No 257 - December, 2003 / January, 2004

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https://hdl.handle.net/2328/386
Ian Britain reviews Germaine Greer's About the Boy
Julian Burnside reviews Don Watson's Death Sentence
Peter Rose reviews Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt

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Browsing No 257 - December, 2003 / January, 2004 by Issue Date

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    Memories of the Changing 'G'. "The Temple Down the Road" by Brian Matthews [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-11) Smith, Amanda
    "The Temple Down the Road" is a book of considerable enjoyment for those who have at some time or other succumbed to the boisterous charms of the MCG. It is a meander through the history of the site and the stadium, a personal memoir of events and experiences, and a reflection on the role of the MCG in the sporting, spiritual and cultural landscape of its city, and beyond.
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    PEN Joins "ABR"
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Teo, Hsu-Ming
    International PEN is a worldwide organisation of writers, consisting of 130 centres in ninety-one countries. PEN was founded in 1921 to promote friendship and cooperation among writers everywhere, regardless of their political positions. It fights for freedom of expression and opposes political censorship. Above all, it vigorously defends those writers who suffer under oppressive regimes.
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    Surviving the Bearpit. "A Pasty-faced Nothing" by Mike Munro [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Bowden, Tim
    I must confess I picked up this celebrity autobiography, complete with embossed cover and a price suggestive of a huge print run, without anticipation. I could not have been more wrong. Mike Munro’s excoriating and frank account of his abused childhood and early years in journalism chronicles a survival story that is Dickensian in scope and impact.
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    Bad Actors. "Vernon God Little" by D.B.C. Pierre. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Ley, James
    "Vernon God Little" is a black comedy and a vicious satire on the cruelty and narcissism of American society. Most of the action takes place in the town of Martirio, Texas, a small pocket of affluence ringed by decaying suburbs and populated by a collection of grotesques of varying degrees of unpleasantness. This novel is, in the end, morally ambiguous. When it concludes, the question of whether Vernon has succeeded or capitulated is left unresolved. Most likely, it is unresolvable. But that’s the Human Condition for you. Watch out for that fucker.
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    Advances, Contents, Letters, Contributors and Imprints.
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12)
    This item contains miscellaneous pieces from this issue.
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    Lost Edens. "Other Gravities" by Kevin Gillam and "A Tasmanian Paradise Lost" by Graeme Hetherington [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Edwards, Brian
    Hetherington's poems are black poems in terms of their fixation with dark histories and fascinating compulsions. As the final poem concedes, the investigatory re-imaginings may be bleak but they provide solace, too — a take on history and identity that is communal and personal. It is a powerful collection. Kevin Gillam’s "Other Gravities" presents a very different mode of writing. In these short poems, with predominantly short-line forms, he offers glimpses. This book, too, allows the varieties of Eden lost.
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    Mad About the Boy. "The Boy" by Germaine Greer. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Britain, Ian
    Taboo - or not taboo? That is the question you soon start asking yourself if you bother with the text of this book and its purported revelations on the subject of ‘male beauty’. It is a stimulating question, but you end up wondering if the publishers, at least, mean you to go to such bother when they’ve hardly gone to any themselves, in the way of editing, to ensure some cogency in their celebrity author’s arguments.
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    Giant Light Buckets. "Stromlo: An Australian Observatory" by Tom Frame and Don Faulkner [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Williams, Robyn
    For whom is this book intended? Who needs the detail of instruments and their capacity, committees and their deliberations, institutions and their rivalries? It is not, according to the authors, 'intended for professional or academic astronomers', though they hope these will 'find much of interest'. It is therefore, by implication, meant for those of us with a lay interest in the cosmos and the struggles required to persuade the leaders of this rich country to support mainstream physics, for which Australia should have a box seat.
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    A Fine Line. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Clark, Sherryl
    This article is a review of various Children's Picture Books, including: Brian Caswell, illus. Matt Ottley, "Hyram and B."; John Heffernan, illus. Freya Blackwood, "Two Summers"; Tom Keneally, illus. Gillian Johnson, "Roos in Shoes"; Sue Lawson, illus. Caroline Magerl, "My Gran's Different"; David Suzuki and Sarah Ellis, illus. Sheena Lott, "Salmon Forest"; and Colin Thompson, "The Violin Man".
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    Searching for Goya. "Goya" by Robert Hughes [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) McQueen, Humphrey
    For the tourist who knows little about Spain or Goya, Hughes’s account will serve. It rescues Goya from the Hollywood film "The Naked Maja" (1959), in which he had an affair with the Duchess of Alba, played by Ava Gardner. Readers familiar with the basics can follow Hughes’s example by turning to the scholarship of Francis Klingender, Fred Licht or Janis Tomlinson, whose insights Hughes acknowledges. Meanwhile, Hughes might be left to ponder whether he is to criticism what Mengs was to Spanish art before Goya.
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    Colliding Brazils. "A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions" by Peter Robb. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Ireland, Rowan
