December 2008 - January 2009
POLITICS
Alfred Deakin & John Bunyan
Alfred Deakin occupied many notable posts and earned several memorable sobriquets in his long and distinguished public career. Member for...
More ...WORLD
'A Mercy' by Toni Morrison
Chris Womersley
A Mercy sees America's last Nobel laureate for literature weighing in with her first novel in five years and returning to some of the...
More ...'Vertigo: A Novella' by Amanda Lohrey
Meg Mundell
The idea of leaving carries a seductive charge: an implicit dare to abandon your old life and begin afresh. City-dwellers Anna and Luke,...
More ...SOCIETY
'From Little Things Big Things Grow' by Paul Kelly & Kev Carmody: Illustrations by Peter Hudson & Gurindji schoolchildren
Mungo MacCallum
This is the book of the song that has become the anthem of the reconciliation movement. A century after the birth of Vincent Lingiari and...
More ...CULTURE
Southern Discomfort: Tasmania’s Art Scene
Juliana Engberg
I'm standing in the midst of crates and stacking shelves. The final scene of Citizen Kane comes to mind: when, at the end of his life, Kane...
More ...CULTURE
Slippin’: AC/DC’s Black Ice
Robert Forster
In the beginning, back in 1966, there was Harry Vanda and George Young. They were the songwriting team in The Easybeats, responsible for...
More ...WORLD
Peter Craven's Best Books for Summer 2008-09
Peter Craven
Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bloomsbury, 976pp; $49.95). Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father,...
More ...WORLD
A Stockingful: Peter Craven on the Best Books for Summer
Peter Craven
I suppose 2008 will be remembered as the year when the bottom fell out of the markets and America elected Barack Obama. If the former is...
More ...CULTURE
Between a Muddle & a Mystery: Brian Dibble’s 'Doing Life'
Drusilla Modjeska
If, by her own admission, order was not a "strong point" for Elizabeth Jolley, it is a badge of honour for her biographer, Brian Dibble....
More ...SOCIETY
Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque: Oliver Stone’s 'W'
Luke Davies
"The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages." So wrote the editors of the New Yorker recently, before...
More ...MEDIA
Going Private: Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre
Hazel Rowley
I loved writing Tête-à-Tête: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005). Never have I written a book with such...
More ...WORLD
Feeling Lucky: What Drives Economic Optimism?
Gideon Haigh
Any serious stock-market turbulence invites images of flappers, bathtub gin and plummeting stockbrokers: that is, of the Wall Street Crash...
More ...SOCIETY
Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow
Galarrwuy Yunupingu
My land is that of the Gumatj clan nation, which is carefully defined, with boundaries and borders set out in the maps of our minds and,...
More ...WORLD
Once Upon a Time in America: Getting Elected in Zanesville, Ohio
Don Watson
The people who built the interstate highways in the 1950s might have done worse to Zanesville: they might have put it right through the...
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MEDIA
The Black Polo
Charles Firth
Some questions are taboo.At 7.49 pm on Friday, 24 October, two twenty-something women, both about 170 centimetres tall and with brunette...
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SOCIETY
Ally of the Dolls
Alice Pung
She was found beneath the floorboards of an old house in Geelong, and appeared to have been through a fire. Her body had disintegrated, but...
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ENVIRONMENT
The Ant & the Butterfly
John van Tiggelen
One crisp spring evening, just on dark, an older man and a middle-aged woman met on a lonely bush track to inspect a patch of scrub by...
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SOCIETY
Panic & Censor
David Marr
I was putting on a bit of dog for the fresh envoy of a Great European Nation. This was deep in the Howard era, and we were drinking coffee...
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POLITICS
Comment
Judith Brett
The big lesson of the past few months of financial crises is that government is the ultimate risk manager. When all else fails, be it the...
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The Shortlist Daily
7 February 2012
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