Like several other publishers, UNSW Press and Text Publishing have produced responses to the recent war against Iraq. The intention appears to be to engage critically with popular perceptions of the war before these harden into accepted historical ‘memory’. The potential benefits of quickly produced, historically aware and politically critical books, which collate and deal comprehensively with the existing evidence and arguments raised by the mass media on a particular issue, are obvious. The two main dangers with publications of this type are that editing and production standards may slip and that the desire to compete with mass-media forms may lead to a replication of, rather than an alternative to, standard journalistic commentary.

Raimond Gaita’s edited collection succumbs to the first of these dangers; indeed, both texts would have benefited from a further proofing. It is Geoffrey Barker’s text, however, that is open to the more serious charge of being insufficiently differentiated from reportage.