A fascinating account of the early life of one of Australia's most colorful and controversial sons. John Hammond Moore trace film star Errol Flynn's turbulent career from his birth in sedate Hobart through his eccentric schooldays and his youth in Sydney and cruising the Pacific to his years as a pioneer tobacco planter in Papua and the discovery that led to Hollywood and stardom. The author comments: 'While his golden age in Hollywood produced wondrous swashbuckling, Errol Flynn was not really acting at all. He was merely transferring a natural style developed in Sydney, Port Moresby, Rabaul, and London to a much larger audience. Anecdotes, quotations from Flynn's own diaries and from people who knew him in Australia and Papua New Guinea crowd one upon the other to underscore this truth, and to embellish this rollicking tale of a man who in the author's words: 'lived for half a century the sort of life adolescents dream of but men dare not attempt.'

An insightful prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes The diary Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's reflections on the momentous events that shook the South during the months leading up to the Civil War: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter. A childless middle-aged widow, Brevard lived nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. In her diary she recorded everyday stewardship of two plantations, a farm, and a gristmill. In the journal Brevard also grappled with her most private struggles, including her vacillation about the morality of secession and slavery, her fear of abolitionists, and her sense of foreboding about the coming conflict.