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Article Excerpt
Buckley's! Ken Buckley; historian, author and civil libertarian: an autobiography. Leichhardt, NSW: A&A, 2008. 373 pp. $29.95.
Looking at the world through the eyes of an individual, particularly one who has had a significant role in social, scientific or political reforms, fascinates many readers. Ken Buckley was a significant contributor on civil liberties and human rights, recognised by the nation with the award of Member of the Order of Australia in 2000.
We live, happily, in an era where biography and autobiography are popular and of good quality. While I write this review, Simon Winchester, author of the international best seller The surgeon of Crowthorne: a tale of murder, madness and the love of words, the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary--and particularly Dr. W.C. Minor, a resident of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and early contributor, is touring Australia to great acclaim.
Mark Mordue has suggested that such writing is taking over from fiction:
Walk into any bookshop in Australia and see what is happening on the shelves, where the best writing is coming from, what is selling. I did. And what I saw was a stream of non-fiction work by Australian writers in the past five years or so that left our contemporary fiction scene six feet under. (1)
Autobiographies have been with us since the times of the Romans--the pagan author Libanius's Oration I was written in 374. Augustine wrote his confessions...
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