December 2024, no. 471
In November, ABR surveys some of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers on Australia-US relations, asking whether our almost compulsive fascination with the US election is good for Australian democracy. Elsewhere, Josh Bornstein shows how corporations feed the social-media beast, and Ruth Balint cautions against mob politics in reporting. Paul Giles praises Tim Winton’s new novel and its ‘colloquial brevity’, and our reviewers consider new works by Michelle de Kretser, Alex Miller, Rachel Kushner, and Alan Hollinghurst. We examine life writing on Nancy Pelosi and Race Matthews, and books on film, theatre, law, heritage, robot tales, medicine, information networks, and much, much more.
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Full Contents
China
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is shaping China and the world by Kevin Rudd
by Neil Thomas
Memoir
A Political Memoir: Intellectual combat in the Cold War and the culture wars by Robert Manne
Memoir
Noble Fragments: The maverick who broke up the world’s greatest book by Michael Visontay
by Jason Steger
Indigenous Studies
Protecting Indigenous Art: From T-shirts to the flag by Colin Golvan
Fiction
Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside
by David Jack
Fiction
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Memoir
Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on life, love, and liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton
by Allan Behm
History
The End of Empires and a World Remade: A global history of decolonization by Martin Thomas
Poetry
Raging Grace: Australian writers speak out on disability edited by Andy Jackson, Esther Ottaway, and Kerry Shying
Theatre
The Playbook: A story of theatre, democracy and the making of a culture war by James Shapiro
by Paul Giles
United Kingdom
Seven Children: Inequality and Britain’s next generation by Danny Dorling
Spectacles of Waste by Warwick Anderson
by Nick Haslam
History