By mid-1942 the Japanese forces were threatening to take the colonial capital of Port Moresby and therefore gain a base to launch their proposed invasion of Australia. The allied forces needed to blunt the Japanese thrust toward Australia and thus protect the transpacific line of communications, as well as to secure a favorable position to take the offensive to the Japanese. Yet this was easier planned than executed; the Australians had been battered...

Retracing Michael Rockefeller's steps, journalist Carl Hoffman traveled to the jungles of New Guinea to solve a decades-old mystery and illuminate a culture transformed by years of colonial rule.

One American soldier called it "a green hell on earth." Monsoon-soaked wilderness, debilitating heat, impassable mountains, torrential rivers, and disease-infested swamps-New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the Empire's strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied commander-in-chief...

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, on which survival is a daily struggle, eccentric Mr. Watts, the only white man left after the other teachers flee, spends his day reading to the local children from Charles Dickens' classic Great Expectations.

"Provides comprehensive information on the geography, history, wildlife, governmental structure, economy, cultural diversity, peoples, religion, and culture of Papua New Guinea"--Provided by publisher.

"In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait through five years of incarceration and exile."--