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Society

Marina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The introduction’s mini-tour prefigures, in capsule form, both the book’s thematic emphases and its guiding rhetorical procedures. As Kin’s chapters move through their discussions of the moral panics that accompany non-nuclear family structures, from same-sex parenthood to chosen childlessness to single-parent families, the book reveals that the real moral hazards of reproductive technology lie not in deviations from the nuclear model but in attempts to impose the model where it doesn’t fit.

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Max Dupain's portrait of Jean Lorraine, a favourite model among Sydney’s artists and photographers of the 1930s and 1940s, graces the elegant cover of Paul Dalgarno’s Prudish Nation. All that gives a somewhat misleading impression of the nature of this book. It is not a work of history. Nor is it an investigation of whether Australia is a notably prudish nation. The variety of gender and sexual identities examined certainly does not leave an impression of prudishness. If Australia was once prudish, it is obviously less so now.

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As a gynaecologist and feminist, I figured that this book would have little new to teach me. By page four, I realised I was wrong. Kate Clancy, an anthropologist by training and a serious researcher into the science underlying menstruation, takes her readers on an adventurous romp through every physiological, political, and social aspect of this monthly bloodletting and tissue-shedding that virtually all women (and other people with uteruses) experience hundreds of times during their reproductive years – myth-busting as she goes.

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For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

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The Eagle in the Mirror by Jesse Fink & My Mother the Spy by Cindy Dobbin and Freda Marnie Nicholls

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October 2023, no. 458

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects. 

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Only rarely does a book of political philosophy inspire a media commotion. Well, at least a small stir – glowing reviews in leading British newspapers, BBC interviews, a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts, praise from the archbishop of Canterbury. Daniel Chandler, LSE economist and philosopher, is the thinker of the moment.

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'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation. 

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Tissue by Madison Griffiths

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August 2023, no. 456

As an abortion provider for more than forty years, and an advocate for abortion law reform and improved abortion services for more than fifty, I approached this book with alacrity. Around one hundred thousand abortions are performed in Australia every year, yet abortion is still not easily talked or written about. I felt that a non-fiction work of nearly three hundred pages on the topic, by a person who had experienced abortion, would be a welcome addition to existing literature, something that other people, contemplating or experiencing abortion, might absorb themselves in.

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As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

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On 27 May 1967, a proposal to change two clauses of the Australian Constitution won the approval of 90.77 per cent of those who voted, the highest ever achieved in an Australian referendum. In the forthcoming referendum, according to various opinion polls, the best the advocates for a ‘yes’ vote can hope to achieve is a bare majority. How can this difference be explained? Several factors appear to be at work. They range from the simple, which are acknowledged, to the complex, which don’t seem to be known. 

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