Jay Daniel Thompson

In A Good Death, Rodney Syme outlines his case for the legalisation of euthanasia. Drawing on his experience working with seriously ill patients over several decades, Syme (a medical practitioner) advances the controversial argument that ‘physician-assisted death’ is a humane response to ‘intolerable and otherwise unrelievable suffering’.

Pornification, The Porn Report and Princesses and Pornstars are three recent entries into the burgeoning academic field known as ‘porn studies’. All three books aim to move beyond the simplistic ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments that have traditionally surrounded pornography. Instead, each text explores the challenges and complexities of living in a world where sexually explicit material is more prevalent than ever before.

Selling Sex provides a comprehensive history of prostitution in Australia. In 342 pages, Raelene Frances (currently Dean of Arts at Monash University) describes the changing nature of sex work in Australian society from the colonial period to the present day. Frances’s text is bril­liantly researched and provides many important insights for readers interested in Australian history and culture, as well as the history of sex and gender.

Narrative and Media provides a lengthy and extensively researched overview of one of the central features of contemporary popular culture. The four authors (all of whom have been scholars at Sydney University) discuss the roles that narrative has played in mediums such as television, cinema and radio. In the introductory chapter, the authors explain the importance of their topic: ‘In a world dominated by print and electronic media, our sense of reality is increasingly structured by narrative.’ Later chapters address issues such as ‘narrative time’, ‘print news as narrative’, and the impact upon narrative conventions of postmodern and post-structuralist thought. In doing this, the authors also provide a ‘consideration of industry-related issues that affect the production and consumption of media texts’.

IBy the Balls opens in the 1950s, when young Laszlo Urge and his family were forced to leave Stalinist Hungary and head to Australia. Laszlo was shocked to find his new country to be a ‘dry and colourless’ place where soccer (which he refers to as ‘football’) was unpopular. However, this situation was to change. In the following decades, Laszlo became ‘Les Murray’, a popular television sports commentator who has publicly championed his favourite game.

Glen St John Barclay and Caroline Turner’s Humanities Research Centre offers the first historical overview of this prestigious Australian National University-based institution. Their book is an extremely dense yet remarkably comprehensive and well-written homage to one of the key international sites of scholarly research in the humanities.