Cambridge University Press

No doubt there is a diverse readership for a book about the geological evolution of Australia. In fact, the last comprehensive text intended for experts was The Geological Evolution of Australia and New Zealand (1968), by D.A. Brown, K.S.W. Campbell and K.A.W. Crook; and nothing of major scope for a lay audience has appeared for a longer time. In the past forty years, of course, the subject has advanced enormously in a general sense, not the least being the revolution in our understanding of the mobility and interactions of the outer shell of the Earth through the processes labelled ‘plate tectonics’. Our specific geological knowledge of Australia has also progressed significantly.

The gods of the Greeks are uniquely anthropomorphic; they are not only imagined with human bodies but with thoughts and feelings largely similar to our own, except for the fact that they cannot grow old or die, and are thus spared the greatest part of human pain and suffering. They can feel anger at the misbehaviour, or pity for the fate, of mortals, as when Zeus sees that his beloved son Sarpedon is about to be slain (Iliad 16.431 ff.), but compared to us, they ‘live at ease’ (Odyssey 5.122 and elsewhere).

Paul D. Kenny’s impressive and engaging book is a corrective to the well-established body of work on populism. This corpus grew in tandem with the most recent successes of populism that have been a feature of contemporary liberal democracies in the past decade, and are a source of anxiety to many who care about democracy and value pluralism.

Two of my favourite images in Stuart Ward’s important new book reproduce black-and-white photographs. One captures the life-sized butter sculpture of the prince of Wales and his favourite Canadian horse, the star exhibit of the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The other shows a group of protesters in London in 1973 contesting European Economic Community restrictions on imports of Commonwealth cane sugar from the West Indies and Queensland. Most of the faces in the picture are obscured, but the body language of a man to the left of the frame, slumped over his hand-rendered ‘Beat Beet. Keep Cane’ placard, communicates depression and dejection.

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

More than thirty years after the last helicopters left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, the flow of new books on the Vietnam war shows no sign of abating. Among them are some intended for a limited, scholarly market, some for a wider general readership; some for Americans, some for Australians. These three books exemplify some of the trends in both the substance and the style of Vietnam war histories, and illustrate both the virtues and the faults of differing approaches to the most controversial conflict of the twentieth century.

In this week’s ABR podcast, listen to Ronan McDonald discuss one hundred years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, among the most famous books of the twentieth century.

In our postmodern age, when everything travels and travel is a metaphor for everything, travel and travel writing have become the subject of intense scholarly interest and debate. Travel, once largely the domain of geographers, and travel writing, previously relegated to the status of a sub-literary genre, now engage attention from literary studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, and, most fruitfully, from gender and postcolonial studies. Conferences and publications abound.

Earlier this year, I took a group of students to the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to see its impressive Joyce collection. We examined some special books, including lavish editions of Ulysses: the 1935 Limited Editions Club edition, with Matisse’s accompanying etchings; the 1988 Arion Press edition, with illustrations by Robert Motherwell – and various others. But the one that had lured us down Swanston Street was the iconic first edition, with its famous blue cover, fortuitously acquired by the SLV in 1922.

In the latest offerings in Cambridge University Press’s ‘Contemporary Japanese Society’ series, Vera Mackie outlines 130 years of Japanese feminism, while Roger Goodman’s collection explores a decade of policy interventions in that country that challenge a society still based largely on a strict gendered division of labour. Men’s primary role is to be the overworked salaryman warrior, while women’s is to care for dependents, both children and grandparents, in a society that ‘is rapidly becoming the world’s oldest ever human population’. Perhaps the shock of 1989, when women’s birth strike reduced the fertility rate to 1.57, should have been expected.