Friday, 15 May 2009
Penguin Group (NZ)

Media Release
Re: NZSAS: The First Fifty Years by Ron Crosby

Penguin Group (NZ) is pleased to announce that on the 3 August 2009 it will release NZSAS: The First Fifty Years – the first and only official history of New Zealand’s elite Special Forces, the New Zealand Special Air Service (NZSAS).

Publisher Jeff Atkinson says,

It is with immense pride that Penguin Group (NZ) announces the publication of the official history of the New Zealand Special Air Service.
Since the best-selling biography of Willie Apiata, VC: The Reluctant Hero was published by Penguin last year, public interest in the NZSAS has skyrocketed.

Chief of the NZ Defence Force says,

Like any family, 1 NZSAS Group’s stories are part of the glue that binds them together. But for reasons of operational security, the activities and personalities of New Zealand’s Special Forces have, until now, largely remained their own – shrouded in secrecy.
This book has an essential role in informing anyone with an interest of how this Unit’s special capabilities have been relied on in numerous deployments, over a range of environments, across the decades of its existence.
Such unusual openness I believe cannot help but promote confidence, and ultimately improve the level of understanding of 1 NZSAS Group – whose history deserves the accolade it aspires to of being the elite Unit of the New Zealand Defence Force.

The Author
Ron Crosby has an honours degree in law but over the last decade has increasingly been occupied in writing New Zealand historical and military books. His lifelong interest in the Urewera led to his writing a biography of Gilbert Mair, one of the leaders of the Arawa Flying Columns which pursued Te Kooti for years in the Urewera – a true example of early special warfare tactics. That book, Gilbert Mair: Te Kooti’s Nemesis (2004), and others led to his being engaged to write this history of the NZSAS.

Ron Crosby will be available for interview upon publication date.

RRP $65.00 | Cased & Jacketed | Viking (an imprint of Penguin Group (NZ))
464pp | black & white photographs throughout

ENDS

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