Michael Shmith
To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Up ...
Music in the Castle of Heaven: A portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach by John Eliot Gardiner
Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother edited by William Shawcross
Breaking News: The Golden age of Graham Perkin by Ben Hills
Right Here on Our Stage Tonight!: Ed Sullivan’s America by Gerald Nachman
The Point of the Baton: Memoir of a conductor by John Hopkins (with William Cottam)
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.
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