Wingar Hogan's Bush Safari: The Big Bush Gang Adventure at Bunyip
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Wingar Hogans Bush Safari 1 is a hilarious comedy with ...)
Wingar Hogans Bush Safari 1 is a hilarious comedy with 3 separate stories. The Italian job, a group of Italian nobles go on a tour of the Australian bush, the true blue tour, the famous dame Edna Rafferty and her hubby sir Les Patterson go on a flying tour of the world in vintage tiger moth planes. A submarine underwater sperm whale tour ,with bunger Mackenzie around the world. Major adventures and startling events occur along the way in each story.
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As Japanese planes attack Pearl Harbor, an army private...)
As Japanese planes attack Pearl Harbor, an army private commits a simple crime that will change his life forever
Richard Mast is a misfit in the infantry unit at Pearl Harbor. A bright mind in a sea of grunts, his only joy on the morning of December 7, 1941, is that today he has guard duty, which means he gets to carry a pistol. Usually reserved only for officers, the close-quarters weapon is coveted by every man in the infantry for its beauty and the sense of strength it gives the wearer. Mast intends to return the gun at the end of his shift—until the Japanese Navy intervenes.
Turmoil erupts when the first bombs fall, and as the Army scrambles to organize its response to the swarm of enemy aircraft, Mast decides to hang on to the weapon, becoming a criminal on the day his country most needs heroes.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
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James Jones’s saga of life in the American Midwest, new...)
James Jones’s saga of life in the American Midwest, newly revised five decades after it was first published and including a new foreword by his daughter, Kaylie Jones
After the blockbuster international success of From Here to Eternity, James Jones retreated from public life, making his home at the Handy Writers’ Colony in Illinois. His goal was to write something larger than a war novel, and the result, six years in the making, was Some Came Running, a stirring portrait of small-town life in the American Midwest at a time when our country and its people were striving to find their place in the new postwar world.
Five decades later, it has been revised and reedited under the direction of the Jones estate to allow for a leaner, tighter read. The result is the masterpiece Jones intended: a tale whose brutal honesty is as shocking now as on the day it was first published.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
(A playwright vacationing in Jamaica becomes dangerously o...)
A playwright vacationing in Jamaica becomes dangerously obsessed with deep-sea diving Ron Grant is one of the finest playwrights of his generation, second only to Tennessee Williams in pure genius. But success does not mean he feels like a man. On vacation in Jamaica with his mistress, an ice queen who considers him her personal trophy, his thoughts are back in New York City, with a beautiful young girl he met a few days before he left town. As the stress bears down on him, the brilliant playwright goes nearly to pieces before he finds his salvation under water. On his first deep-sea dive, Grant falls in love with the haunting beauty of the reef. He returns as soon as he can, staying longer and swimming deeper until all his problems seep away. But a man can't breathe underwater forever-and his obsession will drive him to take increasing risks that will change his life forever. "In Go to the Widow-Maker . . . Jones has demonstrated his ability to create a remarkable novel of ordinary civilian life, of human relationships which are both typical and strange, of love and passion and pathology." -Maxwell Geismar "One of the significant writers of his generation." -The New York Times Book Review "The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the only writer of any time for whom I felt any love." -Norman Mailer James Jones (1921-1977) was one of the most accomplished American authors of the World War II generation. He served in the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945, and was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the battle for Guadalcanal, where he was decorated with a purple heart and bronze star.
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A vacation in the Greek islands becomes complicated whe...)
A vacation in the Greek islands becomes complicated when a private eye is drawn into the murky waters of international hashish smuggling
His name is Frank Davies, but friends and clients call him Lobo. A private eye with a law degree, Lobo doesn’t like to get rough but he’ll do it for a friend. When a rich friend sends him to Paris to retrieve some stolen money, he earns himself a trip to Greece as a reward. It’s supposed to be a vacation, but as soon as he arrives he’s working again.
First his landlady, an English woman married to a Greek, asks his help bringing her cheating husband to heel. Though he doesn’t like her, he finds himself morbidly fascinated by her train wreck of a marriage. Then he meets a countess with a blackmail problem, and offers her a little pro-bono work. As he digs beneath the island’s sunny surface, Lobo learns that no matter how beautiful the scenery, secrets are always ugly.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
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Four World War II infantrymen recover at an army hospit...)
Four World War II infantrymen recover at an army hospital, and struggle to readjust to the home front, in this New York Times–bestselling novel.
At the end of a long journey across the Pacific, a ship catches sight of California. On board are hundreds of injured soldiers, survivors of the American infantry’s battle to wrest the South Seas from the Japanese Empire. As the men on deck cheer their imminent return to their families, wives, and favorite girls, four stay below, unable to join in the celebration. These men are broken by war and haunted by what they learned there of the savagery of mankind. As they convalesce in a hospital in Memphis, the pain of that knowledge will torment them far worse than any wound.
The third of James Jones’s epics based on his life in the army, this posthumously published novel draws on his own experiences to depict the horrors of war and their persistence even after the jungle is left behind.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
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Never-before-published fiction by one of the finest war...)
Never-before-published fiction by one of the finest war authors of the twentieth century
In 1943, a young soldier named James Jones returned from the Pacific, lightly wounded and psychologically tormented by the horrors of Guadalcanal. When he was well enough to leave the hospital, he went AWOL rather than return to service, and began work on a novel of the World War II experience.
Jones’s AWOL period was brief, but he returned to the novel at war’s end, bringing him to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Jones would then go on to write From Here to Eternity, the National Book Award–winning novel that catapulted him into the ranks of the literary elite.
