Dennis Altman

That quintessential Australian–American, Rupert Murdoch, recently counselled Australians against ‘the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe’. While I confess to a certain Schadenfreude when the chief propagandist for the second Iraqi war, which has contributed mightily to that European alienation, seeks to come to grips with the war’s consequences, I think it unlikely that Australia will go down the European path. For Australians, the American relationship looms much larger than it does for Europeans. As Dennis Altman shows in his elegant and argumentative essay 51^st State?, the relationship is deep-rooted in our history, psyche, and culture. We were, after all, one by-product of the American War of Independence. For him, the danger is not so much anti-Americanism but that, in ‘a world dominated by the American imaginary’, we, like Rupert’s News Corporation, might lose our national identity.

Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, it is impossible to buy an airline ticket online in the United States with a credit card issued abroad. When I needed a ticket from Boston to Washington last year, and after numerous unsuccessful arguments with airline websites and 1800 numbers, I dropped into the local Harvard travel agency. There was a welcome familiarity in discovering that it was a branch of STA, one of more than 400 branches operated around the world by the Australian-based company.

The editors of Conversations with Gore Vidal – a recently published selection of interviews conducted with Vidal over the course of his long career – introduce the volume by quoting a comment made in the New Yorker in 1960: ‘Nothing’s easier nowadays than to get the feeling of being surrounded by Gore Vidal.’ They go on to remark that, today: ‘Gore Vidal is again seemingly everywhere.’ Although this is something of an exaggeration, it is true that Vidal and his diverse oeuvre appear to have received more serious attention in the past few years than previously. Now eighty years old, this unique and often controversial figure in American culture has lived long enough to see accepted into the mainstream several of his ideas once regarded as outrageous or ‘unpatriotic’. Indeed, as a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, quoted by Altman, remarked in 2004: ‘Vidal may be in tune with the zeitgeist again …’

Don Aitken was born in 1937, Hugh Stretton in 1924. They have both had distinguished academic careers, making important contributions to the development of Australian social science, and at various points have been prominent in public debate. Both of these books might be seen as reflections on the current state of Australia, about which the younger Aitken is clearly more optimistic than is Stretton.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and e-mails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

Books Alive

Dear Editor,

Jeremy Fisher criticises the 2005 Books Alive campaign (Letters, ABR September 2005) for failing to do things it was not set up to do, and then acknowledges that it does the things it was set up to do extremely well. Fisher says: ‘The ASA has no issue with increasing the sales of Australian books. But that no longer appears to be the focus of Books Alive. Books Alive had the potential to be a unique opportunity to promote Australian literary culture. It has mutated into “an Australian Government initiative that aims to encourage all Australians to experience the joys of reading”.’

The tragedy of Israel is that it wishes, simultaneously, to be a liberal democratic nation, one whose citizenship is defined by universal norms, and at the same time a Jewish state, where even Palestinians born within the borders of the country are denied full equality. I still remember my unease when I visited Israel many years ago at being asked when I, a secular Jew, intended to ‘come home’.

To celebrate the best books of 2004 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors included Dennis Altman, Brenda Niall, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Morag Fraser and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

Chalmers Johnson, who began his career in the US Navy and became a consultant to the CIA, is one of the most respected American experts on East Asia and international affairs. Over the past few years, he has emerged as a significant academic critic of the Bush administration, and what he sees as a dangerously reckless escalation of US imperialism and militarism.