BENJAMIN LAW (ed.) Growing Up Queer in Australia. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
These personal essays in Growing Up Queer in Australia are full of insight and self-reflection. The queer community can take great pride in the quality of the stories and the voices that represent it. This is a very polished collection of stories, perhaps not...
JOHN CANN with JIMMY THOMSON The Last Snake Man. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
A dangerous way to make a living: John Cann’s autobiography tells the story of his life as a professional snake handler. George Cann was a snakey – a snake handler – all his life. His son John grew up to be a snakey too. One...
PAM MENZIES Port Kembla: A memoir. Reviewed by Pip Newling
In this lively and affectionate social history of place, Pam Menzies reveals Port Kembla to be both remarkable and ordinary – a driver of the nation as well as being, like so many places in Australia, on the receiving end of change and globalisation. The book is...
TANYA HEASLIP Alice to Prague and YONGEY MINGYUR RINPOCHE with HELEN TWORKOV In Love with the World. Reviewed by Ann Skea
These two memoirs of travel and dislocation present contrasting approaches to venturing into the unknown. Alice to Prague and In Love with the World are very different books with contrasting styles and perspectives and different stories to tell. Yet, fundamentally,...
OLIVER SACKS Everything in its Place: First Loves and Last Tales. Reviewed by Ann Skea
This second posthumous collection of essays again reveals the passions and intellectual range of the bestselling neurologist, Oliver Sacks. Those who knew of Oliver Sacks as the practising neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and...
JUDITH BRETT From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got Compulsory Voting. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Australian politicians might rank low in public esteem but as this incisive book from Judith Brett reveals, our system of voting is admirable compared to the rest of the world’s democracies and certainly superior to those of the United Kingdom and the United States....
PETER LEWIS Webtopia: The world wide wreck of tech and how to make the net work. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Peter Lewis examines the history and impact of the internet in Australia, and what might happen next. It is curious how often the story of the Soviet Union is invoked to anchor the story of the internet. There are many parallels between the two. For one, their...
BEHROUZ BOOCHANI No Friend But The Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
This award-winning memoir is a cry from the heart, revealing, through poetry and prose, the brutality of indefinite detention on Manus Island. Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish/Iranian asylum seeker who sought to come to Australia on a leaky, unseaworthy boat. He was...
ROY HAY Aboriginal People and Australian Football in the Nineteenth Century: They did not come from nowhere. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
The high visibility of Aboriginal players in the Australian Football League is well recognised and their skills admired. But as Roy Hay argues in the pithy subtitle of his penetrating new history, they did not come from nowhere. At the outset I should disclose that...
PHILIP CHUBB Power Failure: The inside story of climate politics under Rudd and Gillard. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
How did the politics of climate change become so intractable? Power Failure gives an account of the Rudd–Gillard years – a pertinent reminder as Australia goes to the polls in 2019. Again, something is in the air. It is the acrid tang of a looming election. With it...
WENDY ELLIOTT Grit and Grace in a World Gone Mad: Humanitarianism in Talas, Turkey, 1908–1923. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
The early 20th century saw terrible suffering as the Ottoman Empire came to an end; these accounts of American and Canadian relief workers bear witness to events in Turkey during this period, including the Armenian genocide. The Young Turk Revolution succeeded...
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