Malcolm Fraser tells a story about his time as army minister in the 1960s administering conscription during the Vietnam War. In a hotel bar in his electorate of Wannon, in Victoria's Western District, Fraser was confronted by a constituent whose son’s number had come up in...
Books
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Tim Soutphommasane
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Books | March 2010 | Politics
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Sebastian Smee
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Books | March 2010 | Noted
The title of Don DeLillo’s new novel reverses a concept known as the Omega Point, which was coined by the renegade Catholic thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard believed the universe was evolving towards a supreme level of complexity and consciousness. DeLillo’s...
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Michelle de Kretser
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Books | March 2010 | Noted
In Thomas Hardy’s elegiac poem ‘During Wind and Rain’ there are “Clocks and carpets and chairs / On the lawn all day”. As any trawler of flea markets can attest, a terrible vulnerability attaches to private belongings exposed to public view. The pathos is heightened in Hardy’...
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Kate Jennings
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Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture
For your consideration: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Now there’s a rip-snorting line of poetry if there ever was one. Frederick Seidel, who is not afraid to repeat himself, offers the line not once but three times in Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus...
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Simon Leys
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Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture
The bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second. There perhaps it...
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John Keane
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Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture
In Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values (Bloomsbury, 304pp; $35.00), English liberal philosopher AC Grayling confronts readers with a disquieting thought: we are living in perilous times in which the tried and true...
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Linda Jaivin
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Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture | Noted
“It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel … asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman?” But in Martin Amis’ new novel, The Pregnant Widow, it is the man, Keith, who falls, time and again – who stumbles, trips, fails and...
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Peter Craven
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Books | February 2010 | Society & Culture | Noted
Kirsten Tranter, the daughter of famous poet John and formidable literary agent Lyn, has a literary background with bells on. Her first novel, The Legacy, shows her to be a novelist with a commanding talent – a tough plain-stylist who can people her...
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Peter Conrad
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Books | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture
In 1960, when Robin Boyd published his attack on the stylistic cowardice of our suburbs, it took courage to call Australia ugly. The country has never bragged about its beauty, as America loudly does in the hymn that celebrates its azure skies and shining seas and fields of...
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Peter Singer
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Books | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture
Jonathan Safran Foer is a talented novelist with a gift for writing amusingly about serious issues. In Everything Is Illuminated (2003), he created a Ukrainian narrator, Alex, who describes in hilarious detail his work assisting an American Jew – named...
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