DENNIS ALTMAN Righting My World: Essays from the past half-century. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Dennis Altman’s splendid essays span the gay liberation movement, sexual politics, AIDS activism, and glimpses of his personal life. Dennis Altman was born in 1943 and has been a leading gay intellectual and activist for more than half a century. With degrees from the...
WRIGHT THOMPSON The Barn: The murder of Emmett Till and the cradle of American racism. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Wright Thompson’s account of the 1950s murder of a Black teenager in Mississippi is also a reckoning with the history of his own family. Wright Thompson was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in September 1976, about 35 kilometres from the barn in Drew where Emmett...
JOSHUA BLACKBURN The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Joshua Blackburn has compiled a treasure-trove of the humorous, the obscure, the trivial and the surprising in this survey of our language. The Language-Lovers Lexipedia: An A to Z of Linguistic Curiosities began as a quiz game invented by Joshua Blackburn to relieve...
MARIAN WILKINSON Woodside vs The Planet: How a company captured a country. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Australian governments are addicted to fossil-fuel exports that harm the climate and return little to the country. How did this happen? In this Quarterly Essay Marian Wilkinson examines Australia’s contribution to global warming and greenhouse pollution, in particular...
CHRISTOPH BAUMER and THERESE WEBER Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art. Reviewed by Ann Skea
This account of ancient rock art in Eurasia, Arabia and the Sahara attempts to discover the beliefs of the people who created it. This is a big, beautiful and fascinating book. It is a weighty tome, not just because there are large colour images on most of its glossy...
ESTHER ANATOLITIS When Australia Became A Republic. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Esther Anatolitis reveals just how closely Australia’s constitution ties us to the whims of the English monarch, and makes the case for change. It is a safe bet that, other than constitutional lawyers and the odd eccentric, most Australians have not, and probably...
BARRY NICHOLLS Playing to Win: Australia and the 1972 Ashes. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Barry Nicholls turns in a masterly review of the 1972 Ashes series, arguing that Australia’s tour of England reflected societal change. Test series have an inbuilt structure, and Nicholls builds on that in his opening chapter with a discussion of the end of the...
2025 Readers’ Favourites
With the new year barely begun, take a look back at our top ten reviews of 2025. It’s always fascinating to see which reviews have attracted the most interest from readers. While this 2025 list leans slightly more towards fiction than non-fiction, it does...
Tributes to Jean Bedford
Writer and editor Jean Bedford died after a long illness on 11 December 2025. She leaves a considerable literary legacy. Author of eight novels, including Sister Kate and a trio of Anna Southwood detective novels, two collections of short stories (one written with...
LUKE KEMP Goliath’s Curse: The history and future of societal collapse. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Human history has seen many civilisations rise and fall. Luke Kemp contemplates the fate of ours in Goliath’s Curse. This is a monumental work of scholarship that raises fundamental questions about who we are, where we are going, and whether or not the next few...
RICHARD DENNISS Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Richard Denniss provides a chilling analysis of the ploys our politicians use to govern in the interests of everyone but the public. Public choice theory employs basic economic analysis to posit that public officials, such as politicians, are self-interested. There is...
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