Archive

This book, The Battle for Asia, is the most recent and ambitious contribution from the group of Australian political economists, formerly based at Murdoch University, working on East Asian political economy. This book upholds the group’s Marxian structuralist orientation and advances its critique of ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation. The book’s ambition to integrate post-World War II international political economy, Asia’s development trajectories and US hegemony widens this group’s analytical lens and deepens its links with the anti-globalisation movement. For Mark T. Berger, ‘many of the organizations and individuals involved [in the movement] are asking the right questions and pointing in the right direction’.

Berger shares with this movement the belief that the US is the single hegemonic power driving the global economy. He presents capitalism as an inherently unequal system prone to crisis and monopolisation. Global corporations, leading states, mainstream intellectuals and international bureaucrats are its shapers and main beneficiaries. All others are its excluded subjects.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.

On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy ... 

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

In these lines, taken from ‘The African Spider Cures’, Judy Johnson might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’s second poetry collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of the world with snippets from the poet’s personal life. In the title poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin shepherd-boy’s chance discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: ‘There is no connection between the two events,’ she writes, ‘[…] Yet I encounter coincidence.’