MINKY WORDEN (ed.) The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights. Reviewed by Sophie Read-Hamilton
According to Germaine Greer, the revolution for women’s equality hasn’t even begun. Whether you agree with Greer or not, The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women’s Rights makes it abundantly clear that the revolution is nowhere near finished....Crime Scene: DENNIS LEHANE Live by Night. Reviewed by Peter Corris
This book is among the best of Lehane’s novels. With books like Mystic River and Shutter Island to his credit, Dennis Lehane has a very good track record, and Live by Night is up there with his best work. Talk about grabbing the reader’s attention: this is how...The Godfather: Peter Corris on finding the titles
Getting titles right is important. I remember a stand-up comic speculating on how novels with titles like Mister Zhivago or The Sun also Sets would have fared. How about Lucky James? The working title I had for the first Cliff Hardy book was so bad it could have...LUCY NEVILLE Oh Mexico: Love and Adventure in Mexico City. Reviewed by Suzanne Rath
In this memoir, Lucy Neville finds love in a city of kidnappers. Mexico City has a population of almost nine million people and boasts the second highest rate of kidnappings in the world. On the other hand, Blackheath, a sleepy town in the Blue Mountains of New South...The Godfather: Peter Corris on the books that stayed unpublished
Like many, perhaps most, scribblers who’ve been at it a long time, I have written books that will never be published. Generally speaking, this is a good thing for the writer and readers. Nothing of Hemingway’s published posthumously enhanced his reputation and the...GERARD WHATELEY Black Caviar: The Horse of a Lifetime. Reviewed by Candida Baker
The champion who won our hearts – and every race she entered. Black Caviar. Even the name is special, isn’t it? It rolls around your tongue, like caviar itself – rich, exotic, luxurious. It reminds me of a vodka and caviar bar that was once all the rage in London,...The Godfather: Peter Corris on filming Cliff Hardy
I’m often asked why more Cliff Hardy novels haven’t been filmed or made for television. Good question, but it’s a long story. The idea of a Hardy film came up quite early when only three of the books had been published. Director Stephen Wallace responded to my agent...PETER ACKROYD Tudors: The History of England Volume II. Reviewed by Folly Gleeson
The Tudors are endlessly fascinating. This new history examines the effects of one small family on a nation’s identity. Tudors, Volume II in Peter Ackroyd’s planned six-part history of England, has a different tone from that of Volume I, Foundation. In both...SEBASTIAN FAULKS A Possible Life. Reviewed by Peter Corris
There are clever and subtle echoes in this book, but it is not a novel. A Possible Life is not a novel and it is misleading of Faulks and his publishers to present it as one. It’s a collection of long short stories, two of which are almost novella length. No...The Godfather: Peter Corris on seeing and hearing
In 1958, when I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus. In those days methods of injecting insulin and monitoring blood sugar levels were much cruder than they are now and maintaining good metabolic control was difficult. That I did so for the next few...DAVID MARR Political Animal: the Making of Tony Abbott (Quarterly Essay 47). Reviewed by Linda Funnell
He’s anti-abortion and his career owes a debt to Alan Jones. Does Tony Abbott have a problem with women? There’s an unsettling recent tradition of the political subjects of Quarterly Essays meeting with ill fortune. Think of Annabel Crabb’s profile of then-Opposition...
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