The Author
K.M. HARDIE
K.M. Hardie
K.M. Hardie is a British and Australian dual-citizen who has lived on three continents and crossed a good deal of the world the hard way. In his late twenties he traveled through fourteen African countries in the back of an ex-British-army truck, sold off when the Cold War ended — six months on the road with twenty strangers. He has stayed with communities most travelers never reach, from a forest village in what was then Zaire to tribal villages along the Amazon, and cycled the length of New Zealand on a mountain bike. He has since lived in Asia, New Zealand, and now Australia.
The rest of the time he made complicated things simple for a living. For twenty-five years he was the writer large corporations brought in when a hard idea had to be explained so anyone could follow it — manuals read by thousands of staff, websites used by tens of thousands. He started out building more than thirty commercial software applications, then spent years turning dense technical material into training films and courses people actually understood.
He writes Military Stories for Boys because of what he has watched happen to reading. At nine he could finish a book in a day. He still reads history, philosophy, and psychology for pleasure, but even his own attention isn't what it was before screens — and for a boy growing up inside that pull, the problem is far larger, and it lasts a lifetime. These books are his answer to it.
A note from the author
When I was nine, I could read a book in a day.
Most boys that age can't anymore, and I understand why better than I'd like to. Screens have worn down even my own concentration — the slow, patient kind that reading runs on. For a child growing up inside that, the problem is far bigger than it is for me, and it doesn't pass. It follows him into the rest of his life.
So I built these books to pull a boy back into reading, with two things working as the training wheels. The first is the writing: these are true history, but I tell it like a thriller, and a story moving at that speed holds his attention long enough for the focus to start coming back. The second is the pictures — a carefully made illustration on every page, sometimes two or three, there to give his brain a little of the quick reward a screen has trained it to expect, while the reading does its quieter work underneath.
None of the history is invented. The battles, the people, the decisions they made under pressure — all of it happened. I just tell it the way it gripped me when I was that nine-year-old with a book.
These pictures aren't decoration. Each one is made for the page it sits on, and the same boy and the same general stay recognizable from the first page to the last. That kind of consistency takes real care; as much of it goes into the pictures as into the words.
A boy opens one because the cover looks like something he'd actually want to read, gets carried through by the story and the pictures, and finishes a whole history book almost without noticing. Then, with luck, he wants the next one.