Now, for the first time, Jones’s earliest writings are presented here, as a collection of stories about man and war, a testament to the great artist he was about to become.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
James Ramon Jones was an American novelist. He is best known for the fictional portrayals of his real life accounts as a witness to the Pearl Harbor attacks and as a soldier in World War II.
Background
James Ramon Jones was born on November 6, 1921 in Robinson, Illinois, the son of Ramon Jones, a dentist, and Ada Blessing. Discovery of oil on his grandfather's farm had brought an affluence to the Joneses that dwindled during the early 1930's with the Insull stock scandal.
In March 1941 he learned of the death of his mother, on December 7 of that year he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and in March 1942, he received word that his father had committed suicide.
Education
Like his older brother and younger sister, Jones attended the local schools. He was interested in literature and sports but never became a school athlete. When he graduated from high school in 1939, money for college was no longer available. His father advised him to join the army.
Career
After a summer construction job in Findlay, Ohio, Jones tried to enlist in the Canadian army but was refused. On November 10, 1939, he joined the United States Army Air Corps and was sent to Fort Slocum, New York. On December 18 he was shipped by way of the Panama Canal to Hickham Field, Hawaii. Unable to qualify as a pilot because of poor eyesight, he requested a transfer to the infantry.
In September 1940 he was assigned to Schofield Barracks near Honolulu. He began submitting poems and stories for publication without success. Sensitive and impressionable, Jones was deeply moved by the changes and losses in his family and in the people around him.
In 1942 he attended writing classes at the University of Hawaii; on December 6, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division, of which he was a member, was sent to Guadalcanal; they landed on December 30. Jones's outfit saw action immediately. On January 12, 1943, he received a head wound from enemy shrapnel but returned to duty after a week. Later, killing a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat left him emotionally distraught. He reinjured a chronically weak ankle and was hospitalized.
In May, Jones was shipped back to the United States, to Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. In November, rather than be discharged, Jones elected to remain in the army, but on "limited service" only. Nonetheless, he was assigned to a combat outfit at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, that was preparing for duty overseas. Denied a furlough, he went AWOL, returning home to Robinson, Illinois. Here he met Lowney and Harry Handy; she loved to help young writers. Jones stayed with them, but after two weeks, reported to Camp Campbell.
Still angry with his assignment, he again went AWOL. Back in Robinson, he drank too much, was arrested, and jailed. Returned to Camp Campbell, he was reduced in rank and reassigned to a supply unit composed of wounded veterans. Although later promoted to sergeant, he still found conditions so intolerable that he could not work on his novel. Again he went AWOL. When he returned, he was sent to a hospital for psychiatric observation. Partly through the intercession of the Handys, he was given a medical discharge on July 6, 1944, and granted a small disability pension. After visiting Thomas Wolfe's home in Asheville, North Carolina, he returned to Robinson and settled in with the Handys to write. Lowney Handy had already become both his mentor and his lover.
In 1945, Jones enrolled in a writing class at New York University. He showed the manuscript of his novel to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. Perkins rejected it, but on learning that Jones, who had returned to Illinois, was planning to write about life in the peacetime army, urged him to do so and offered an unprecedented option of $500. Encouraged by the Handys and, after Perkins's death in 1947, by editors Burroughs Mitchell and John Hall Wheelock, Jones set to work, writing slowly and painfully from 5:30 in the morning to midafternoon. The result, From Here to Eternity (1951), with its amazing intensity and shocking realism, has been called the finest novel on soldiering ever written. Jones had, Wheelock said, extracted an "exalted kind of poetry" from a "plethora of realistic detail. "
The movie rights brought $82, 500. With millions of copies sold, the novel was both an artistic and a financial success. After working for a while in Hollywood, Jones returned to Robinson to help Lowney Handy establish the Handy Artist Group at nearby Marshall, Illinois, a place where young writers came to live and write. Jones invested heavily in the project and built his own quarters, where he worked and housed his collection of books, jazz records, guns, knives, Meissen porcelain, and chessboards.
In 1952, Jones received the National Book Award and met other writers, including Norman Mailer and William Styron. Always, whether at the Handy Group or traveling, often by jeep and trailer with Lowney and other members of the group, Jones maintained his daily writing schedule. Some Came Running (1958), the story of a writer returning to his hometown in search of real values, was not well received by critics.
In late 1956, having finished his novel, Jones went to New York City to see his publishers. After a short stay in New York, where Jones wrote The Pistol (1959), him and his wife sailed for Europe on April 12, 1958. After four months in London, they settled in Paris.
In Paris the Joneses' apartment on the Ile St. Louis became a center for expatriates during the 1960's. With boundless energy, Jones maintained a large correspondence, worked on movie scripts, met artists and editors, helped aspiring young writers, and finished the second volume of his projected war trilogy, The Thin Red Line (1962), which some critics called "the best combat novel" of the generation. He traveled to New York, Jamaica, and Greece and Spain, usually with his wife and two children.
In February 1973, he went on assignment to Vietnam for the New York Times Magazine, stopping in Hawaii on his way back. He recorded his findings in Viet Journal (1974). Longing to return to America, Jones accepted a teaching position for the 1974-1975 academic year at Florida International University in Miami. In 1975 the family rented, then bought, a house in Sagaponack, New York, where he all but finished his war trilogy.
He died of congestive heart failure in Southhampton, New York and was buried in Poxabogue-Evergreen Cemetery, Bridgehampton, New York.
Quotations:
When at the post library he discovered the novels of Thomas Wolfe and realized, he said, that "I had been a writer all my life without knowing it. "
Connections
After moving to New York City, there James Jones met Gloria Patricia Mosolino, an actress and writer. They were married on February 27, 1957, in Haiti, and lived for a while at the Handy Group. When Lowney Handy attacked Gloria with a knife, they left, never to return.