The crying years: Australia's great war [Book review]

Peter Stanley is one of Australia's most distinguished scholars of military history. An immensely prolific researcher and author, he has published over two dozen books on various aspects of experiences of war, ranging from coverage of the home front, the front line, the propaganda campaigns, through to the myths and legends that form in the aftermath of conflict. Stanley's latest work, The Crying Years: Australia's Great War, builds on this exemplary record by presenting public audiences with a rich and engaging visual history of the Australian experience of the First World War. In an expert blending of the visual with the textual, Stanley has smoothly weaved his narrative of the war through a collection of visual items from the National Library of Australia's holdings. The great strength of The Crying Years is that readers are simultaneously engaged in Stanley's writing and immersed in the feeling of the period via historical photographs, recruitment materials, maps, cartoons, and ephemera of the era, with a small number of selected textual sources such as diaries, letters and newspaper reports.