Australian Books
Summer books
2021: grit your teeth and read a good book
Unexplained connection
Why would an Australian lawyer and historian write a book explaining how the English and American Revolutions produced the American…
Disappointed in the Libs?
How might the centre-right do better? This is the question that the promising young writer Jake Thrupp has posed; and…
Jesus & the journo
Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian newspaper, is best known for his shrewd analysis of our country and…
Hooray for Hollywood
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood – and hates it.…
Australian art in the Roaring Twenties
The only criticism that can be levelled at For the Fallen by Paul Paffen is that it lacks the hard…
Justice betrayed
It was always an inherently implausible accusation: that Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate had sexually assaulted choir boys after Mass…
Missing chapters
Between them, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have a wealth of research and writing experience, and their biography of…
In the land of the blind
Somehow, American culture has got itself into a terrible mess of division and acrimony: elites against mainstream, progressives against conservatives,…
In the trenches
I can hardly recall a more engaging and uplifting biography than this life of Major-General William Holmes, who was killed…
Queer Teen Craze
It is remarkable how quickly the cause of transgenderism has moved from being a strange object at the back of…
Xi’s Big Red Book
As well as micromanaging the lives of 1.4 billion Chinese, Xi Jinping is becoming a prolific author. His latest book,…
Speaking Our Language
The Australian language is one of the few bonds that still binds together the Australian nation. And, heaven knows, we…
George Pell: Behind Bars
This is the prison diary that should never have been written because Cardinal George Pell should never have been in…
Summer books
Bad year, good books
Office boy
For most of us, going to work means going to an office, to sit at a desk and perform bureaucratic…
In the land of the blind
Carter William Page, born in 1971, is the former United States Navy officer with personal, business, scholarly and government connections…
Blame game
Ah, millennials. Golden children of the Digital Age or dysfunctional, over-educated slackers? Bit of both, says Anne Helen Petersen, although…
Born comics die laughing
Evolutionary theory is primarily about survival but, as Jonathan Silvertown makes clear in this intriguing book, as well as having…
Portrait of the piss artist as a young man
Being the son of the revered John Olsen has often been intriguing, and sometimes difficult. Olsen, 92, is arguably Australia’s…
Anatomy of fiction
By more than a mile the best book I have read during the pandemic is Tim Finch’s Peace Talks. It…
A darkling plain
Thirty years ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes unleashed widespread celebration, especially among their suppressed…
Base politics
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York moved to the lectern. It was the Cow Palace in San Francisco in…
Bedwetter’s lament
The trouble with political memoirs is that it’s very hard to get the balance right between the book-length version of…
Decency personified
The life of Paul Ramsay shows that business people don’t have to be ruthless to succeed. Many will find this…
