"A spectacularly understated page-turner. Each story enters a world apart, often spoken with a poetic dry wit, sometimes acerbic to the point of controversial, honest to the point of brutal. Some people and situations are so funny you'll wish you'd been there. Many times you wonder how some have survived - some don't. From Ceduna, Madura, Mundrabilla, Kimba, and Yalata near the dog fence, Lewis has met, worked, and lived with the creme-de-la-creme of drifters and transients, as well as the fourth and fifth generational outback station owners. In the great Australian outback - among the dry red soil, the mulga and saltbushes, where the kestrels observe and keep their secrets - beware who you're talking to." Helen Travers, author of 'A Little Lower Than Angels'

The author is trying to answer many questions that arise every day in the ordinary life of a human being. The main theme is world pandemics, which was a pretext for the depopulation of the planet. But the real story is far beyond that. The creation of the world we know and its inevitable end, which was sped up with the eternal temptation of the human, Being God (borrowed from Salvador Dali’s opera Être Dieu). Those who could not resist the temptation of being God took the fate of the world into their own hands and shaped it in their own image. ... We were born for them, we were educated for them, we lived for them, and we died for them. When they talked about freedom, they were actually talking about slavery. We were slaves, willing slaves, until we became useless eaters. They kept us alive as long as we were useful to them. When we became old jades, they let us out to graze on the poisonous grass. Those who resisted them were destroyed, declared insane, unfit, the worst enemies ...

Russia is dying from within. Oligarchs and oil barons may still dominate international news coverage, but their prosperity masks a deep-rooted demographic tragedy. Faced with staggering population decline—and near-certain economic collapse—driven by toxic levels of alcohol abuse, Russia is also battling a deeper sickness: a spiritual one, born out of the country’s long totalitarian experiment. In The Last Man in Russia, award-winning journalist Oliver Bullough uses the tale of a lone priest to give life to this national crisis. Father Dmitry Dudko, a dissident Orthodox Christian, was thrown into a Stalinist labor camp for writing poetry. Undaunted, on his release in the mid-1950s he began to preach to congregations across Russia with little concern for his own safety. At a time when the Soviet government denied its subjects the prospect of advancement, and turned friend against friend and brother against brother, Dudko urged his followers to cling to hope. He maintained a circle of sacred trust at the heart of one of history’s most deceitful systems. But as Bullough reveals, this courageous group of believers was eventually shattered by a terrible act of betrayal—one that exposes the full extent of the Communist tragedy. Still, Dudko’s dream endures. Although most Russians have forgotten the man himself, the embers of hope that survived the darkness are once more beginning to burn. Leading readers from a churchyard in Moscow to the snow-blanketed ghost towns of rural Russia, and from the forgotten graves of Stalin’s victims to a rock festival in an old gulag camp, The Last Man in Russia is at once a travelogue, a sociological study, a biography, and a cri de coeur for a dying nation—one that, Bullough shows, might yet be saved.

This historical study of the UK’s WWII homeland defense service dispels the propaganda and pop culture myths to reveal its true wartime role. In 1940, Britain formed an armed citizen militia to act as the first line of defense in case of Nazi invasion—an essential, if suicidal, mission intended to buy time for the organization of regular forces. Officially, they were the Home Guard. Later, a British sitcom that ran for nearly a decade in the 60s and 70s dubbed them Dad’s Army. That show contributed to a distorted perception of the Home Guard that persists today. But as Malcolm Atkin reveals in this thought-provoking book, the Home Guard’s image was manipulated from its earliest days. Sifting through official documents and contemporary histories, as well as stories, artwork and poetry of the era, and comparing these with postwar films and histories, Atkin explores how the myths of the Home Guard arose and were exploited. He also shows how the strong sense of gallows-humor amongst its volunteers—which fits in with a long tradition of self-deprecating humor in the British army—was taken out of context and became the basis of the TV series. To the Last Man strips back the myths, analyzing how the modern perception has evolved. The result is a new, gritty, and sometimes shocking appreciation of the role that the Home Guard was expected to play in the Second World War.