Best Selling Books by James Mcdonald

This is a translation of Voltaire''s work on the Cathar Crusade - the thirteenth century papal war against the people of the Languedoc. It includes parallel texts with James McDonald''s English translation against Voltaire''s original French, along with notes, and short essays on Voltaire, his life and his works.

Grey Forrester is trying to use the few powers he has been left with to make a way in the world while he tries to find out why he has been banished from his home, and facing a trial for his life. Looking for any hint as to what happened nearly seven years earlier, a marker gets called in and he has to find two girls that have been kidnapped. As always, there is more than the obvious when you open the curtains on the veiled world.

The fourth volume in McDonald''s Canberra series tells the story of the creation of a national capital in a quiet corner of country NSW. There are glimmers of a grand vision conceived by the six ex-colonies for their capital in the wake of federation, as a means of helping define the new nation itself. But the path was often diverted by jurisdictional jealousies, which bled into the painful processes of site selection and the choice of a design. The treatment of Walter and Marion Griffin, and the dilution of their plan, is a tragedy, which still polarises opinions today. There are some disconcerting truths revealed. The capital was conceived within the context of the White Australia Policy. Despite the pomp of the opening celebrations of the provisional Parliament House, McDonald shows how the fractures within Australian society came to the fore: in race, religion, and class. It was not the rose-coloured spectacle that is so often portrayed. Nothing evinces this so clearly as the brave sovereignty protest of Nangar and Ooloogan on that day in May 1927. Canberra IV also relays the carnage of the land resumptions. There were attempts to socially engineer a utopian model and to win over the city''s disenfranchised residents. But if anything galvanised the population against the bureaucracy, it was prohibition. Canberra asserted itself in the late 1920s. Its community did not just emerge from the cosy cottages of a transplanted Public Service. It evolved from a mix of elements including the workers'' camps, the rump of the original pastoral communities, and the new commercial sector. Canberra IV also looks at how the city''s development stalled during WWI, ramped up again in the 1920s, but was dampened again by the Great Depression and, of course, another World War. The builders of Canberra never really had a clear run. The book also covers the demise of the old villages. And, of course, the impact on neighbouring Queanbeyan, was profound, with that town changing in ways unimaginable at the turn of the century and, along the way, endured shabby treatment from the FCT administrations.

The Ogre wants the Kung-fu Master to teach him the ancient arts, but burping, farting and bad hygiene certainly aren''t good behaviors that a master would stand for. Written in the spirit of an Aesop''s Fable; both characters in the story have important lessons to learn and they aren''t always easy. The Master and the Ogre come to discover that changing one''s nature is far more difficult than changing one''s behavior.