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Book of the Week

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This fascinating and frustrating volume is really three books in one: a compilation of revelatory portraits of seven modern economic crises; a beautiful essay on language, literature, and finance; and an effort to draw lessons from the seven calamities. Of the three books, two are brilliant, one less so.

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For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

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Near the end of this biography of Frank Moorhouse, author Catharine Lumby tells a story that will strike retrospective fear into the heart of any male reader who has ever climbed a tree. Watching an outdoor ceremony in which a cohort of Cub Scouts was being initiated into the Boy Scout troop to which he belonged himself, and having climbed a tree to get a better view, the young Moorhouse ‘slipped, and he slid a couple of metres down the trunk of the tree with his legs wrapped around it. He came to rest on a jagged branch, his crotch caught in the fork.’

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Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko

by
October 2023, no. 458

Edenglassie is the seventh novel by acclaimed Bunjalung novelist Melissa Lucashenko. Set in a brief historical window – a little-known interim of time and place after transportation of convicts had ended but before Queensland became an independent colony in 1859 – this narrative moves seamlessly between what whitefellas might call past, present, and near future. In this interface, Lucashenko creates characters that cause the reader to not only ask – what if? but also where to now?

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The best literary short fiction gives the author an opportunity to stretch their limbs from poetry into abstraction, painting emotion in words without the need to make figurative or even internal sense. The story does not need to be a medium for delivering ‘story’, as such, but can become a container of emotion, for the feelings the artist intends to deliver. The emotion delivered by literary fiction teaches us to feel empathy for the characters, making the short form an effective empathy delivery vehicle.

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As I read Everything You Need to Know about the Voice, I was acutely conscious of the significance of the timing – just weeks before Australians are due to vote in a referendum on whether we should establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to parliament or not. Over the months leading up to the referendum, we have witnessed a significant rise in lies, disinformation, and misinformation, all intended to influence voters, and hence the outcome. This book provides timely and essential reading that rebuts the tide of misinformation.

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Forty-three years ago, David Marr – journalist, broadcaster, biographer, political commentator, and public intellectual – published his first book, a sharp, memorable biography of Garfield Barwick, former Liberal attorney-general and chief justice of the High Court. After the appearance of Patrick White: A life in 1991, long considered one of the best biographies ever written in Australia, he might well have followed the more predictable path of the serial biographer. But Marr’s trajectory has proved to be anything but predictable.

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In her short life, Lesbia Harford (1891–1927) created a body of poems which have become increasingly important to scholars and poets in understanding both the impact of poetic modernism in Australia and shifting concepts of gender, class, and the tensions between a personal and a collective politics. While Oliver Dennis’s 2014 Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford presents Harford’s full oeuvre, the new Text Classics edition, selected and introduced by Gerald Murnane, brings a sharp and accessible focus on this seminal Australian poet, highlighting her key themes and demonstrating a literary style that straddled worlds: from the formal structures and decorous themes of late nineteenth-century poetry to the challenges to form, voice, and subject matter that characterised the emerging revolutions of literary modernism.

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Our planet is in trouble. Climate change is real. Widespread, tumultuous change has occurred in our atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and cryosphere, driving weather and climate extremes, anomalies, and record heat across the globe. Already, the damage has been substantial. ‘[Climate change] has led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people’ (Sixth Assessment Report, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC). And the cause is well known. Decades of research and legions of scientists attest unequivocally that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, threatening to precipitate unprecedented levels of global heating across the planet.

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In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

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