Edwin Llewellyn Charles was a slim, handsome youth, but Terence John, his brother, was beautiful and he knew it. Technically, the boys were twins, but their personalities could not have been more different. So begins this sweeping true story of a fractured but close-knit Australian family during World War II, focusing on the service of the twins and life on the home front as experienced primarily by their elder sister and mother. When hostilities are declared, Terry joins the Australian Military Forces and is quickly promoted. However, as a militiaman, he is banned from serving overseas. Having watched Edwin join the glamorous RAAF and become a pilot, Terry resigns his commission to follow his twin. Forced to swallow the disappointment of failing to emulate Edwin by winning his wings, Terry becomes a navigator in heavy bombers in the closing stages of the European war. Readers are transported from the Charles family home in northern NSW to Canberra, Africa, England, Scotland, the United States, the Subcontinent and Ceylon between 1939 and the end of 1945 as the perspective shifts between the two protagonists. Little-known aspects of wartime experience are explored, including the so-called ‘wet canteens’ debate; the international negotiations over the release of interned Allied and Japanese diplomats, and the life of the Raj on the north-west frontier and in India and Ceylon. The author’s clever interweaving of primary documents with historical fact gives rare insights into the lives and relationships of the Charles family and creates an authentic snapshot of wartime Australia. The Charles Family’s War is a compassionate and multilayered examination of two intelligent and articulate young men who come of age in the cauldron of global conflict.

Moments define us: moments of adversity reveal character; moments of challenge disclose courage or cowardice; moments of action uncover decision or irresolution; and defining moments reveal leadership.This book is about seven defining leadership moments from the American Revolution. 7 Leadership Lessons is not a complete study of the American Revolution; readers will have to go elsewhere for such a chronicle. Rather it is the story of seven leadership moments that helped to win liberty during the struggle for Independence. On these pages you learn about real people facing real challenges and overcoming what reasonable observers believed were insurmountable odds. These leaders, thankfully, were unreasonable for the cause of liberty.This work is a guide to learning about the leadership that created a revolution, opposed Great Britain, the greatest power of its age, and created the freest society on earth. In these pages you are able to study the leadership of a select few who changed the course of human events and helped bring about the birth of an exceptional nation. This is a compact collection of stories that retell some of the most dramatic events in the founding of the United States. These stories—for leadership is best learned by storytelling, rather than through lectures on process, style, or technique—offer you insights into the meaning of leadership and liberty that can change your life. These seven leadership lessons are as relevant today as they were essential to the birth of the United States. The stories are about the leadership that forged colonial British subjects into a nation of Americans. They define the leadership that hammered out the standard for how Americans are expected to lead. In 1775, this leadership created the flame of liberty that lit the world, and offered a beacon of freedom and human progress to all men.