The Paperboy S War

'I reckon throwing that rock through the window of Phelan's butcher shop was one of the best things I ever did. But I didn't think so at the time ...' So begins the Ted Egan story. Old Phelan presented Ted's mother with a bill: TO WINDOW BROKEN BY TEDDY EGAN £5 5s 0d. Ted was going to have to find the money. He got it as a paperboy, shouting 'Herooda paper!' on street corners. Jumping on and off the No. 20 tram rattling out of the city of Melbourne into Coburg. Ducking back to the newsagency to get a Women's Weekly for a woman in the Ladies' lounge of Brown's Hotel. In The Paperboy's War the well-known outback folklorist, singer, songwriter, historian, and television presenter recalls his early days, his priestly vocation, the warmth of family life, the agony of puberty, and Melbourne in the 1940s. A great and terrible war raged, but here we see it from a unique perspective: the paperboy. At home the Yanks were taking over leafy Parkville, the dance floors and the women's hearts. Even - black Yanks! Nights at home would be spent tracing the exploits of brave Timoshenko at Stalingrad, speculating on how 'people who live in paper houses' like the Japanese couldn't cause too much trouble, and gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of divisional shoulder patches, enemy aircraft silhouettes and the classes of warships. Ted Egan rekindles the pride Australians felt for 'the Rats' at Tobruk and those who slugged it out on the Kokoda Trail. But life and dreams go on, war or no war. Every schoolday the excruciatingly beautiful Norma would hop on the tram at The Grove. Br. 'Slick' Edwards at the Christian Brothers would read Man Shy and there arouse a love of words. The return of cousin Frank, the bronzed Anzac from the Middle East, provided a role model. Aunt Mary's tales of the Murchison Goldfields stirred a wish to travel. And there was cousin Bill, who had run away to sea at 15, travelled the world and experienced the war at close quarters. He came back wearing Italian suits and gave the young Ted an idea. He too would be a sailor. Ted would leave Melbourne and go to Brazil, via Darwin. Ted Egan was born in Melbourne and spent the first sixteen years of his life there, the years covered by this book, the first of three telling of his life. He intended to drop in on the Northern Territorians for a month before going off to become a gaucho in South America, but ended up staying in the Territory for more than 40 years. Ted Egan studied under lamplight in the outback, gaining a BA from ANU. He is working on a post-graduate historical account of the clash between Aboriginal and western culture when a group of Japanese fishermen and a white policeman were speared to death in 1932. He learned two Aboriginal languages and has taught Aboriginal Studies at Alice Springs High School. He performs, writes, sings and records his own songs, and collects and records others. He is a television presenter and writer. He is a member of the Prime Minister's Reconciliation Council. Awarded the Order of Australia (AM) in 1993 for 'services to the Aboriginal community and contribution to the literary heritage of Australia through song and verse', he lives and works in Alice Springs.

Albert Sparks Jr. was born in 1929, the only child of Albert and Mamie Sparks. The Sparkses were good people, non-educated, and much influenced by the southern rural, fundamentalist Protestant Church. Two years later, in early Depression times, they built a small brick home in Bodenheimer, a community about 10 miles from Winston-Salem, NC. Albert Jr. was reared in that home-centered, church focused environment, and at age 10 he became a member of Royal Ambassadors, a boys organization at Bodenheimer Baptist. Still a member even now, his leader is a maudlin, highly emotional lady, a teary and true daughter of the Lord. And then, a fellow RA offered him the opportunity to become a paperboy. A new life began! Albert Jr. had a route of 65 Bodenheimer customers, more or less. Every afternoon on his rounds he heard stories...Calvin Butner and his bootlegging, hauling white likker in a Nehi drink truck; Hub and Estelle Doty and their marital problems, and their strange succession of partners. Some stories have follow-up chapters, such as the German POW who walked away from a work detail. A key to the stories is Wellman’s Store, where Albert Jr. meets the truck with his daily bundle of Tribunes. Every day he talks with Cece and Ella Mae Wellman about war news, and he hears gossip from the Ladies News Table. Most chapters have the date and a few headlines from that day’s paper. In the final chapter, on the night of V-J Day, he met “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen”, 15 years old, and ‘so-o-o soft’. Actually, she’s the RA leader’s niece. And they celebrated V-J Night, or at least they started. “I prob’ly won’t go back to RA’s.”

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An eerie and beautiful novel . . . Its secrets continue to reveal themselves long after the book has been finished.”—The New York Times Book Review The sun is rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call is found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck is tried, sentenced, and set to fry. Then Ward James, hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She’s armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free—and meet—her convicted “fiancé.” With Ward’s disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida’s back roads and seamy places in search of The Story, racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a back seat to headline news. Now a major motion picture directed by Lee Daniels starring Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, David Oyelowo, and Macy Gray, with John Cusack and Nicole Kidman Praise for The Paperboy “Dexter is a writer who cuts to the bone. There is not a spare word in this searing tale. . . . A bravura performance by one of America’s most original and elegiac voices.”—People “Hip, hard-boiled and filled with memorable eccentrics . . . The Paperboy burns with the phosphorescent atmosphere of betrayal.”—Time “A wise and fascinating tale well told.”—Entertainment Weekly

Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the preeminent novelist-critic of his generation. Always entertaining, with a razor-sharp wit and inimitable judgment, he expounds on a dazzling range of topics from chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, to Andy Warhol, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. The very best of his essays and reviews from the past twenty-five years are brought together in this substantial and wide-ranging collection, including pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, Nabokov, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V.S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton,V.S. Pritchett and John Updike.

The Hollywood War Film offers readers a lively introduction to the theory, history, stars, and major films constituting this vital genre, from Hollywood's earliest days to the current moment Combines broad historical and theoretical coverage of the genre with in-depth analysis of specific films Includes chapters on All Quiet on the Western Front, World War II combat films, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima films, and Iraq war films An ideal text for perennially popular courses on the war film genre

First of three volumes of the autobiography of a folklorist and songwriter who was brought up in an Irish-Catholic family in inner suburban Melbourne during World War II. Indexed. This volume covers Egan's childhood in Melbourne and, at the age of 17, his travels to Queensland and Darwin, where he stayed for over 40 years. The author was awarded the Order of Australia in 1993 for services to the Aboriginal community.

From #1 bestselling author-illustrator Dav Pilkey, a Caldecott Honor picture book about a boy, his dog, and the solitude they share before the world wakes up. In the still before dawn, while the rest of the world is sleeping, a boy and his dog leave the comfort of their warm bed to deliver newspapers. As the boy pedals his bike along a route he knows by heart, his dog runs by his side, both enjoying a world that, before sunrise, belongs only to them. Bestselling author-illustrator Dav Pilkey celebrates the beauty found in silence and the peace that comes from being with a beloved friend in this Caldecott Honor-winning picture book. For more acclaimed picture books from Dav Pilkey, check out Dog Breath, The Hallo-Wiener, 'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving, and Julius (written by Angela Johnson). And don't forget the worldwide bestselling Dog Man and Cat Kid Comic Club graphic novels and Captain Underpants chapter books!