THE NATION REVIEWED

Mad as she and her fellow demagogues might seem, big as her lies might be, Palin steps directly from the last chapter of American history, the one that begins with Ronald Reagan.

In the Monthly Comment, Don Watson reads the latest biographies of Sarah Palin and comes to the unsurprising conclusion that she’s a hyper-ambitious narcissist and delusional, unprincipled liar. As the contest for the 2012 US Republican nomination gathers momentum, Watson traces the development of the current brand of American populism back to Ronald Reagan, an actor who played the president in the ’80s.  

*

Plus, in “It Tolls for Thee”, Guy Pearse pays attention to the rise of gadget-related injuries in a phone-distracted world; in “London Calling”, MJ Hyland meets Australian chef Brett Graham at his Michelin-starred London restaurant; and in “A Small Breed”, Sonya Hartnett visits a dog show with the diminutive and rare Portuguese podengo.

THE MONTHLY ESSAYS

Ivan Sen’s time in the desert sounds like a kind of mystical crisis, in which he says he came to understand “everything” about films and making them. Dreamland was the film Ivan had to make, and he was well pleased.

In “Dreamland”, Peter Robb goes lappin’ in north-western NSW with filmmaker Ivan Sen, creator of Beneath Clouds and the forthcoming Toomelah. Son of an immigrant father and Aboriginal mother, Sen makes films about “how place and your past in a place possess you through your life”, whether set in Moree, the Nevada desert or Hong Kong.

*

Keating the prime minister was at least a decade ahead of his time. He imagined Australia as a great nation, but the aftermath of the early-1990s recession was not the moment for that conversation. Now, after 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth, […] the debate is long overdue.

In “The Book of Paul”, George Megalogenis recognises a longing among his colleagues in political journalism for the “sharply dressed economist with a poet’s ability to make the business cycle sound like a symphony”. Megalogenis asks what our leaders might learn from Paul Keating at a time when, in Keating’s words, “everyone thinks politicians are not worth two bob”.

*

Thirty years since the disease that came to be known as AIDS was identified, there have been no fireworks, no flagpoles planted on high, previously inaccessible peaks, and, outside the busy network of HIV/AIDS organisations and clinical researchers quietly getting on with their work, there was little to tip off the wider community to this ‘pearl’ anniversary.

In “A Quiet Anniversary”, Gail Bell marks the thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, the “wasting disease that went by many names”. Bell reviews Australia’s response in effectively “taming” the disease over 30 years – a “good news story”.

*

Plus, in “Caught in the Game”, Jonathan Horn gives a guide to the form of the sports betting industry; and in “Window Dressing”, Lindsay Tanner addresses the hope and futility of political reform.

ARTS & LETTERS

Would John Dunne have minded his sentimentalities and his marital ups and downs dramatised so publicly? Probably not […] Would Quintana have minded being her mother’s subject? That is at once more delicate, and simpler: how many children, especially girls, want their mother to explain them to the world?

In “When the Centre Cannot Hold”, Inga Clendinnen surveys the writing of Joan Didion up to her latest book, Blue Nights. With admiration for the novelist and essayist – a “potent feminist exemplar” – Clendinnen observes the poignancy of her writing when dealing with the loss of her husband John Dunne and, most recently, her daughter Quintana. However, Didion threatens to mislead the reader with her tendency for magical thinking.

*

Troy Bramston sticks to the increasingly thin narrative that “caucus members were simply united in their dislike of Rudd”. I can’t recall the simplicity. Or the unity.

In “New Labor Dreaming”, Maxine McKew reviews Troy Bramston’s Looking for the Light on the Hill, a study of the growing malaise of the Labor faithful since the 2007 federal election, in the context of her own political career as the former member for Bennelong.

*

Frank Moorhouse is the nation’s Edith Wharton. All his career he has been investigating the comedy and wisdom of manners: how they reveal and disguise time, character and place. He is a master of finding formality in informality, of detecting rules where we thought spontaneity reigned.  

In “Age of Innocence”, David Marr reunites with fictional freethinker Edith Campbell Berry in Cold Light, the final volume in Frank Moorhouse’s trilogy. In his historical three-decker novel, Moorhouse has captured “the psyche of Australia”, Marr writes, and earned Edith a permanent place on the nation’s bookshelf.

*

Plus, in “Right Composition”, Anna Goldsworthy meets the composer and Musica Viva director, Carl Vine; and in “Spin It”, Robert Forster assembles a collection of 30 albums that represent his rock’n’roll soul.