Welcome to the May issue of ABR! Highlights include:
• Johanna Leggatt on City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham
• Peter Rose reviews On David Malouf by Nam Le
• Beejay Silcox on the lure of dystopian fiction in the age of Trump
• Daniel Halliday on why politicians find tax justice so hard
• Paul Giles on Ian McEwan's latest sci-fi-inspired Machines Like Me
May 2019, no. 411
Johanna Leggatt reviews City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest by Sophie Cunningham
When Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants (1975), many critics labelled their attempt to prove a spiritual link between people and plants as mystical gibberish, with a New York Times review chiding the authors for pandering to charlatans and amateur psychics ...
Peter Rose reviews On David Malouf by Nam Le
For more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words ...
'This is the way the world ends' by Beejay Silcox
When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’ ...
'Why do politicians find tax justice so hard?' by Daniel Halliday
As part of his budget speech to the House of Representatives in April, Josh Frydenberg, the federal treasurer, announced that his suite of policy changes would ‘deliver better outcomes for all Australians’. Such talk is par for the course in parliamentary democracies ...