    Australian writer Peter Robb has once again written a whole, complex, foreign society into our comprehension. This time it is Brazil, its myriad worlds of experience, its cruelly stolid immobility and exhilarating changefulness, its very incoherence, somehow made accessible to our understanding.
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    Orwell's Legacies. "Orwell's Australia: From Cold War to Culture Wars" by Dennis Glover. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Bramston, Troy
    In recent years, Orwell’s legacy has been examined and re-examined, with many trying to unravel his words and deeds to discover their true meaning. The left and right have invoked and condemned Orwell, who expressed progressive and conservative views, opinions that were shaped over time, as a result of experience, instinct, observation and thought. Glover’s appeal to the left to understand Howard’s Australia in the context of Orwell's thought is timely and perceptive.
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    Aung Myint.
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Leith, Denise
    Twenty-one years in jail for writing and distributing a pamphlet. This was the sentence that the Burmese junta’s military court handed down to Aung Myint, a Burmese poet, journalist and member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).
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    Best Children's Books [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) England, Katharine
    This work is a compilation of favourite children's books by Katharine England, Kaye Keck, Stella Lees, Pam Macintyre, Agnes Nieuwenhuizen, Judith Ridge and Margaret Robson Kett.
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    Funny Inside Feelings. "The Uncyclopedia" by Gideon Haigh and "Names From Here and Far: The New Holland Dictionary of Names" by William T.S. Noble. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Ludowyk, Frederick
    There is a fundamental problem with Noble's book. Nowhere are the principles of inclusion and exclusion explained in any way. The title of the book, despite the fact that ‘New Holland’ is also the name of the publisher, leads us to expect that it is dealing with names that exist in Australia — indeed, the blurb on the back cover describes the book as ‘a comprehensive reference to names in Australia’. There may well be very good reasons why many names do not appear in the book, but those reasons are nowhere stated. While there may be a dig at the seriousness of the standard encyclopedia in the title of Gideon Haigh's "Uncyclopedia", and while the structure of the book subverts the order of the standard encyclopedia, the writer is clearly a lover of the often curious facts an encyclopedia can store. If there is parody here, it is directed at those earnestly serious and seriously dull ‘books of lists’.
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    Borrowed Glamour. "The Boy" by Julian Davies. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Richardson, Owen
    It is Davies’s failure to think his way fully into the material that keeps "The Boy" middling warm rather than hot. Erotic fiction, after all, is a kind of pastoral, and its demands on the imagination of the writer are exacting. You can see Davies trying for the rapt quality of James Salter’s "A Sport and a Pastime" or John Scott’s "What I Have Written", but he never gets there.
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    Tropical Dreams. "Geckos and Moths" by Patricia Johnson and "Forever in Paradise" by Apelu Tielu. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) McGirr, Michael
    "Geckos and Moths" deals incisively, yet without histrionics, with the unravelling of a dream and the fraying of an Australian colonial fiction. "Forever in Paradise" is, on the other hand, unable to deal realistically with human imperfection. The book is infatuated with its central character, Solomona Tuisamoa. The problem is that Solomona is a pompous bore. He is such an impossibly wise, just, kind, caring and virtuous man that it is difficult to relate to him at any level.
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    Best Books of the Year.
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Various
    This article identifies favourite publications from 2003 selected by the following writers: Tony Birch, Neal Blewett, Ian Britain, Alison Broinowski, Paul Brunton, Inga Clendinnen, Martin Duwell, Morag Fraser, Andrea Goldsmith, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Peter Goldsworthy, Bridget Griffen-Foley, Clive James, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, Brian McFarlane, Brenda Niall, Ros Pesman, Peter Porter, Peter Steele, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and Robyn Williams.
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    Kuta Madness. "Back From the Dead: Peter Hughes' Story of Survival and Hope After Bali" by Patrick Lindsay [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Crosswell, Brent
    Patrick Lindsay's "Back from the Dead", one of the first books published on the Bali bombing, is primarily an evocation of the inferno and its aftermath, through the eyes of those who survived it. This book will prompt readers in unexpected ways. It will certainly repay the reading.
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    Mind Hoards. "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (Quarterly Essay 11)" by Germaine Greer and "Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance (Quarterly Essay 12)" by David Malouf. [review]
    (Australian Book Review, 2003-12) Fraser, Morag
    With Greer proposing that white Australians embrace Aboriginality, that ‘the gubba move towards the blackfella’, and with Malouf working to the title "Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance", one might expect, at best, a frisson of dissonance. But the gods had more in mind. The two essays, about as different as can be in cadence and argument, nonetheless intersect, sometimes run parallel. Malouf, like Greer, is engaged in a radical exploration of the way Australians understand themselves and their history, and in a language alive to depths of thought and feeling, not just the surface reflexes of nationalism. In the ripples of deep thought, the writers overlap.
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