Non Fiction

Lawrence Hill is the son of a white mother from Chicago (‘a kickass civil rights activist’) and a black father (‘most recently from Washington DC … urban, educated, lower middle class’), but grew up in Toronto. Blood: The Stuff of Life, the ninth of his books, originated as the Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Massey Lectures, an annual series of broadcasts inaugurated in 1961 as a forum where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time. The Australian equivalent is the ABC’s Boyer Lectures.

Mark Dapin’s anthology, From the Trenches, is a timely but not opportunistic book. At more than 400 pages, it is long enough to suggest the sheer scale of the war and its centrality to European (if not world) history ever since. It samples all the relevant genres (letters, memoir, journalism, fiction, poetry) and offers a multiplicity of viewpoints (senior ranks, subalterns, NCOs, privates, and nurses). The book is not simplistically pro- or anti-war, but its overall message is unmistakable. The whole enterprise was a huge and bloody mistake, stupidly prolonged by inadequate politicians for more than four years.

Why does illness create such a marked need for story? Why do we want to read about other people’s illnesses and talk or write about our own? At the most basic level, it is surely because human beings always need stories. Indeed, neuroscientists believe that narrative consciousness is hard-wired into our brains ...

In his introduction to this book, Richard Toye makes the startling but, as far as I know, accurate claim that this is the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of Churchill’s wartime speeches. For a series of orations that now occupy many pages of any dictionary of quotations, The Roar of the Lion fills a surprising gap. Unfortunately, it does not fill it adequately.

Award-winning biographer Brenda Niall welcomes the first biography of Penelope Fitzgerald by superlative British biographer Hermione Lee, and is fascinated by the great novelist’s secret river of creativity.

Gideon Haigh reviews a major new study of the failure of investigative journalism during the 2008 GFC. He argues that journalists became invested in the economic boom, to their cost.

David Malouf turns eighty this month, improbably. To mark his birthday, UQP has published a new poetry collection by Malouf. ABR Poetry Editor reviews Earth Hour in this issue.

I have often thought that a large part of achievement is just fronting up; having an idea and acting on it, however unlikely success might seem. What you need is a resolution (or the disposition) not to be discouraged by failure and to be pleasantly surprised by success. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. You make the most of any opportunity. You should also jettison a conventional sense of the social niceties. You’re going to Boston for your honeymoon. Hey, why not ask Noam Chomsky for an interview?