The riveting new book on the momentous year, campaign, and election that shaped American history.

It’s January 2, 1960: the day that Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy declared his candidacy; and with this opening scene, Chris Wallace offers readers a front-row seat to history. From the challenge of primary battles in a nation that had never elected a Catholic president, to the intense machinations of the national conventions—where JFK chose Lyndon Johnson as his running mate over the impassioned objections of his brother Bobby—this is a nonfiction political thriller filled with intrigue, cinematic action, and fresh reporting. Like with many popular histories, readers may be familiar with the story, but few will know the behind-the-scenes details, told here with gripping effect.

Featuring some of history’s most remarkable characters, page-turning action, and vivid details, Countdown 1960 follows a group of extraordinary politicians, civil rights leaders, Hollywood stars, labor bosses, and mobsters during a pivotal year in American history. The election of 1960 ushered in the modern era of presidential politics, with televised debates, private planes, and slick advertising. In fact, television played a massive role. More than 70 million Americans watched one or all four debates. The public turned to television to watch campaign rallies. And on the night of the election, the contest between Kennedy and Nixon was so close that Americans were glued to their televisions long after dawn to see who won.

The election of 1960 holds stunning parallels to our current political climate. There were—potentially valid—claims of voter fraud and a stolen election. There was also a presidential candidate faced with the decision of whether to contest the result or honor the peaceful transfer of power.

This is a definitive volume of new and selected poetry by one of Australia's most versatile poets and essayists.This book distils an adult lifetime into the intense magic of poetry. Wallace-Crabbe is a nature poet in the broadest possible sense: his poems, ranging widely in tone and subject-matter, seek above all to convey the richness and variety of our world, his sense that we are 'inserted headlong into life' and must make the best of what comes to us. Throughout his work - at times wryly philosophical, at times gently elegiac - Wallace-Crabbe remains passionately committed to his quest, 'troubling the stubborn world for meaning'.

Shortlisted for the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literature Awards. Chris Wallace-Crabbe's Rondo harvests a decade's worth of new writing by one of Australia's foremost poets. It paints a vivid portrait of eucalypt Australia's current position in an rapidly changing world. The poet asks for fresh meanings from Gallipoli and Scotland, from physics and from `Art's porous auditorium', where poetry can still be heard. `The words are only the words,' he writes, `which is more or less everything.' Critic Eric Ormsby dubbed Wallace-Crabbe a `genial smuggler of surprises': `his uncommon affability, even when treating the gravest subjects, leaves the reader unprepared for his sudden luxuriance of phrase.' (TLS)

Leading thinkers on the policies and leadership of the Morrison Government from 2019 to 2022 Australia has rarely endured as many difficulties as it did during the COVID-19 pandemic-dominated Morrison Government's term of office, from its surprise 2019 election win to the 2022 poll. How did government perform? How did policy and administration fare during this tumultuous political period? Was Australia's national government resilient in the face of the massive pandemic challenge, and how were its operations reshaped by it? Leading journalists and scholars, including Karen Middleton, Michelle Grattan, Chris Wallace, Julianne Schultz, Katharine Murphy, Stephen Duckett, Brendan McCaffrie, Stan Grant, Geoffrey Watson and Renée Leon, answer these questions in a searching examination of policy and leadership under the Morrison Government.

Political Lives is an intimate history of image-making and image-breaking in national politics. In 2011, Chris Wallace was writing a biography of Julia Gillard. After seeing the unparalleled onslaught from the Abbott opposition, she cancelled her contract and repaid her advance with the awareness of how hard the biography could hit. Political Lives is a result of that fraught experience. In it Wallace reflects on the roles and motives of biographers and their biographies in the 20th century. To discover who wrote biographies, and why, Wallace interviewed every living 20th century prime minister and their biographer, from Menzies to Hawke, Whitlam to Keating. The result is an intimate history of Australian national politics.

The 2019 Australian election produced a surprise result showing, not for the first time, that every election is there for the taking - including the next one. Here are the ten steps to winning an election. We have a democracy that performs relatively well, but many Australian elections are very close. So-called 'unloseable' elections are lost, reminding us that every election is a real contest. In this indispensable book drawing from years of close-up observation and analysis, historian and political journalist Chris Wallace draws out the ten essential steps to winning an election. The learner's error, she argues, is to grasp onto a couple of factors - so-called 'conventional wisdom' - without considering a full suite of winning factors and tracing the connections between them. Wallace notes that even when a couple of factors are significant in an election scenario, small improvements elsewhere can make the difference between winning and losing if performance and professionalism are maximised across the board. How to Win an Election is not a book designed to change your political opinion. It is a crucial resource for future political campaigns to ensure credibility, competence and accountability. Most of all, it is for party supporters and voters who can cast their vote knowing it has been backed by the best possible efforts to create change.