When Footballers Were Skint: A Journey in Search of the Soul of Football
Jon Henderson
Biteback Publishing, 2018
308 pages
Bill Leivers, who played for Manchester City from 1953-1964, wryly recalls to the British journalist Jon Henderson in When Footballers Were Skint about how the football club owner once rewarded the players on the train home from a successful away game, not with a fistful of sterling for a few drinks all round, but with a packet of Polo Mints.
If the assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play.
One Last Spin: The Power & Peril of the Pokies
Drew Rooke
Scribe, 2018, 325 pages
Ever wondered if it possible to win against the pokies? Why not ask someone who should know, like a poker machine technician.
鈥淚 make these machines in order to grab your money,鈥 one such techie said when asked by freelance Sydney journalist, Drew Rooke. 鈥淚 would not be so stupid to play myself.鈥
Triumph: Jesse Owens & Hitler鈥檚 Olympics
Jeremy Schaap
Head of Zeus, 2014
272 pages
He may have been the world鈥檚 greatest athlete at the time, writes Jeremy Schaap in Triumph, but Jesse Owens was also a Black American. Therefore Owens, the winner of four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was refused a room at hotel after hotel on his arrival back in New York, until a agreed on condition that he use the service entrance.
Doug McEachern鈥檚 novel follows the progress and regress of the two friends living in the 1960s as 鈥渆ndless acrimonious debates over militancy鈥 pepper their student group house in inner-city North Adelaide.
Rebel Prince: The Power, Passion & Defiance of Prince Charles
By Tom Bower
William Collins, 2018
Meghan: A Hollywood Princess
By Andrew Morton
Michael O鈥橫ara Books, 2018
鈥淣obody knows what utter hell it is to be Prince of Wales,鈥 whined Charles, the heir to the British throne.
All that handshaking and small talk is 鈥渁n intolerable burden鈥, his never-right office temperature 鈥渕akes my life so unbearable鈥, and first-class seats on commercial airflights are 鈥渟o uncomfortable鈥.
Dissent didn鈥檛 obey strict decade-demarcation lines on Australian campuses in the radical 1960s, writes Sally Wood in Dissent: The Student Press in 1960s Australia.
Sir Alex Ferguson was deeply affronted by the Manchester United Football Club supporters who got stroppy about the proposed takeover of the huge English Premier League club he then managed by the US corporate raider, Malcolm Glazer, in 2004.
鈥淭hey carried on to the degree where they actually thought they should have a say in the running of the football club,鈥 exclaimed the outraged manager.
Ferguson got to the core of things by starkly asking just whose club it is.
Nobody better reflects the military and political elites鈥 cavalier attitude to nuclear weapons than Sir William Penney, the architect of Britain鈥檚 hydrogen bomb program.
Asked how destructive the new weapons were in meetings in 1961 between US Democrat President John F. Kennedy and British Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Penney casually answered by saying: 鈥淚t would take twelve to destroy Australia, Britain five or six, say seven or eight, and I鈥檒l have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind鈥.
In 1960, trainee priest Thomas Keneally abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney鈥檚 North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than medieval Latin.
His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing. This was both Keneally鈥檚 attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the 鈥渕adness and melancholia鈥 of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him for six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its 鈥渁nti-human moral code鈥.
The Billonaires鈥 Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football鈥檚 Super-Rich Owners
James Montague
Bloomsbury, 2017
330 pages
At this stage of the 2017 English Premier League (EPL) season, it looks like one of the two Manchester teams will win the championship 鈥 and with barely a Mancunian between them. Both Manchester United and Manchester City have overseas owners, overseas managers and overseas-dominated player lists.
Former top dog at the Health Services Union (HSU) Michael Williamson used to joke that 鈥渘othing鈥檚 too good for the workers 鈥 and their representatives鈥, as he brazenly defrauded the union to the tune of $5 million.
Just one lavish, boozy lunch with his cronies would burn through the annual dues ($600) of one of his low-paid union members 鈥 hospital cleaners, orderlies, clerks, porters, etc 鈥 writes journalist, Brad Norington, in Planet Jackson.