NSW contributor
Kelly D. Wiltshire reviews A Little History of Archaeology by Brian Fagan
As the old saying goes, one should never judge a book by its cover; however, the instantly recognisable iconography on the cover of A Little History of Archaeology does provide an insight into this book’s content ...
... (read more)Anna Clark reviews Australia’s First Naturalists: Indigenous peoples’ contribution to early zoology by Penny Olsen and Lynette Russell
What does it mean to really know an ecosystem? To name all the plants and animals in a place and understand their interactions? To feel an embodied connection to Country? To see and hear in ways that confirm and extend that knowledge?
... (read more)Nicole Abadee reviews Frankissstein: A love story by Jeanette Winterson
What distinguishes man from machines? What is artificial life, death, progress? These are just some of the questions Jeanette Winterson explores in her brilliant new novel, Frankissstein, a modern take on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Two warnings: first, the structure is complex, as the narrative segues ...
... (read more)Desley Deacon reviews Seven Big Australians: Adventures with comic actors by Anne Pender
Nowadays every second young person seems to want to be a stand-up comic, an occupation that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and occasional nature. Anne Pender gives us mini-biographies of seven Australians who succeeded, often spectacularly, in the risky business of being a comic long ...
... (read more)Christopher Allen reviews Heaven on Earth: Painting and the life to come by T.J. Clark
Giotto’s frescoes invite us to ponder the nature of what we instinctively, conveniently, but not very satisfactorily call realism. Compared to the work of his predecessors, these images have a new kind of material presence. Bodies become solid, take on mass and volume, and occupy space ...
... (read more)Jacqueline Kent reviews Faber & Faber: The untold history of a great publishing house by Toby Faber
The ‘untold history’ of Faber & Faber should be a cause for celebration. For so many of us, possessing the unadorned, severe paperbacks with the lower-case ‘ff’ on the spine meant graduation to serious reading: coming of literary age by absorbing the words and thoughts of Beckett, Eliot, Larkin, Stoppard, Hughes, Plath ...
... (read more)Michael Sexton reviews Robert Menzies: The art of politics by Troy Bramston
‘A mutinous and ferocious grace: Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath' by Felicity Plunkett
It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch ...
... (read more)Zora Simic #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement edited by Natalie Kon-yu et al.
How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns ...
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