Kevin Foster Kevin Foster i(A7100 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 y separately published work icon The Lives of the Saints : David McBride’s Ethic of Self-interest Kevin Foster , 2024 27436185 2024 single work podcast review
— Review of The Nature of Honour David McBride , 2023 single work autobiography

'This week’s ABR Podcast features Kevin Foster’s straight-shooting review of whistleblower David McBride’s memoir The Nature of Honour, which begins: ‘Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol.’ Foster’s books include Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013). One of his current research projects – about social media and the military – is funded by the Australian Army Research Centre. ‘The lives of the saints:' (Production summary)

1 The Lives of the Saints : David McBride’s Ethic of Self-interest Kevin Foster , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January - February no. 461 2024; (p. 9-10)

— Review of The Nature of Honour David McBride , 2023 single work autobiography

'Sometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol. Saul of Tarsus had been an enthusiastic persecutor of Christians before his spiritual detour en route to Damascus. St Camillus de Lellis, patron saint of nurses and the sick, to whom we owe the symbol of the red cross, spent his early life as a con man, a mercenary, and a compulsive gambler – little wonder he went far in the Church. Where our secular martyrs are concerned, matters become still murkier. Mahatma Gandhi tested his chastity by sleeping naked with nubile young women and girls – one of whom was his grand-niece. And as for Julian Assange ...'(Introduction)          

1 The Gate : The Terrible Price of Victory for the Taliban Kevin Foster , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 460 2023; (p. 20-21)

— Review of The Sparrows of Kabul 'Fred' Smith , 2023 single work autobiography

'Diplomat and musician Fred Smith’s memoir of his time with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) at Kabul airport, and later in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), processing Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, opens with a richly symbolic vignette. On his first visit to the North Gate, one of only three public entry points to Kabul airport, Smith is confronted by a nightmare vision of the country’s collapse. Amid a cacophony of screaming and gunfire, thousands of Afghans jostle, push, and kick one another, waving passports, holding babies aloft, as they fight their way towards a narrow gap in the razor wire entrance to the gate, guarded by a human wall of US Marines. Every thirty seconds or so somebody squeezes through the scrum to safety, emerging discomposed, bloodied, and bewildered.' (Introduction)          

1 Collateral : Dispatches from the Mental Battlefield Kevin Foster , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , July no. 455 2023; (p. 45-46)

— Review of Line in the Sand Dean Yates , 2023 single work autobiography

'We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.' (Introduction)   

1 Robben Island of the Mind : Dispatches from a Cairo Prison Kevin Foster , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. 23-24)

'It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.' (Introduction)

1 'Valiant For Truth: The Life of Chester Wilmot, War Correspondent' by Neil McDonald with Peter Brune Kevin Foster , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 390 2017;
'Chester Wilmot was blessed with the professional reporter’s principal virtues, talent, self-confidence, resilience, and luck. While his skills as a broadcaster took him to the various fronts of World War II, it was luck, as much as planning, that put him in Tobruk, Greece, and on the Kokoda Track at the precise moments to witness Australia’s armed forces in their first critical tests of the war. Yet if luck played its part in gifting him proximity to the action, it was his artistry, his ability to inform and enthral his listeners, to bring them to the ‘tip of the spear’, that transformed his accounts of, respectively, a siege, a rout, and a fighting withdrawal into epic adventures of the nation at war. When, at General Thomas Blamey’s insistence, Wilmot was stripped of his accreditation and sent home from New Guinea in November 1943, he turned this personal and professional crisis into a triumph, resurrecting his career in London where he reported on the fighting in Europe for the BBC’s nightly War Report.' (Introduction)
1 Myth Eats Man : Phillip Schuler as Catalyst Kevin Foster , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 385 2016; (p. 24-25)

— Review of Phillip Schuler : The Remarkable Life of One of Australia's Greatest War Correspondents Mark Baker , 2016 single work biography
'ho was Phillip Schuler? A war correspondent for The Age, his six-week visit to Gallipoli in July and August 1915 produced, inter alia, a few of the rare eyewitness accounts of the battle and resulted in the first extended treatment of the Gallipoli campaign: Australia in Arms (1916). Schuler also compiled a unique photographic record of some of the battlefields and the living conditions in the trenches. Later enlisting as a soldier, he served in Flanders where, in April 1917, aged twenty-seven, he was fatally wounded by a stray shell.' (Introduction)
1 Self-Publish and be Damned, Sometimes Kevin Foster , 2000 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 6 February 2000; (p. 11)

— Review of Night Parking Laurie Clancy , 1999 single work novel
1 Writing Against War Kevin Foster , 1992 single work review
— Appears in: The CRNLE Reviews Journal , no. 2 1992; (p. 99-103)

— Review of Earth Against Heaven : A Tiananmen Square Anthology 1990 anthology poetry
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