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Anniversary edition of Don Watson's brilliant, award-winning and best-selling biography of Paul Keating with new content.
Introduced by Carmen Lawrence, former Premier of WA and senior minister in the Keating government.
Others have fair claim on the economic transformation of Australia, but Paul Keating's so-called 'big picture' vision, his political courage, the requisite luck and his gift for story-telling have earned him most of the credit. Certainly no one did more to bring about the successful economy we now enjoy - and inhabit. But history will just not behave. If this transformation not only brought economic growth and prosperity, but in some degree also laid the ground for the debasement of political debate to tin-eared sloganeering and second-hand managerialism, should he not share the credit for that as well?
From the Afterword by Don Watson
In December 1991 Paul Keating wrested the role of Prime Minister from Bob Hawke and the bruises from that struggle were part of the baggage he brought to the job: the other parts included the worst recession in 60 years and an electorate determined to make him pay for it. Keating defied the odds and won the 1993 election, and in his four years as Prime Minister set Australia on a new course - towards engagement with Asia, a republic, reconciliation, a social democracy built on a modern export-based economy and sophisticated public systems of education and training, health and social security. Widely regarded as a quintessential economic rationalist, Keating's record clearly shows that his vision was infinitely broader and more complex.
Don Watson was employed as Keating's speechwriter. Based on the diaries Watson kept through the four turbulent and exhausting years of Keating's Prime Ministership, on its release Recollections of a Bleeding Heart was widely deemed a masterpiece. It is at once a groundbreaking 'inside' account of politics and a profound and extraordinarily frank study of the most intriguing and visionary politician in Australia's modern history. Now, when vision and character have all but vanished from politics, Don Watson's Recollections makes absorbing - and essential - reading.
About the Author
Don Watson's RECOLLECTIONS OF A BLEEDING HEART: Paul Keating Prime Minister, won the Age Book of the Year and Non-Fiction Prizes, the Brisbane Courier Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Australian Literary Studies Association's Book of the Year. His Quarterly Essay, RABBIT SYNDROME: Australia and America won the Alfred Deakin Essay Prize. DEATH SENTENCE, his best-selling book about the decay of public language won the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year 2003. WATSON'S DICTIONARY OF WEASEL WORDS, another best-seller, was published in 2004. His most recent book AMERICAN JOURNEYS won the Age Non-Fiction and Book of the Year Awards in 2008. It also won the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction.
“Everyone who sets out to write history must be free to decide how he will do it. It can’t be any other way. I regret very few things more deeply than Paul Keating’s belief that he was betrayed by this book, but if I had written it according to his lights, rather than mine, from his angle rather than mine, I would have betrayed myself; and, for want of a more clinical term, history - this bit of it at least - would have been betrayed as well.”
From the Afterword by Don Watson
“Focus Watson’s sharp and seditious eye on the strange world of the Prime Minister’s Office and the result is mesmeric, and not just to the strange breed, the politics watcher. It’s a great yarn. Many of his descriptions of the Federal Parliament and the life lived in it are disturbing - and extremely funny. We should revisit Keating’s world, not out of nostalgia (Watson’s treatment doesn’t allow it in any case), but to imagine - and see - that politics can be done differently.”
From the Foreword by Carmen Lawrence
'This book is like the black box recorder in a plane.' former PM Paul Keating
'...a masterpiece...simply the best inside account of life, politics and combat inside the highest office of the land ever written.' Michael Gordon, The Age
* 'one of the most intelligent and seductive books about Australian politics which has ever come my way.' Robert Manne, The Sydney Morning Herald
'...the story of four tumultuous years told by an intelligent and curious insider, and no insider has ever done it better.'Les Carlyon, The Bulletin
'...the finest insider's account yet published of Australian politics in action at the highest level.' Tony Baker, The Adelaide Advertiser
'...a classic: an insider's account of the working of the political process, with its paranoia, its envies, its fevered inconsequentiality, its joys, crammed with wisdom and a lovely detachment.' Evan Williams, Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald
'....a sheer delight to read...written by a man who would have difficulty putting together a dull sentence...Watson stiches a rich tapestry of national, international and personal context.' Diana Simmonds, The Sun-Herald
ISBN: 9781742751993
ISBN-10: 1742751997
Audience:
Tertiary; University or College
Format:
Paperback
Language:
English
Number Of Pages: 832
Published: 1st September 2011
Publisher: Random House Australia
Dimensions (cm): 23.1 x 15.4
x 6.0
Weight (kg): 0.907
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