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Karl Kruszelnicki

As Eric Hobsbawn points out in his autobiography, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (2002), ‘the world needs historians more than ever, especially skeptical ones’. History, however, is not a popular subject in today’s schools. Three of these four books make attempts, variously successful, to engage young readers in a sense of the past. The other is a bizarre compilation of odd details, and could be considered an account of the history of certain sciences; it almost fits into the historical ambit.

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How to Play Netball by Jodie Clark and Kristen Moore & How to Play Cricket by Garrie Hutchinson

by
December 2002-January 2003, no. 247

I was given these books for review just as I was finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Its combination of fictional characters, information about language, architecture and war, and visual images reminded me that reading has so many functions. We read in order to imagine, to learn, to make discoveries. My admiration for Austerlitz also put me in mind of national differences. On the cover is a photograph of a child dressed as a pageboy and holding a feathered hat. His serious gaze and self-conscious posture mark him as a product of a culture where the intellect has precedence over the physical. Pale hair and a gently rounded face indicate his European origins, but otherwise it is almost impossible to relate him to any Australian child.

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