A dead Kindle means extracting dead trees from the library, in this case from Compactus (their stacks) at the Maroubra branch of the Randwick City Library.
White clearly resented writing this autobiography, so much so that one wonders why he bothered doing it straight when he might have made some theatre of it. It's pedestrian and there's less score settling than I was led to expect. I skipped the second section Journeys. We get a very few anecdotes about fellow culturalists (Brett Whiteley and fam come to visit for instance, also the Nolans, an early encounter with Melba he tells twice) but little about other sybarites (Norman Lindsay for instance) who were further down the food chain in his eyes. There are some clangers: no clear picture emerges of life-partner Manoly, or the basis of attraction; at some point White decided to move to Centennial Park and we don't hear from the other parts of the household. Somewhere in there White observes that Aussie women are blokey (there's some truth in that), but also somehow concludes that the blokes are feminine. London, World War II in North Africa, nothing much about the jackerooing, the Queen comes to Sydney Harbour and other old, upper-class Sydney, when all the money was young.
As with everything White, reviews and commentary are legion. C. K. Stead's contemporaneous review. Similarly Humphrey Carpenter. More colour on the Castle Hill of the day from Mireille Juchau. David Marr on scattering Manoly's ashes at Clovelly. He says "Howard appealed to something in Australians that White knew, feared and fought all his life: our yearning for small comfort and respectability." — and yet White himself never did motivate many Australians to reach for more than this.