On 2 January 2013, just a day before Jim Davidson was due to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house, he found himself behind far more serious locked doors when he was arrested by the Yewtree detectives over alleged sex offences. Twelve months later, the public voted to crown Jim Davidson as the winner of the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother. Finally, with all charges dropped and no further action being taken, and with the public offering him their staunch support, Jim can finally look back on his year from hell. Facing a series of damaging false allegations, Jim was forced to fight, not just for his reputation and his career, but for his freedom too. Mounting legal costs and a deepening sense of injustice saw Jim sink to the lowest point of his career as the Yewtree investigation threatened to ruin him both financially and emotionally. Finally, after months of pain came the words he and his supporters had been waiting to hear: No Further Action. Now, with the public's approval, Jim reflects on this painful period with the regular dose of wit and humour that have made him so successful. Searingly honest, No Further Action pays tribute to those who stood by him and takes a wry look at what life is like under investigation in the public eye.

'Lilliput', in this dual biography, is the world of literary magazines in Australia between the 1940s and the 1980s. Here Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith, of the journals Meanjin and Overland, were determined, driven visionaries. Both were very human—and occasionally bruised—believers in and workers for a better nation. The book ranges from before the Menzies era and the Cold War, through the Whitlam period and beyond to the challenges of the 1980s. It shows how the editors constantly aimed for a culture more liberal, diverse and developed than the one then prevailing. Their publications may have lacked resources and economic return, but they nonetheless possessed authority, regularly providing stimulation for their readers and for the nation. In finely wrought detail, Jim Davidson — the second editor of Meanjin — traces the commitment of Christesen and Murray-Smith to this ambitious cultural project and how it attracted many of the key writers and thinkers of those years. There are pen portraits of many of them, as the reader is taken behind the scenes. Emperors in Lilliput exhibits the enlightened creative spirit animating these journals at their best. It is at once captivating biography and rich social history.

One of Atlas & Boots' Top 10 Adventure Travel Books of 2021 A dramatic account of the deadly earthquake on Everest--and a return to reach the summit. On April 25, 2015, Jim Davidson was climbing Mount Everest when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake released avalanches all around him and his team, destroying their only escape route and trapping them at nearly 20,000 feet. It was the largest earthquake in Nepal in eighty-one years and killed about 8,900 people. That day also became the deadliest in the history of Everest, with eighteen people losing their lives on the mountain. After spending two unsettling days stranded on Everest, Davidson's team was rescued by helicopter. The experience left him shaken, and despite his thirty-three years of climbing and serving as an expedition leader, he wasn't sure that he would ever go back. But in the face of risk and uncertainty, he returned in 2017 and finally achieved his dream of reaching the summit. Suspenseful and engrossing, The Next Everest portrays the experience of living through the biggest disaster to ever hit the mountain. Davidson's background in geology and environmental science makes him uniquely qualified to explain how this natural disaster unfolded and why the seismic threats lurking beneath Nepal are even greater today. But this story is not about "conquering" the world's highest peak. Instead, it reveals how embracing change, challenge, and uncertainty prepares anyone to face their "next Everest" in life.

'I was written out of the family story. This book is my attempt to write myself, and my mother, back into it.' In this singular memoir, historian and biographer Jim Davidson writes about his fraught relationship with his authoritarian and controlling father, whose South African background and time in Papua New Guinea and Fiji prompted his own post-war mini-empire of dominance. A manipulative and emotionally ferocious man, he rejects his son and creates a second family, shutting Jim out and eventually disinheriting him, but never really leaving him alone. Traversing territory across Australia, South Africa, India and London, this beautifully written book tells of a time of crushing conformity, sharply reminding us that some experiences can never be written out of our personal histories. Sales Points Literary memoirs of men uncovering the dynamics of their families are popular - e.g. Richard Glover, Tim Elliott in Australia Increased interest in queer memoir, i.e. experiences of people coming out as gay or queer, especially in contexts where acceptance or understanding is limited Jim Davidson writes with a historian's eye for the personal impact of grand historical forces, and the undercurrents of how powerfully relationships can shape lives Released for Father's Day in Australia - an antidote to ads for biographies of sporting heroes

