Non Fiction

If you were asked to come up with three cultural touchstones for the nation of Iceland, there’s a good chance that you would nominate Hannah Kent’s 2013 novel Burial Rites, perhaps along with the music of Björk and Sigur Rós. Burial Rites might be a bit of a cheat, given that Kent is an Australian novelist. Nevertheless, this novel, which tells the story of a woman executed in Iceland in the nineteenth century, has been an enormous success. Translated into more than twenty languages, it sold millions of copies worldwide and is set to become a film. It surely put Iceland on the map for many readers.

Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

Toby Walsh’s The Shortest History of AI begins and ends with a sermon against panic. ‘Our children’, writes Walsh, ‘are set to inherit a worse world than the one we were born into, due to a raft of problems, some of which are caused by AI.’ The next couple of decades ‘will be challenging’. Yet Walsh is unequivocal in his faith: first, that artificial intelligence scientists will eventually achieve their final goal, ‘matching human intelligence in all its richness’, and second, that such a feat will be ultimately beneficial to humanity. The secret to such optimism, in the face of acknowledged ‘challenges’ ranging from racial and gendered bias to the ‘existential’, lies in learning ‘the lessons of the past’. And this book, writes Walsh, is not a bad place to start learning those lessons.

Women give birth to babies, but according to patriarchal myth men give birth to nations. As the eminent political theorist Carole Pateman observed some time ago, literature is full of stories of men giving birth to nations, political orders, or political life itself, an explicitly male appropriation of procreative power. In the new discursive order of modernity, political creativity belongs to masculinity.

Fawaz Gerges is a leading expert on mainstream Islamist movements, jihadist groups, and social movements in the Middle East. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe. Two decades ago, his in-depth field research resulted in The Far Enemy: Why Jihad went global (2005). It showed that the 9/11 terror attacks united social forces in the Muslim world against Al Qaeda. The dominant response of jihadi groups was an explicit rejection of Al Qaeda and total opposition to the internationalisation of jihad. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation gave Al Qaeda a ‘new lease on life, a second generation of recruits and fighters, and a powerful outlet to expand its ideological outreach activities to Muslims worldwide’.

Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

You can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

From bountiful feasts on collective farms to choreographed parades in Red Square, Soviet Socialist Realism painted a world of triumphant spectacle. In the eyes of Western critics, however, these images were as bland as they were removed from Soviet reality. As a result, Socialist Realism hovered on the margins of art history almost until the end of the twentieth century, when a series of studies in the early 1990s moved away from the reductive assessment of the movement as vulgar propaganda, revealing a complex and intriguing aesthetic reasoning within its production. A subsequent wave of further research would foreground the influence of this artistic production outside the Soviet Union. With Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, Alison Carroll aligns with efforts to examine the impact of the movement in a global context, placing focus on a region that certainly merits greater attention.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Britain today is no place for young people. The evidence is as familiar as it is stark. One million of the nation’s fourteen million children experienced destitution in 2022, meaning that their families could not afford to adequately feed or clothe them or keep them warm. In 2024, a record 150,000 lived in temporary accommodation in England. The long-standing decline in infant mortality has stalled. Facts like these, concerning the families struggling most, are often cited as proof of atrophy under Conservative austerity (which, while destructive in its own right, degraded Britain’s resilience against Covid-19 and the energy crisis that followed) and as indicators of the issues that Keir Starmer’s new Labour government should prioritise. But what do we miss by focusing on the worst-off?