —The Guardian This is the story of how the politicians took Tinseltown to task in the late 1940s and 1950s. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began in earnest, the search for “Reds under the bed,” later led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was felt most keenly in Hollywood, where the investigations were carried out under the full glare of the spotlights. Painstakingly researched and drawing on numerous exclusive interviews, this book charts the generation of actors who found their livelihood ruined by being blacklisted and the writers forced to hire “fronts” to continue to work; it reveals how Arthur Miller was offered the chance to have his hearing dropped in return for a photo opportunity with Marilyn Monroe; and how Kirk Douglas’s naming of Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus signaled the end of this extraordinary era. Witch Hunt in Hollywood is the definitive account of how political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade.
In this landmark work, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ted Morgan examines the McCarthyite strain in American politics, from its origins in the period that followed the Bolshevik Revolution to the present. Morgan argues that Senator Joseph McCarthy did not emerge in a vacuum—he was, rather, the most prominent in a long line of men who exploited the issue of Communism for political advantage. In 1918, America invaded Russia in an attempt at regime change. Meanwhile, on the home front, the first of many congressional investigations of Communism was conducted. Anarchist bombs exploded from coast to coast, leading to the political repression of the Red Scare. Soviet subversion and espionage in the United States began in 1920, under the cover of a trade mission. Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted the Soviets diplomatic recognition in 1933, which gave them an opportunity to expand their spy networks by using their embassy and consulates as espionage hubs. Simultaneously, the American Communist Party provided a recruitment pool for homegrown spies. Martin Dies, Jr., the first congressman to make his name as a Red hunter, developed solid information on Communist subversion through his Un-American Activities Committee. However, its hearings were marred by partisan attacks on the New Deal, presaging McCarthy. The most pervasive period of Soviet espionage came during World War II, when Russia, as an ally of the United States, received military equipment financed under the policy of lend-lease. It was then that highly placed spies operated inside the U.S. government and in America’s nuclear facilities. Thanks to the Venona transcripts of KGB cable traffic, we now have a detailed account of wartime Soviet espionage, down to the marital problems of Soviet spies and the KGB’s abject efforts to capture deserting Soviet seamen on American soil. During the Truman years, Soviet espionage was in disarray following the defections of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Gouzenko. The American Communist Party was much diminished by a number of measures, including its expulsion from the labor unions, the prosecution of its leaders under the Smith Act, and the weeding out, under Truman’s loyalty program, of subversives in government. As Morgan persuasively establishes, by the time McCarthy exploited the Red issue in 1950, the battle against Communists had been all but won by the Truman administration. In this bold narrative history, Ted Morgan analyzes the paradoxical culture of fear that seized a nation at the height of its power. Using Joseph McCarthy’s previously unavailable private papers and recently released transcripts of closed hearings of McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee, Morgan provides many new insights into the notorious Red hunter’s methods and motives. Full of drama and intrigue, finely etched portraits, and political revelations, Reds brings to life a critical period in American history that has profound relevance to our own time.
"This wonderful narrative by a retired history professor takes us back through the time and space of his ancestors and his own youth. Weaving between present and past, it offers a unique blend of nostalgia and incisive commentary about the imprint of Americans on the land and on each other. Gaines Post Jr. shares with us an odyssey that is at once personal and universal."-James McPherson, Emeritus Professor of History, Princeton University, and author of Battle Cry of Freedom On a solo trip in 2002, Gaines Post Jr. drives his 1966 Volkswagen Bug from California to Wisconsin and back, traveling so slowly that the land and its history seep into his bones. Crossing old trails kindles his imagination of the westward expansion that attracted his ancestors and shaped America's national character. In South Dakota, he visits Red Cloud's grave and hears the great Lakota leader whisper that Post is not at the end of his path. While working cattle on a Wyoming ranch, Post recalls his grandfather, born during Red Cloud's War. Part travelogue, part memoir, and overflowing with history's natural wonder, Blue Bug, Red Road speaks to those with a wandering spirit searching for quiet layers of time and memory within the American landscape.
