Critic of the Month with Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno (Adam Spence) Frank Bongiorno is a historian based at the Australian National University in Canberra. His most recent book, Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia, won the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Non-fiction, ACT Book of the Year, and the Henry Mayer Book Prize. He is president of the Australian Historical Association and the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. When did you first write for ABR? My earliest review was published in May 2003, and it was of the latest – fifth – edition of Geoffrey Blainey’s mining history The Rush That Never Ended, as well as covering a collection of essays on Blainey that had arisen from a conference on his work, The Fuss That Never Ended. My ambivalence about Blainey in his roles as both historian and advocate is clear enough in the piece. (I did not feel better disposed when he had his lawyer send letters threatening to sue me over my later treatment of his contributions to public debate on immigration in my book The Eighties, published in 2015.) What makes a fine critic? The best critics contextualise. They see a book in a wider landscape, and it is the generosity and creativity of their vision that can turn even a brief review into something much more significant and engaging. Landscape includes what historians call ‘historiography’ and academics more generally call ‘the literature’, but it is more than that. It is culture, society, and politics in the widest sense – the webs of meaning, relations, and power within which both the reviewer and reviewed perform their work. The really fine critics have both depth and breadth, surprising a reader with the kinds of allusions they can bring into their reflections. And of course, they must write well! Which critics most impress you? A lot of the reviewing I do has a broadly political aspect, and I learnt as a young historian from reading the masters of the acerbic, A.J.P. Taylor and Humphrey McQueen, and later from the longer, reflective modes of David Runciman, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Ross McKibbin in the London Review of Books. Neal Blewett and Glyn Davis in Australian Book Review have made an impact on me, and I have in recent years much enjoyed the thoughtful reviewing in ABR of a fine historian, Penny Russell. What do you look for from an editor? Better judgement than I often have. That usually means quietly omitting an ill-judged sentence here and a superfluous phrase there. But editors also match a reviewer to a book – and I have benefited enormously from editors’ creativity, imagination, and faith in this regard. Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective? I don’t accept them all, not least as time wouldn’t allow it. As an academic historian, I also examine several postgraduate theses in any year, each the size of a book, as well as reading my own students’ work. I am sometimes asked to provide a cover endorsement for a book, I do launches, panels, and conversations, and I am sometimes a prize judge. So I tend to jump only at things that especially interest me, or which I’d want to read anyway. I do enjoy getting a little out of my comfort zone of Australian history – such as occasional historical fiction – and I owe a great debt to Catherine Keenan, then Sydney Morning Herald literary editor and later co-founder and executive director of Sydney’s Story Factory, for first encouraging me into general non-fiction. I would not have been brave enough to chase an opportunity to review a book about The Young Stalin without some gentle coaxing and kindly mentoring. Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors? Occasionally, and only rarely of the unkind sort. What do you think of negative reviews? I have written them, and I’ve received them. They are part of the job: you must be able to write a negative review if a book warrants that kind of response. And you need to be able to accept criticism as an author. But fairness is an old-fashioned virtue, and one I value. It’s poor reviewing to overlook a book’s strengths and harp on about its failures. It is even worse to quote selectively (or worse, inaccurately) to carry a bad argument. The worst kind of negative review is the one that is used for self-boosting or self-promotion, sometimes combined with score-settling. They are rare, not least because the best editors help to avoid that kind of scenario, but they happen, and they can be nasty. In my experience, readers unfamiliar with the ‘politics’ sitting behind that kind of negative review often smell a rat. How do you feel about reviewing people you know? As an academic working in Australian history for thirty years – and for most of my career in Australia – I would write very few reviews if I banned writing on authors I knew. It’s not a large pool. There is no doubt that this poses the problem of insularity, and you do have to draw the line somewhere. I do not write reviews where I have a close personal or professional relationship with the author. I have always refused to review books in the rare instances where I have had antagonistic personal relations with a writer. I never review books that I have read and commented on in draft, or for which I produced an endorsement. I have written hundreds of reviews over the years and can honestly say I haven’t been conscious of pulling a punch to save someone’s feelings. But I look, in the main, for what is good and worthy about a book rather than combing it for things that I can nit-pick about. What’s a critic’s primary responsibility? To contribute to the public conversation with integrity, judgement, and creativity. Once you start pulling punches or bestowing favours that are unconnected to a book’s strengths or weaknesses, you’re really finished as a serious reviewer. And if you can’t do anything more than summarise a book’s contents, you’ve done nothing that good AI software can’t accomplish.

From the New Issue

The Other Side of Daylight: New and selected poems by David Brooks

Like Fire-Hearted Suns by Melanie Joosten

2024 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner) | ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ by Tracey Slaughter

Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

You May Also Like

Factory 19 by Dennis Glover

An interview with Dan Disney

2017 Books of the Year

An interview with Ross McMullin