Lee Miller
Carolyn BurkeBloomsbury 426 pages, $49.95

LEE Miller – model, actress, inventive photographer and among other things, war correspondent. This full-length biography is a fabulous read and a great insight into her remarkable life and those of the 1930s and 40s avant-garde, as she was involved with many of the leading artists in Paris and New York including Jean Cocteau and Man Ray.

This in some ways later detracted from the recognition she deserved for her own work in photography. The period around World War II is of particular interest. During the war she helped produce a book in London titled Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire.

And later, as a US war correspondent, she photographed the Allied liberation of France, then went on to witness the fall of Nazi Germany (the photo of her in Hitler’s bath is still considered an iconic image), before photographing pits full of bodies, skeletons and the starving survivors scavenging for food in rubbish dumps at the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald.

– CPL Damian Shovell

Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs - The Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co
Jeremey Mercer Orion Publishing 260 pages, $39.95

SHAKESPEARE and Company is a bookstore in Paris, famous as much for its occupants as it is for its books. Writers from all over the world have stayed amidst its clutter, free-of-charge, and it has been a source of inspiration to many.

Books Baguettes and Bedbugs is one man’s story of his experience staying at the bookstore. Journalist Jeremy Mercer landed in Paris after outing a criminal source in his newspaper in Canada and was forced to flee after threats on his life.

The book is an intriguing tale of struggle and living on a combination of wits and luck in a city which seemingly offers so much. It explores the curious characters that come and go in the bookstore and in particular the owner, George. Books Baguettes and Bedbugs is delightful read that takes you into some of the seedier sides of Paris, but demonstrates the real spirit of human kindness in the store’s owner.

– Rachael Irving

Furphy – The Water Cart and The World
John Barnes and Andrew FurphyAustralian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 142 pages, $39.95

IT’S no Furphy that there’s a new book about Furphies.

Furphy – The Water Cart and The World explores the recent history of a family name that came to prominence in Australia firstly as a Shepparton-based family producing inventive farm machinery (and most famously the water cart), to its more readily identified place in the Australian vernacular after being adopted by World War I soldiers as a colloquialism for rumour.

Much of the family history won’t be of great interest, but the chapters on the appropriation of the word furphy, and it’s links to soldiers on the battlefields will.

The book tells how Furphy water carts were used at training camps in World War I, and there’s also some interesting quotes from C.E.W. Bean’s The Anzac Book which credited “nearly all the camp rumours had their origin in these groups near the rubbish carts.” Bean also considered the drivers of these carts as being a great source of rumour-mongering.