JOHN HILL On Being a Minister: Behind the mask. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
On Being a Minister is an ideal primer for the political class. We’re in election mode and it’s a long campaign. Plenty of politicians (aspiring and actual) are waiting to be either elected or re-elected. I think of one of my all-time favourite political quotes from...
SAMANTHA TRENOWETH (Ed) Better Than Sex: Women talk about sex and romance in the digital age. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
Better Than Sex is not just a book about the effect of the internet on relationships, but a close look at all the ways of being, meeting, relating and finding love. When I read Samantha Trenoweth’s introduction to her latest anthology Better Than Sex, I had to do a...
HELEN GARNER Everywhere I Look. Reviewed by Michelle McLaren
The Helen Garner of Everywhere I Look is as contradictory as she’s ever been in this collection brimming with highlights. At the opening event of the 2014 Melbourne Writers Festival, Helen Garner read from her then newly released book about the trial of Robert...
SARAH BAKEWELL At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, being, and apricot cocktails. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
At the Existentialist Café takes us into the lives and minds of the famous European philosophers of the 20th century. John-Paul Sartre had bulgy eyes that looked off in different directions. When you sat down with him in a Paris café for a yarn about philosophy, it...
VICKEN BABKENIAN and PETER STANLEY Armenia, Australia & the Great War. Reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Armenia, Australia & the Great War is a rigorously researched history that focuses on Australians’ experiences of the Armenian genocide. In 1915, just hours before the Anzac soldiers began their attack on Gallipoli, the Ottoman Empire put in motion the world’s...
ALICIA SOMETIMES and NICOLE HAYES (Eds) From the Outer: Footy like you’ve never heard it. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
From the Outer, a collection of tributes to and critiques of Aussie Rules, canvasses fresh perspectives on the game its fans just call ‘footy’. This book is well named. In AFL parlance the Outer was the uncovered, and usually unfavourably vantaged, spectator...
MICHAEL WILDING Growing Wild. Reviewed by Inez Baranay
Growing Wild is the entertaining and instructive memoir of a writer and publisher who always took notice, and always took notes. If you’re starting your writing and publishing life in 2016, can you quite imagine how different things were before the tsunami of...
BENJAMIN LAW The Family Law. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
Family memoir at its giddy, poignant best – The Family Law captures with incisive wit what it meant to grow up Asian and gay on Queensland’s suburban Sunshine Coast. Fans of the recent SBS TV series of The Family Law will already be familiar with the idiosyncratic...
DINO HODGE (Ed) Colouring the Rainbow: Blak Queer and Trans perspectives: life stories and essays by First Nations people of Australia. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
The passionate life stories and the essays in Colouring the Rainbow reveal the challenges facing Queer and Trans Indigenous Australians. This powerful collection looks at the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sexuality and also places it within an...
STAN GRANT Talking to My Country. Reviewed by Kathy Gollan
Part polemic, part memoir, Stan Grant’s new book is a passionate account of the toll of a lifetime of negotiating between two cultures. The contradictions of being black in Australia, shown so vividly in this book, are there right from the beginning, in the...
MARK FORSYTH The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the delight of not getting what you wanted. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
The Unknown Unknown illuminates the serendipitous pleasures of book buying. Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, is not one of my heroes. Yet as Mark Forsyth has argued in this exquisite little essay, Rumsfeld’s 2002 phrase ‘unknown unknowns’ (linking Iraq...
Recent Posts
DAVID PRICE The Shameful Isles. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck6 November 2025David Price’s history of Western Australia’s lock hospitals and the [ … ]
BRIAN STODDART Playing the Game: How cricket made Barbados. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress4 November 2025Brian Stoddart’s multi-faceted account of a small island’s cricket history is a [ … ]
ANDREW PIPPOS The Transformations. Reviewed by Linda Godfrey30 October 2025The second novel from Andrew Pippos draws inspiration from the epics of ancient [ … ]
JOHN BANVILLE Venetian Vespers. Reviewed by Naomi Manuell28 October 2025Set in Venice in 1899, John Banville’s new novel blends crime and the gothic as [ … ]