Evatt: Politics and Justice by Kylie Tennant

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Previous owner has signed inside page, now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Light foxing to top foredge. Small mark on inside blank front endpage. Dust jacket has some light creasing at edges and spine. Small tear to tail edge front cover and back cover corner have been repaired with book tape. Interior and binding are also very good.

Evatt was a nationalist eager for Australia's honour and an internationalist who sought the rule the law in the conduct of nations.

The controversial Labor leader was a central figure in every legal rights struggle for 35 years. The youngest judge to sit on the High Court, he made judgements that established vital precedents and wrote enduring books on his country's history.

In WWII, as Minister for External Affairs, he secured from Roosevelt and Churchill a reversal of the policy of an expendable Australia and the desperately needed plans Churchill called Evatt's Spitfires.

He was a dominant figure in the framing of the United Nationals Charter, and as the first president of the UN Assembly, when he announced the Declaration of Human Rights, he brought Australia to the proudest place she had held in international affairs.

In opposition during the ant-red hysteria of the 1950s, he took on the unpopular task of securing the defeat of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill in the High Court.

This is a social history of half a century with Evatt as its central and dominating character. (book flap)