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History of Modern Design has developed from a course of the same name at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In keeping with its didactic origin, the subject is presented in chronological order, illustrated with more than 500 images, 125 of which are reproduced in colour. The book is ambitiously broad in its coverage, commencing with the seventeenth century and ending in the twenty-first, focusing on design from Europe and North America, and ranging through furniture, interiors, metalwork, ceramics, graphic design, typography, and product design. A good two-thirds of the book is devoted to the twentieth century, which is presented in context from the preceding historical surveys. While the focus is on design for mass production and industrial processes, the crafts are not entirely neglected. An extensive bibliography on design, coupled with helpful reading lists, will prove popular in this useful introduction to the complex and wide-ranging subject of design. (CM)

Holidaying in Tuscany, I once met an escapee from a Glenn Murcutt lecture. The class of American students had flown from New York to be immersed, in the modern manner, in six weeks of architecture beside an Italian beach. Murcutt delivered the first lecture.

Where would the picture book industry be without animals? Talking or non-speaking, cute or obnoxious, mischievously alive or poignantly dying, animal characters can be utilised to teach life lessons, and to make complex issues accessible and less confronting for young children. Add humour, passion and strong original writing, and you have a winner.

Books, of course, should not be judged by their covers. In this case, however, the choice of cover illustration – the historic Reichstag veiled in silver fabric by the Bulgarian–American ‘wrap artist’, Christo – seems unusually significant, and not only because the author devotes his concluding remarks to it (more about that later). German history is a well-ploughed field. With library shelves groaning under the weight of books on the subject, only the narrowest studies, aimed at specialised markets, will offer much that is really new. The only justification for yet another narrative history of modern Germany – and with a title as blandly generic as this one – is therefore that a familiar story will be presented in a new wrapping.

We expect memoirs to be true – it is one of the main reasons we read them – but we have also grown accustomed over the years to the idea that, while the memoir may be true in spirit, events may not have happened exactly as described. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memoirist to include some prefatory remarks to that effect. Such caveats seem fair; we have come to see them as no more than acknowledgments of the way things are.

Eva Marks was nine years old and living in Vienna when Kristallnacht forced her family to leave Austria. Although her parents separated early, there was no shortage of money during her first nine years. Her mother ran a successful business manufacturing exquisite accessories for fashionable women, which involved occasional travel. At these times, Eva was left in the care of her grandmother and her two aunts, who were as independent and strong-willed as her mother. An only child, only niece and only grandchild, she was greatly indulged, although conscious that she lacked siblings and happy parents.

The Mildura Writers’ Festival is always one of the most congenial and stimulating events on our literary calendar. Clive James, our lead reviewer this month, has just agreed to attend this year’s festival and to deliver the 2003 La Trobe University/ABR Annual Lecture. The lecture will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, 25 July, and the festival will follow that weekend (July 26–27). Clive James (pictured below) will also deliver the lecture in Melbourne soon after the Mildura Writers’ Festival. Full details of both events will follow in the June/July issue. ABR subscribers will be entitled to attend this major lecture gratis.

In our postmodern age, when everything travels and travel is a metaphor for everything, travel and travel writing have become the subject of intense scholarly interest and debate. Travel, once largely the domain of geographers, and travel writing, previously relegated to the status of a sub-literary genre, now engage attention from literary studies, history, anthropology, ethnography, and, most fruitfully, from gender and postcolonial studies. Conferences and publications abound.

These two first novels confront the ongoing complaints of literary commentators that new novels are too often set in the past rather than dealing with present realities. Moving from the criticism of ‘literary grave-robbing’ by American author Jonathan Dee, Malcolm Knox has complained that most major Australian novelists tend to mine fantastic or historical subject matter rather than examining the culture of our daily lives. Knox takes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a popular and critical success, as his model for a perceptive fictional treatment of popular culture. More recently, David Marr urged novelists to use contemporary settings to address what he calls the ‘new philistinism of John Howard’s Australia’. 

William C. Clarke cuts an interesting figure. An anthropologist who has concentrated on Pacific populations, Clarke combined this discipline with an interest in poetry in his 2000 lecture ‘Pacific Voices, Pacific Views: Poets as Commentators on the Contemporary Pacific’. Clarke used his poetry as a vehicle for considering issues such as land tenure, corruption, and tourism. It is angry, astute poetry; this is not the tranquil Hawaii and Fiji of tourist literature. Such poetry is undoubtedly moving, despite Clarke’s echo of W.H. Auden’s assertion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.