Ratings for this book are hard to come by, but the few that I could find (those at Amazon U.S. and GoodReads) are excellent. Oddly, this book does not seem to be sold at the Amazon Australia website, even though the publisher is in Australia. So, there are no ratings for the book to be found there. I did a little perusing of the book and it looks very well done, however. I am personally thrilled to have it, because a good dictionary of biography is great to have around for reference purposes.
The book apparently is not sold at Amazon U.S. except as two separate volumes. This one book contains all of the content of those two volumes.
Unusual for this kind of find, this book is available in all three of your favorite digital flavors: pdf, ePub, and mobi.
Title: Dictionary of World Biography, Second Edition.
Format(s): Pdf, ePub, mobi.
Author(s): Barry Jones.
Publisher: Australian National Press.
Pages: xv + 938 (pdf format).
Ebook Rating/Number of Reviews (Amazon): 5 (1) for volume 1; 5 (1) for volume 2. 4.00 (3) at GoodReads (for the 2 volumes).
Price: $0.00.
Lowest Price at (or through Amazon) if available there: $25.00 + $25.00 = $50.00 (paperback - New, for volumes 1 and 2).
Book Description (Amazon): There is no true book description there, but this information about the author is there:
Jones, Barry Owen (1932- ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972-77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977-98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry, abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post-industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983-90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987-90 and Customs 1988-90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991-95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992-2000, 2005-06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860- (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975), and he edited The Penalty is Death (1968). Sleepers, Wake!: Technology and the Future of Work was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, became a bestseller and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille. The fourth edition was published in 1995. He received a DSc for his services to science in 1988 and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have been elected to all four Australian learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s one hundred ‘living national treasures’ in 1998, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006.
Comments: This is the second (the most recent) edition. I believe this ebook to be a legal free download because the publisher offers the book free on their website and provides the direct links to it.
URL: http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/anu-l...rld-biography/ (semi-direct link).