Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

The Year it all Fell Down

by
July–August 2013, no. 353

The Year It All Fell Down by Bob Ellis

Viking, $29.99 pb, 264 pp, 9780670077410

The Year it all Fell Down

by
July–August 2013, no. 353

In The Year It All Fell Down, journalist Bob Ellis revisits 2011, a year that, as the title suggests, produced social and political change on a global scale. The text provides a month-by-month account of this dramatic time. Ellis covers the Queensland floods and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. He describes the US-sanctioned execution of Osama bin Laden and the mass killings perpetrated by Anders Breivik. Readers are reminded that Julian Assange ‘won the Martha Gellhorn Prize for “brave, determined, independent” journalism’, and that Prince William married Kate Middleton. There are references to veteran actor Kirk Douglas’s appearance at the Oscars ceremony and to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Ellis speculates that this film might be ‘a parable … of our denial of Global Warming’.

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.