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The first thing the general reader will need to know about this book is that it is not for the general reader. It too often and too closely approaches the clipped and densely allusive style of the average scientific paper, designed for initiates only and a small band of them at that. It uses too many words from the jargon of physics, chemistry and even geology with insufficient or no explanation. Even if Scientific American and New Scientist are your cup of tea, this book could exceed your powers of digestion.

State Premiers are usually required to be articulate; to be literate and civilised as well is an unexpected bonus.

After almost nine years in office, one of our most literate Premiers since or before Federation, has set down in urbane, often oratorical prose, his observations on the way Australia is going.

Fifteen years ago the British urban historian Asa Briggs wrote a short but stimulating essay on Melbourne in the Victorian era in his Victorian Cities. In thirty pages he not only challenged the conventional assumptions of Australian historiography of that time (specifically deploring the lack of systematic study of the Australian city) but also threw out various ideas about how to approach Australian urban history. It took some time for historians here to take up Briggs’ challenge, but with the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne Australian urban history has come of age.

This book in praise of the potato, the most versatile and delicious of vegetables, is one I thoroughly enjoyed. Having a penchant for the potato I am an easy mark for the creative use of this lovely vegetable.

Ms Souter shows us over and over again in this well defined book how very diversified one can be with the potato. She gives general information on the types of potato grown in Australia and those types usually available at the local markets, which type to use according to methods of cooking, and growing and storing potatoes.

A curious fact of modern history is that it seems to take a single decade, sometimes less, for an exploited or colonised people to become, in turn, exploiters or colonisers. This is especially true in Asian history: the Chinese conquest of Tibet, the forceful takeover by India of Portuguese Goa and more recently, in 1975, the military campaign launched by Indonesian forces against East Timor.

 This volume of stories adds to the spate of books by or about Turgenev that have appeared recently yet it cannot be said to be redundant, as it provides an English version of five novellas not readily available in a collected form. Since the translator’s argument rests on the importance of the frequently neglected later part of Turgenev’s oeuvre (i.e. the shorter works appearing after the major novels) to a true understanding of Turgenev’s philosophical and spiritual history, then obviously the English-speaking world must have access to it, and they should be pleased to make the acquaintance of this accurate and easy translation.

Shalom, compiled by Nancy Keesing is I think a brilliant and moving collection of short stories.

Ms Keesing, an indefatigable compiler, has brought together for the first time a selection of Jewish stories and. arranged them in three sections, each one of which throws light on a certain aspect of Jewish life, either in Europe, in Australia over a long period, or in the present Australia-Israel conflict. This is a fine and sensitive arrangement of the stories.