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Andrew Bacevich is a former West Point graduate, a principled man on the conservative side of politics who considered it wrong for wealthy citizens to leave the fighting of America’s wars to the poor and disadvantaged. He had fought in Vietnam, and his son, a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, had volunteered for duty in Iraq. Just before Bacevich Sr was to attend the Sydney Writers’ Festival in June 2007, he received word that his son had been killed in Iraq. He cancelled his engagement in Sydney, and sent a poignant letter explaining his absence. It is a great pity that he was unable to come. The book that Bacevich was due to speak about is one of the most trenchant accounts I have read about contemporary American military culture. It should give any thinking Australian pause about the growing influence of American doctrine, strategy, training, equipment and choice of weapons over the Australian Defence Force.

The planning history of our cities is one that has received surprisingly little attention. While the catalogue abounds in detailed studies – Adelaide and Canberra between them account for the bulk of this literature – national overviews, much less international contexts, are thin on the ground. In this rarefied atmosphere, Robert Freestone has been a generous contributor. His earlier Model Communities: The Garden City movement in Australia (1989) provided a comprehensive overview of urban planning in the period here under review (1900–30). Designing Australian Cities now provides a complementary overlay.

Does any male under thirty not employed in the English department of a university really like Jane Austen? At least Shakespeare wakes you up now and then with a spot of violence and bloody murders.

This literary gender divide is at the heart of Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight (Penguin, $19.95 pb, 244 pp), Nick Earls and Rebecca Sparrow’s funny story about a male and female student writing a story together, inspired, as an author’s note informs us, by an Internet story about a male and female student writing a story together. Very metafictional.

Creative Writing courses – those ostensible hothouses of creative ferment whose methods and very existence have been so heatedly debated in these pages and elsewhere – often appear to those of us on the outside as the breeding ground for several subspecies of writer. On the one hand, there are the determinedly postmodernist, whose highly ironic and heavily footnoted metafiction is, on average, about fifty per cent less clever than they like to think it is. On the other, there are the magic realists and wannabe lyricists, whose lilting, pastel-coloured prose seems more at home in the pages of a teenager’s personal diary than it does in those of a serious anthology. Then there are the plain-speaking reporter types, who should probably be doing journalism but, for one reason or another, have chosen Creative Writing instead.

Bob Burton is not one to pull punches: early in Inside Spin he describes the public relations (PR) industry as one dominated by a ‘culture of secrecy’ with its practitioners operating ‘on the basis that they are most successful when they are nowhere to be seen’. That the industry is largely unregulated adds to the sense of unease that many Australians feel about its activities.

If you look carefully at a political cartoon, the most remarkable thing is the quantity of latent information it depends on. Opening Russ Radcliffe’s collection from the Howard years at random, I spot something from one of the nation’s less fabled cartoonists, Vince O’Farrell of the Illawarra Mercury. It is a picture of a military aircraft marked Labor, barrelling along the ground. The pilot has a pointy nose and broad girth, and the co-pilot’s voice bubble tells us, ‘I say skipper … That’s the end of the runway and we still haven’t taken off’. The whole story of Bomber Beazley’s last, tortured term as Opposition leader is there in an image and a couple of words that takes only seconds to assimilate.

Napoleon’s Double, by Antoni Jach, is another in the series of fictions inspired by the larger-than-life figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. It would be wrong, however, to think that this is an historical novel about Napoleon the man. The operative word in the title is the word ‘double’, and the imaginative writing in the novel ‘doubles’ history, illuminating it. Doubles abound in the work: of the characters, but also of central themes and meanings.

In the early seventeenth century, the German princely territory of the Palatinate burst on to the centre of the European political stage. In August 1619 the Elector Palatine Frederick V – ruler of one of the most prosperous and culturally vibrant territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and a leader of Protestants throughout Europe – was elected king of Bohemia. This put him in opposition to the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, an Austrian Hapsburg and leader of the Catholic forces, who had been deposed a year earlier by the same rebellious Bohemian estates which then elected Frederick. These events quickly fuelled what has come to be known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48), one of the most ferocious in Europe’s bloody history.

This is Agnes Nieuwenhuizen’s third guide to teenage reading: Good Books for Teenagers (1992) was followed by More Good Books for Teenagers (1995). Thankfully, this latest instalment is not Even More Good Books for Teenagers, but the much less prescriptively titled Right Book, Right Time: 500 Great Reads for Teenagers. Whereas ‘good’ collocated all too easily with ‘a good breakfast’ – as in bran – ‘great’ communicates a certain quality of excellence or a joyful exclamation. Either way, we immediately understand that when there is chemistry between young people and books something exciting, of both literary and personal significance, is going on.