When Markus Cottin begins digging into some family mysteries his father tells him he will find "only a chain of fools, each one worse than the one that came before." His search takes him to Colorado mining towns, to the Navajo reservation, and around the desert Four Corners region, and the story he uncovers is a painful one of race politics and labor unrest in the 1950s West. After he finds his own family involved in bombings and the murder of a Navajo miner, he can't stop until the story leads him back, link by link to his grandfather, his father, and ultimately himself. A powerful novel of the Southwest, Mine Work is told with feeling and style by a writer who knows the region, road by dusty road.When first published in 2000, Mine Work won two coveted Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America for best original paperback and best first novel. In multiple printings it became an admired classic of Western writing.

On 2 January 2013, just a day before Jim Davidson was due to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house, he found himself behind far more serious locked doors when he was arrested by the Yewtree detectives over alleged sex offences. Twelve months later, the public voted to crown Jim Davidson as the winner of the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother. Finally, with all charges dropped and no further action being taken - and with the public offering him their staunch support - Jim can finally look back on his year from hell. Facing a series of damaging false allegations, Jim was forced to fight, not just for his reputation and his career, but for his freedom too. Mounting legal costs and a deepening sense of injustice saw Jim sink to the lowest point of his career as the Yewtree investigation threatened to ruin him both financially and emotionally. Finally, after months of pain came the words he and his supporters had been waiting to hear: 'No Further Action'. Now, with the public's approval, Jim reflects on this painful period with the regular dose of wit and humour that have made him so successful.Searingly honest, No Further Action pays tribute to those who stood by him and takes a wry look at what life is like under investigation in the public eye.

Essays by Jim Davidson including excerpts from The Indomitus Report. This book covers topics on individual sovereignty, agorism, freedom, arms and armor technology, guns, launch vehicles, missiles, the space frontier, extra-solar planets, longevity research, culture, society, films, nanotechnology, privacy technology, and travel to Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America.

Postmarked Calexico explores the enigma and disappearance south of the border of one, or maybe more than one, renegade writer who doesn't want to be found. One man's dogged search for an old friend through the mountains of Colorado and the beaches of Baja ultimately entangles him in the labyrinthine lives of two men and a woman, who will change him forever. This search, and Davidson's spare and provocative narrative style, peel away layer after layer of silence hiding a complex story of passion and protest, of pair of committed writers (or over-committed writers) whose quixotic destiny is both to challenge and to flee the destructive matrix of contemporary America. Echoes of Edward Abbey and B Traven haunt these pages, along with the almost impossible dream of disappearing into a dangerous emptiness called Mexico. Davidson deftly weaves the herosim and significance of their deeds-along with their need to live in the shadows-into the bone-dry mythology of the American West.

Lyrebird Rising is a study of the extraordinary life of Louis Hanson-Dyer (1884-1962), which began in the Melbourne of the Land Boom and ended in Grace Kelly's Monaco. Born into a wealthy family - her father was a parliamentarian and controversial doctor - Louise developed her interest in music early, and used her wealth (augmented by marrying a man 25 years her senior) to advance the arts in Melbourne. She assisted the poet Shaw Neilson and underwrote musical ventures, but increasingly felt the tug of Europe. In 1932, in Paris, she established Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre (Lyrebird Press), and as a music publisher set about reviving baroque and medieval music, in rare editions notable both for their scholarship and sumptuousness. Later (assisted by a second husband, 25 years younger) she began to make discs to illustrate these editions. From that original idea the recording venture grew and grew: in 1950 Louise made the first long-playing records in Europe, and by the time she died Oiseau-Lyre was a famous label, putting out some of the earliest recordings by such people as Dame Joan Sutherland, Sir Colin Davis, Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and Dame Janet Baker. Lyrebird Rising re-creates the ambience of Melbourne in the twenties, Paris in the thirties, and London in the fifties; it also discusses expatriatism, explores the paths open to a dynamic woman at the time, and examines the changes in musical taste that were set in motion by the rise of musicology, radio, and the gramophone record.