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By the time the First World War broke out in 1914, photography had become affordable and popular. Many of the 100,000 New Zealanders who went overseas to fight carried cameras with them, determined to capture their part in the ‘great adventure’. And soldiers were not the only ones to take photographs: cameras were also used by officials, journalists and medical staff. The Face of War is the first book to examine the photographs, many previously unknown, of New Zealand’s First World War experience, tracing a sometimes shocking, often moving visual history through soldiers’ snapshots, keepsake portraits, battlefield panoramas, photographic medical records and rolls of honour. Sandy Callister discusses how photography was used to capture and narrate, memorialise and observe, romanticise and bear witness to the experiences of New Zealanders at home and overseas. Her study is the first to argue for the importance of New Zealand photography to the history of war, but also examines in depth the contradictions of this photography: as a site of remembrance and forgetting, of nation and sacrifice, of mourning and mythology, of subjectivity and identity. Both authoritative and insightful, The Face of War superbly illuminates an often overlooked aspect of New Zealand’s First World War history.

Passport to Hell is the story of James Douglas Stark--\"Starkie\"--and his war.Journalist and novelist Robin Hyde came across Starkie while reporting in Mt Eden Gaol in the 1930s and immediately knew she had to write his \"queer true terrible story.\" Born in Southland and finding himself in early trouble with the law, the young Starkie tricked his.

Alexander Aitken was an ordinary soldier with an extraordinary mind.The student who enlisted in 1915 was a mathematical genius who could multiply nine-digit numbers in his head.He took a violin with him to Gallipoli (where field telephone wire substituted for an E-string) and practiced Bach on the Western Front.

Revealing and often heartbreaking, this collection of letters offers a powerful firsthand account of a pivotal event in New Zealand history: World War I's Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. Grouped in chronological order, the correspondence—gathered from archives, newspapers, and family collections—details the campaign's harrowing conditions and key events, from preparation and landing on the Ottoman peninsula to the December withdrawal. In these epistles, the intense emotions of the men who survived the trenches are made known, whether it be jubilation at ground gained or sorrow at the passing of friends. Biographical notes on the letter writers, historic photographs, and a comprehensive introduction are also included.

The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) remain at the heart of Australia's national story. But standing firm on the other side of the Anzac enthusiasts is a chorus of critics claiming that the appetite for Anzac is militarizing the nation's history and indoctrinating their children. Anzac, the Unauthorised Biography cuts through the clamor to provide a much-needed historical perspective on the battle over Anzac. It traces how, since 1915, Australia's memory of the Great War has declined and surged, reflecting the varied and complex history of the Australian nation itself. Most importantly, it asks why so many Australians persist with the fiction that the nation was born on April, 25 1915, with the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign.

What is taboo in any family or in any society is never fixed. And neither is that body of family information which everybody knows but no one talks about. Mental illness is one such subject, and it created a kind of fence around one central element of Thomson's work in the 1980s - his grandfather Hector's story. He has had the courage to take that fence down and use a range of sources to enter the no man's land of suffering and isolation which was a part of his grandfather's life, and perforce, that of his grandmother and the young child who became his father. When the first edition was in preparation, Alistair Thomson's father objected strenuously to any mention in the book of his father's (Alistair's grandfather's) mental illness; reluctantly Alistair agreed to leave out the subject. We can understand why the author's father, himself a soldier, felt so strongly. The images were too hard to bear for the man who was a young boy in the 1930s, living through very, very hard times with his disturbed father after his mother's death. Now, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, but still able to read the text, he gave his son permission to tell the story. And it is a compelling and important one. From that story, we see the price families and in particular wives paid for the multiple wounds men brought home with them from war. What the second edition shows was the sheer force of survival in his grandmother Nell, who had not only the handful of two small boys to raise, but a damaged husband to support. And making her life harder still was that her husband's disability was very hard to define precisely...We know that the damage war does to families is generational; it doesn't stop when the shooting stops. It is passed on indirectly from father to son to grandson, and to the women with whom they live. By retelling his family's story, Alistair Thomson has been able to fashion a moving portrait of his family: his grandmother Nell, and after her death, of their sons, Al's dad and his uncle, still children, having cold mutton for Christmas dinner, alone with their father, a soldier of the Great War. -- Jay Winter, Yale University *** Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994 (by Oxford University Press) and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. War historian Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation, and historian Michael Roper concluded that an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by. In this second edition, author Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has been transformed over the past quarter century, how a 'post-memory' of World War I creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of Australia's national past, and how veterans' war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. Thomson returns to a family war history that he could not write about 20 years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly-released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans' post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory. (Series: Monash Classics).

When journalist Robin Hyde researched and published in 1931 an article on life in Mt Eden gaol, her description of prison life was so convincing that the authorities ransacked records for information on convict Robin Hyde. This same journalistic verisimilitude prompted John A. Lee, World War I veteran, author, and politician, to greet Hydes Passport to Hell as the most important New Zealand war book yet published. Hyde took the raw New Zealand, Gallipoli, and Western Front experiences of Starkie perhaps the quintessential NZ soldier in his contempt of danger and discipline alike and, as editor D. I. B. Smith points out, composed her book in the way that the finest war books are shaped. She is concerned to show the making of a man who can both murder a surrendering prisoner and carry a wounded comrade across no-mans land as gently as a kitten. Hyde knew she was writing more than a documentary of war: [Starkie is] something of a visionary and in physical courage unquestionably heroic . . . I had to write [the book] when I heard his story, and because its an illustration of Walt Whitmans line There is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in man.\"

Revealing and often heartbreaking, this collection of letters offers a powerful firsthand account of a pivotal event in New Zealand history: World War I's Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. Grouped in chronological order, the correspondence-gathered from archives, newspapers, and family collections-details the campaign's harrowing conditions and key events, from preparation and landing on the Ottoman peninsula to the December withdrawal. In these epistles, the intense emotions of the men who survived the trenches are made known, whether it be jubilation at ground gained or sorrow at the passing of friends. Biographical notes on the letter writers, historic photographs, and a comprehensive introduction are also included.

Review(s) of: The Devil's Own War: The First World War Diary of Brigadier-general Herbert Hart, Editor: John Crawford, Published by: Exisle in Association with the New Zealand Defence Force, Auckland, 2008, 336pp, $55.