NSW contributor
Ian Dickson reviews 'The Luck of Friendship: The letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin' edited by Peggy L. Fox and Thomas Keith
The tall, handsome, socially adept if emotionally reticent scion of a wealthy, well-connected family and the crumpled, physically unimpressive, excitable son of an alcoholic travelling salesman seem to be an unlikely pair to form a long-standing friendship. For both James Laughlin and Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams ...
... (read more)James Dunk reviews 'The Environment' by Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin
On 6 October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning of the dangers of surpassing a 1.5° Celsius rise from pre-industrial levels in average global temperatures. They are many, and dire. To halt at 1.5°, carbon emissions need to fall by forty per cent globally by 2030 ...
... (read more)Virtuosic performance text, palimpsest of a nineteenth-century Russian folktale, and a merciless and often very funny sectioning of the self, Ania Walwicz’s horse enacts what it names: ‘Polyphony as identity’. The narrative more or less follows the story of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Piotr Jerszow ...
... (read more)Simon Tormey reviews 'The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A twentieth-century history' by David Edgerton
Ben Vine reviews 'These Truths: A History of the United States' by Jill Lepore
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared that the story of American history is of countless people striving toward ‘a more perfect union’, that most utopian of goals enshrined in the nation’s Constitution. In These Truths, a one-volume account of the entirety of American history since European settlement ...
... (read more)Alex Tighe reviews 'Net Loss: The inner life in the digital age (Quarterly Essay 72)' by Sebastian Smee
You probably own a smartphone. Chances are it’s in your pocket right now, or at least within arm’s reach – don’t pick it up. Fight the habit. Besides, you’ve probably checked it in the last fifteen minutes. If you are an average user, intentionally or not, you will spend three to four hours looking at its screen today. If you did check your phone after the second sentence, then well done for making it back to this piece, although (according to some research) it probably took you about twenty-five minutes to refocus.
... (read more)Lucas Thompson reviews 'The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath' by Leslie Jamison
There is an eerie sameness to addiction memoirs, which tend to follow the same basic structure. In the beginning, there is some immense and unassuageable pain, followed by the discovery of one substance or another that dulls some of that pain. Then comes the dawning realisation ...
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