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In Defence of Food is several books rolled into one. It is a primer on nutrition science, a contextual exposé on what we put in our mouths, an advertisement for the joys of eating and even something of a self-help diet and behavioural book. It is also part of Michael Pollan’s ongoing conversation with the reading (and eating) public, and is more satisfying when placed within his oeuvre, particularly The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006).

Mostly, though, In Defence of Food is a polemic about ‘the problem of the Western diet, and how we might plot our escape from it’. Pollan even cites a shiny new eating disorder for us to worry about: an ‘orthorexic’ is a person ‘with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating’. While Pollan writes about the United States, we only have to read the ingredient lists on our supermarket products, or reflect upon the controversy over the meat-heavy (or meat-rich, depending on your viewpoint) CSIRO diet books, to recognise the Australian relevance of the ‘Western diet’ debate.

Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear comprises a trio of essays commissioned by the Sydney PEN. According to its website, PEN is ‘an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia’. In this book, three major Australian authors discuss the roles that tolerance, prejudice and fear have played in contemporary Australian society. This is a society in which traditional ideas about national identity and race have been variously championed and attacked. The result is thought-provoking and engrossing.

The text opens with Christos Tsiolkas’s essay on tolerance. Tsiolkas argues that it is no coincidence that a liberal ‘politics of tolerance’ has become popular during an historical period in which neo-conservatism has flourished. Gideon Haigh follows with an essay on the cultural ‘narcissism’ that swept through Australia during John Howard’s eleven years as prime minister. During this period, Haigh argues, Australian culture became ‘shallow, thick-skinned, aloof from the world’s problems, impervious to the sufferings of others – then retracting in angry confusion at the hint of questioning, raging petulantly when crossed …’ The third piece is Alexis Wright’s analysis of the harmful and infectious nature of fear. This is a topic that both Tsiolkas and Haigh raise at different points in their essays. Wright argues that Anglo-Australians have long been socialised to fear ‘Aboriginal people and … law’, while a ‘fearfulness of white Australia’ has arisen within Aboriginal culture. Wright concludes her piece by arguing that literary fiction can offer an effective mode of political resistance in a period when both major political parties in Australia are essentially singing the same neo-conservative tune.

During the hot summer of 2002, I visited Canberra for the first time and alternated between the air-conditioned confines of the National Gallery and the National Library of Australia. It was in the latter that I stumbled upon The Flower Hunter, an exhibition of works by the Australian flower painter Ellis Rowan, whose life is now chronicled in a biography by Christine and Michael Morton-Evans.

Any summary of Clive Hamilton’s contributions to public debate thus far would focus on two themes: his savage criticism of modern society and its ‘fetish for growth’; and his rejection of contemporary politics, in particular the theory and practice of social democracy. He sees the implicit faith in growth and markets, and the avoidance of a realistic analysis of power, combining to ensure that modern politics is ineffective in tackling the causes and consequences of the contemporary epidemic of unhappiness.

C.K. Stead’s new collection of non-fictional prose confirms his reputation as New Zealand’s grand old man of letters, still swimming, aged seventy-six, against the tide. The author of fourteen books of poetry, as many novels, and several critical works which followed from his highly influential The New Poetic in 1964, Stead continues to be under-read and under-appreciated outside his own country, despite his outward-looking vision, the cross-national themes of his writing and the translation of his work into several European languages. The parochialism of ‘mainstream’ literary critical culture is nicely illustrated by an approving British review of his novel My Name Was Judas (2006), which Stead quotes in one of the journal entries included in this anthology. The reviewer ‘praises’ Stead as ‘an elderly and obscure New Zealand author who ... must surely be a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize’. Well might the Nobel bridesmaid remark, ‘How’s that for even-handed!’.

‘This book is a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion,’ writes Peter Conrad in the introduction to this enormous book. Neither aim is especially unusual, but their ambitious fusion here creates a questing mesh of narratives, huge in scope, in which architecture, music, literature, drama, motion pictures, poetry and philosophy in many schools and eras are gathered under the sprawling rubric of art, and no religious tradition is excluded. At times it feels as if you are reading a book about everything, and its restlessness carries you through thirty-three extremely solid, occasionally indigestible chapters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Eleanor Dark is one of the great novelists of Australia’s mid-twentieth century, along with Christina Stead, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Patrick White. The modernity of her writing is still stunning. But it has always been difficult to grasp her oeuvre whole. Her novels have seldom, if ever, all been in print at once, and some have virtually disappeared from sight, while the popular success of The Timeless Land (1941) overshadowed the achievements of her other works. Oh, for a ‘standard edition’ of all her titles! Somehow her career lacks a satisfying shape or trajectory, as if it amounts to less than the sum of its often brilliant parts. As G.A. Wilkes put it in 1951, ‘The kind of novel she can write well … no longer satisfies her; the kind of novel she wants to write, she has not yet achieved.’

The Woman in the Lobby lacks the satirical punch of Fabulous Nobodies (1989) and the blithe esprit of Wraith (1999) that has made Lee Tulloch such a diverting storyteller. This overlong novel, entertaining in places, engages in some of the lowest common denominators of popular fiction – fashion, drugs and lots of sex.