NSW contributor
James Bradley reviews 'The Rich Man’s House' by Andrew McGahan
Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened …
... (read more)Russell Blackford reviews 'A Thousand Small Sanities: The moral adventure of liberalism' by Adam Gopnik
In an era of dogmatism, polarisation, and intolerance, visible on both the right and left wings of politics, liberalism needs more love. Part of its image problem is a widespread perplexity about what values and principles it really stands for. In different times and places, liberalism has meant many different, even contradictory, things ...
... (read more)Alexander Wells reviews 'Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The mass suicides of ordinary Germans in 1945' by Florian Huber, translated by Imogen Taylor
Everyone knows about the final days of Adolf Hitler – his abject suicide in a clammy Berlin bunker. Many prominent Nazis followed suit, including the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who broadcast messages to the public espousing the virtue of death over defeat. His wife, Magdalena, wrote ...
... (read more)Zora Simic reviews 'See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse' by Jess Hill and 'Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo' by Mithu Sanyal
Domestic violence and rape are not easy topics to write or read about. It’s not just because of the subject matter itself, as grim and distressing as the details can be. The writer must grapple with centuries of cultural baggage, competing theorisations and research paradigms, and the politicisation of these issues, for better or worse ...
... (read more)In The Old Lie, Claire G. Coleman has given herself a right of reply to her award-winning début novel, Terra Nullius (2007). Here, she strips away some of the racial ambiguity of the human–alien invasion allegory of that novel and leaves in its place a meaty analysis of colonisation and imperialism ...
... (read more)Dan Dixon reviews Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion by Jia Tolentino
Writers describing the contemporary moment abound. Many do it well, but few do it as shrewdly as Jia Tolentino. With Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion, Tolentino has produced a début collection of essays so insightful ...
... (read more)In June 2019, Australian Book Review announced the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, an initiative generously funded by Peter McMullin in association with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (University of Melbourne). This initiative was not only created to highlight issues pertaining to ...
... (read more)Julia Kindt reviews Socrates in Love: The making of a philosopher by Armand D’Angour
It may be tempting to think we already know Socrates, the Athenian philosopher whose most famous dictum remains that he was wise only insofar as he was aware of his own ignorance. Although Socrates never published anything of his own ...
... (read more)Paul Giles reviews Permanent Revolution: The reformation and the illiberal roots of liberalism by James Simpson
The argument of James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution is that the emergence of liberalism as a cultural and political category in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was shaped by the ‘radically illiberal history of ...
... (read more)2019 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner): 'Nah Doongh’s Song' by Grace Karskens
Nah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s ...
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