ROBERT MANNE On Borrowed Time. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks
From asylum seekers to politics, climate change and the personal challenges of dealing with cancer, Robert Manne’s essays are a rich canvas and urge us to interrogate prejudice and injustice wherever they threaten to take root. When Robert Manne, Emeritus...
EMILY MIDORIKAWA and EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Woolf. Reviewed by Justine Ettler
From Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell to Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, Midorikawa and Sweeney celebrate the friendships between women writers. I’ve heard people say that what ensures a writer’s continued productivity are things like having a...
LOUIS NOWRA Woolloomooloo: A biography. Reviewed By Tom Patterson
Nowra’s affection for his suburb is all through this book – offering Woolloomooloo as both a place of refuge and an ideal to aspire to. In the mid-19th century, a new type of dandy appeared in Paris. They were rich enough to be idle and could be found...
CLARE PAYNE One: Valuing the single life. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
One is driven by a keen sense of social justice, and an intolerance of all the ways in which society devalues those who, for various reasons, live alone. If this is the age of single living, as Ita Buttrose proclaims on the cover of this book by Clare Payne, it...
JOHN BIRMINGHAM Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney; DAVID HUNT Girt: The unauthorised history of Australia. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Leviathan and Girt are engaging because they do what official histories shy away from – they spin a ripping yarn. We Australians have a strained relationship with our past. As the ongoing culture wars rage ever louder, it might seem that we respond to our history...
GIDEON HAIGH A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean. Reviewed by Jeannette Delamoir
In exploring the death – and life – of Mollie Dean, Gideon Haigh covers a lot of fascinating ground. A young woman walks home after a Melbourne theatre performance, making a phone call to a friend along the way. Then, metres from her front door, she is...
DAVID RITTER The Coal Truth: The fight to stop Adani, defeat the big polluters and reclaim our democracy. Reviewed by Caleb Goods
The Coal Truth brings into sharp focus why the proposal to mine coal in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland is so critical to our common future. The unassuming word Adani has come to represent an immense conflict over how Australia’s, and the world’s, future...
JAMES COVENTRY Footballistics: How the data analysis revolution is uncovering footy’s hidden truths; PETER NEWLINDS with DAVID BREWSTER Around the Grounds: Magic moments from the life of a sports broadcaster. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Sport can be examined from many angles. The first of these books takes a single sport and the second a single life as its subject. I might be the worst person to review Footballistics since I decry the over-quantification of the game. If I’m allowed to wear...
DAVID CHRISTIAN Origin Story: A big history of everything. Reviewed by Mathilde Montpetit
Clearly written and ambitious, David Christian’s Origin Story manages to weave a comprehensive narrative about the evolution of the universe and the human species. Origin Story begins with a manifesto: a defence of Christian’s field. Big History, he explains, is the...
DURGA CHEW-BOSE Too Much and Not the Mood. Reviewed by Clare O’Brien
Honesty and self-actualisation are at the core of this debut collection of essays by Durga Chew-Bose. The 14 pieces in Too Much and Not the Mood, varying in length and form, draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, as does the book’s title. The...
HUGH MACKAY Australia Reimagined: Towards a more compassionate, less anxious society. Reviewed by Shelley McInnis
For decades, Mackay has warned in mild tones about the social costs of our retreat into consumerism: now he is calling us out more stridently. It’s been a while since I reviewed one of Hugh Mackay’s books, and when I heard him being interviewed on Radio National about...
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