Non Fiction

Although the tone of their commentaries differs, Jessa Crispin’s What Is Wrong with Men and Simon James Copland’s The Male Complaint are, more or less, examining the same thing: the workings of the patriarchy in general and what specifically has gone wrong, especially in recent times, with what Crispin refers to as ‘the tug of war’ between men and women.

Apple is one of the world’s largest companies. Its market value reached $3 trillion in January 2022, having grown by more than $700 million per day since August 2011 when Tim Cook took over as Chief Executive Officer after an ailing Steve Jobs resigned. Apple began with Jobs and Steve Wozniak ‘tinkering in a garage’. Iconic products followed including the Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPad and, most successful of all, the iPhone. An early slogan aimed to align Apple with ‘the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.’ For a company experiencing huge growth, that image was often at odds with the day-to-day commercial reality.

During the walk she takes with Michelle de Kretser along the Cooks River, the bit that snakes between Hurlstone Park and Tempe, Belinda Castles, the author of Walking Sydney, muses on the impact of Sydney’s geography. ‘On the footpath-climb to skirt the golf course,’ she writes, ‘the village-like nature of Sydney makes itself felt, the way suburbs are enclosed and cut off by ridges and valleys, cliffs and rivers, the tentacles of the harbour. A city’s form has an effect on thinking and ways of being.’

This handsome book is a strange beast: half official report, half pitch to potential clients, half lavishly illustrated history of four decades of collecting Australian art. Clearly, this does not add up. Which is a pity, because Artbank is important to the current visibility, and popular success, of contemporary art in Australia.

Two distinguished professors have joined forces to write an impassioned book about the recent, concerted attacks on science. While they both live and work in the United States, where what they describe as the ‘forces of darkness’ are most active and influential, the problem they describe is truly global. Mann is a celebrated climate scientist who has been a leading voice in the field since the 1980s, while Hotez is a virologist who became involved in the public debate about the Covid-19 pandemic. The central argument of the book is that we face existential crises in both human health and the health of our planet. While the best hope of successfully tackling these challenges relies on science, there is now ‘politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science’, threatening both our ability to advance understanding of these complex issues and, equally important, the freedom of scientists to communicate their understanding.

Living alongside the world’s only native black swans, Australians should be more alive to the provisional nature of truth than most. For thousands of years of European history, the ‘fact’ that ‘all swans are white’ was backed up with an overwhelming data set that only the delusional – or a philosopher – would debate. But as Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out, the difficulty with inductive reasoning is that it can seem incontrovertible all the way up until it is not. But if the truth is always shifting, where do we find solid ground when our lives depend on it? And to what absolutes and experts can we refer in an era of wilful misinformation, institutional mistrust, and anti-expert populism?

Ilya Sutskever was feeling agitated. As Chief Scientist at OpenAI, the company behind the AI models used in ChatGPT and in Microsoft’s products, he was a passionate advocate for the company’s mission of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) before anybody else. OpenAI defines AGI as ‘highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work’, the development of which will benefit ‘all of humanity’. OpenAI’s mission, Sutskever believed, gave humanity its best chance of getting to AGI safely. But he worried about failing the mission. He fretted to his colleagues: What if bad actors came after its technology? What if they cut off his hand and slapped it on a palm scanner to access its secrets?

In his otherwise bleak 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré lets himself have a little fun with the character of Elizabeth Gold. She is an idealistic Jewish woman in her mid-twenties who works in a small library in the London neighbourhood of Bayswater. She is also a member of the British Communist Party. For Liz, however, membership is less a matter of ideology than a token of her moral commitment to peace work and the alleviation of poverty. She is disdainful of her local branch, with its petty ambitions to be ‘a decent little club, nice and revolutionary and no fuss’ – unlike her comrades in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), whose determined struggle against the militarism and decadence of the capitalist West she admires from afar.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is famous in France for his booming eloquence, his rich vocabulary, and his deep knowledge of history and politics. The firebrand orator was born in 1951 in Tangier, Morocco, to parents of Spanish and Sicilian descent, then moved to France with his mother in 1962. After a degree in philosophy and languages he was a schoolteacher before becoming a political organiser and elected politician, notably from inner-city Marseille.

Can a ‘shortest history’ of Turkey, including the expansive history of the Ottoman Empire, work? As well as covering imperial grandeur, it must address complex and sensitive issues such as the Kurdish conflict, the Armenian genocide, Islamism, slavery, and autocracy. Benjamin C. Fortna, a Middle Eastern historian, successfully combines sympathy and interest in Turkey with a candid examination, including of darker aspects of its past.