Review

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

In a 2010 interview, Tobin Siebers, the author of Disability Theory and Disability Aesthetics, argued that ‘[d]isability still seems to be the last frontier of justifiable human inferiority’. At the same time, he suggested, the evolution and success of modern art owed much to ‘its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful’: ‘No object has a greater capacity to be accepted at the present moment as an aesthetic representation than the disabled body.’ A central problem for Siebers was the disconnect between ‘two cultures of beauty’. Could the ‘aesthetic culture’ that celebrated disability influence the dominant ‘commercial culture’ that stigmatised it?

This new book by Clive Hamilton and Myra Hamilton provides a detailed and elegantly written analysis of the nature and causes of inequality in Australia – a problem that has increased markedly over the past forty years. The study focuses on the role of élite privilege, rather than on wealth itself. The authors assert that élite privilege – which they regard as a species of advantage distinct from that of male and racial privilege – has not been sufficiently theorised and, more importantly, is hidden in plain view. The aim of the book is to ‘make visible the practices, beliefs and attitudes that characterise elite privilege and allow its reproduction’. A large part of the book, written by this father and daughter team, is concerned with demonstrating the ways in which the non-meritocratic nature of Australian society is systematically concealed.

The End of Empires and a World Remade is Martin Thomas’s magnum opus. Subtitled ‘A global history of decolonisation’, it is more than 600 pages long, of which nearly 300 pages consist of Notes and Bibliography covering more than 2,000 articles and books. The overwhelming majority of these were published in the twenty-first century – an indication of the burgeoning academic interest in decolonisation.

For Hillary Rodham Clinton’s admirers, Something Lost, Something Gained cements her place in America’s political pantheon. For her detractors, well, it probably confirms their view. When autobiography morphs into autohagiography, the result is always the same – self-promotion and self-justification become coterminous. Anodyne description masquerades as deep insight, and triviality promotes the Panglossian self-satisfaction that denies the reader any insight into how the author overcame more than her fair share of embarrassment and setbacks.

When you are languishing in a prison cell, you can become intensely creative. John Bunyan, Jean Genet, and Miguel de Cervantes used their time to write classic works of literature. On the eve of his hanging, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini wrote a memoir to explain why he set out to murder eight people. Louis is fictional, the anti-hero of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Part one of Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls – a homage to magical realism and some of its greatest proponents, including Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez – presents an unnamed narrator searching for truth in a fantastical library behind a guarded wall. The two further parts also explore the idea of the inhabitation of libraries. Indeed, this will be familiar to Murakami’s readers, for he has written about libraries before. For instance, in his children’s novella The Strange Library (1983) a schoolboy is imprisoned in the under-ground maze of his local library and told to memorise books.

Sally Rooney inspires large quantities of what is known these days as ‘discourse’. This dubious honour is a result of her becoming very successful at a very young age, a misfortune compounded by being cast as a generational representative. She is a ‘millennial’, apparently. Her popularity has not gone unpunished. There have been several high-profile attempts to cut her reputation down to size. She is also Irish, which has led to her being scorned as a privileged white woman, the Irish people famously knowing nothing of suffering and oppression.

Michel Houellebecq’s novels cover a lot of territory. His approach to writing is a totalising one, offering a complex picture of contemporary society, often including its prehistory and its near or sometimes distant future. Annihilation (first published in 2022 and now available in English) bears all the hallmarks of this approach: a description of a sad dinner where two government ministers discuss their failed marriages is interrupted by digressions on the current state of the European car market and the impact of recent constitutional reforms on the upcoming presidential elections; a hospital bedside visit is punctuated by reflections on the French medical system and a comparative analysis of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. The novel features typical Houellebecqian characters who, in the author’s words, have reached a ‘kind of standardised despair’ and ‘the deterioration of reasons for living’.

In this important book, Colin Golvan – a distinguished senior counsel – recounts some of the most notorious cases of copyright abuses endured by Indigenous artists, their work taken without permission, attribution, or adequate compensation and used on objects ranging from souvenir T-shirts to expensive carpets. An intellectual property barrister, Golvan leads us through the intricacies of these cases with lawyerly precision and poise, championing the role of copyright in bringing justice to Indigenous people.