Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

John Carroll

Guilt Edge

by •
December 1992, no. 147

Wildlife film-makers Richard Southeby and his wife Nicole Vander are filming a duck hunt at Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina, where Greenpeace demonstrators plan to make their presence felt. Their fanatical leader, Simon Rosenberg, has a flowing beard and deeply troubled eyes. His idea is to get his troops in front of the guns, really provoke the shooters and obtain maximum publicity. Remind you of anyone? But then in the early stages of filming, Nicole is blown away into the swamp by an unseen assassin. Who’s responsible? Greenpeace crazies? Duck hunters? Or an international hired hitman known as the Jaguar? You guessed right.

... (read more)

The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism revisited by John Carroll

by •
October 2004, no. 265
Dirk den Hartog reviews ‘The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism revisited’ by John Carroll

His handsome and expanded edition of John Carroll’s Humanism (1993) is given added weight by an epilogue about the meaning of September 11. It can now be read alongside his recent The Western Dreaming (2001), which tried to chart a way out of the spiritual atrophy of late modernity in which, as this book argues, the unfolding of humanism from the Renaissance on has left us – with its egoistic individualism, its rationalistic blindness to limits and its rancorous hostility to the sacred.

... (read more)

'September 11: A Symposium'

September 2002, no. 244

Never far from one’s mind these days, the events of September 11, 2001, and their direct aftermath in Afghanistan and elsewhere, had to be prominent in this month’s issue of ABR, such is their complex resonance and ubiquitous iconography. To complement Morag Fraser’s essay in this issue on the consequences of ‘September 11’ for civic ...

Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture by John Carroll

by •
April 1994, no. 159
Bronte Adams reviews 'Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture' by John Carroll

When Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth appeared in Britain, British feminists asked, ‘where has Naomi Wolf been for the last 20 years?’ The same question might well be asked of John Carroll. His assessment of humanism seems imperiously oblivious to structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of the humanist edifice.

... (read more)

Guilt Edge

by •
September 1992, no. 144

The remarkable Peter Corris has done it again, producing his third book this year, with probably a couple still to come. I say remarkable because, with the occasional lapse, he manages to maintain a high standard of entertainment despite being prolific. No real writer, of course, would countenance publishing one book a year, let alone four or five, but fortunately for crime buffs this is not a problem for Mr Carris, who, one suspects, would happily produce a book every month if the publishers let him.

... (read more)

Letters

by •
August 1987, no, 93

Dear Madam,

I don’t usually believe in responding to reviews, but Kenneth Gelder’s review (ABR June 87) of The Illustrated Treasury of Australian Stories, which I edited, raises a few points which are worth a reply.

... (read more)

Guilt by John Carroll

by •
February–March 1986, no. 78
A.F. Davies reviews 'Guilt' by John Carroll

This odd little book could be a worthy antipodean entry in the Bead Game, the semi-religious competitive ritual that Herman Hesse in his Magister Ludi (1945) saw steadily engrossing the high intellects of the West as we neared the year 2000 CE. Players were challenged to confront the full breadth of human culture and compose a personal Hand, a sequence of allusions to past high moments of faith, science or art, whose novel juxtaposition and hidden correspondences would both deeply inform and spiritually enrich. Because they lived impotent and dejected amid the rubble of an exhausted civilisation, Hesse’s players had no more gratifying occupation, and, of course, the introduction of new beads treating of the culture of the recent past or anything faintly contemporary was severely discouraged.

... (read more)

Sceptical Sociology by John Carroll

by •
May 1981, no. 30
Warren Osmond reviews 'Sceptical Sociology' by John Carroll

Sceptical Sociology is really a set of essays, some of them previously published, by the Reader in Sociology at La Trobe University. It contains a long introductory piece which gives the book its title, a concluding confession, and a number of vignettes which Carroll calls ‘stories’. The book as a whole is a display of the perversity of brilliance.

... (read more)