tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-257176112011-09-28T04:51:24.377+09:30The staff at Dymocks Books in Adelaide really know their stuff. This blog is full of their own views on new releases. Enjoy!Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.comBlogger411100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1168576880857160672007-01-12T15:05:00.000+10:302007-01-12T15:11:20.866+10:30This is a very powerful book that doesn't try to hide the reality about bullying. It has simple line drawings discussing a schoolyard bullying incident, which is effective in itself. However, the photos in the last few pages really highlight what bullying leads to on a large, world stage. Chilling....<br /><br />Find it in our Children's Non-Fiction Section<br /><br />Christine<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116857688085716067?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1164760211183696072006-11-29T10:50:00.000+10:302006-11-29T11:02:15.660+10:30While you are lying on the beach or having a post Christmas lunch lie-down, what are you going to read??!! Let our very knowledgeable staff give you some hints….<br /><br />Christine suggests: <br /><strong>One For the Money<br />Janet Evanovich</strong><br />The heroine of these 12 books is the worst bounty hunter on earth and also has a hilarious family and a complicated love life. Set in working class America it is a very funny, and not too heavy, read. Get the first 3 in an omnibus. I love them!<br /><br />Sarah suggests: <br /><strong>Inside Little Britain <br />Boyd Hilton (with Matt Lucas and David Walliams)</strong><br />A fly on the wall documentary written by a close friend that contains biographical information. It gives an insight into David’s attempt to cross the channel for charity, as well as what goes on behind the scenes on the live Little Britain show.<br /><br />Judy suggests: <br />…that you come in and see her. I can guarantee she will find something you love because she has been awarded the <strong>INDIVIDUAL AUSTRALIAN BOOKSELLER OF THE YEAR</strong>!!! Yes, she is officially the BEST!<br /><br />Nikki suggests: <br /><strong>Classics</strong> <br />You can’t go wrong popping a classic novel into someone’s Christmas stocking! For wit and elegance you need Jane Austen, for passion and drama you need Emily Bronte. To get lost over your Christmas break you should dive into Dickens, Tolstoy or Arthur Conan Doyle. You could question the meaning of life with Camus or splash into the poetry of Plath. The list of essential reading is endless.<br /><br />Kate suggests: <br /><strong>My French Life<br />Vicki Archer</strong><br />If you can’t go overseas this holiday period, this book will transport you to France! Experience French life through her words and glorious photography by Carla Coulson. Whether you have been to France or not, this book will make you fall in love with all things French! An absolutely stunning book.<br /><br />Charlotte suggests: <br /><strong>Salvation Creek <br />Susan Duncan</strong><br />A powerful autobiography of an Australian woman who comes to terms with loss, grief and major changes in her life until she finally achieves peace.<br /><br />Marion suggests: <br /><strong>Tales of the Otori – Across the Nightingale Floor (Book 1)<br />Lian Hearn</strong><br />The first 3 in the series are just brilliant, one is transported to ancient Japan and the descriptions are so detailed and beautiful you get quickly lost in the stories and fabulous characters. I have still to read the 4th and final, but after listening to Hearn talk about her books I am eager to start the next epic. Action adventure and lore all rolled into one – just beautiful!<br /><br />Linda suggests: <br /><strong>Year of wonder <br />Geraldine Brooks</strong><br />Excellent way to learn some history in a fictional form. I enjoyed it immensely!<br /><br />Any <strong>James Patterson </strong>(crime) is good reading. Short chapters that get you hooked into reading more.<br /><br />Damian suggests: <br /><strong>Cats Cradle <br />Kurt Vonnegut</strong><br />Kurt is wonderful: funny, warm and never fearing to look at the things people do. See also <strong>Breakfast of Champions </strong>and <strong>Galapagos</strong>.<br /><br />Katharina suggests: <br /><strong>The Book Thief <br />Markus Zusak</strong><br />Superbly written – a very intense, unforgettable story set in WWII about the power of words and how books can nourish the soul.<br /><br />Bruce suggests: <br /><strong>Around the Buoys <br />Adrienne Cahalan</strong><br />Yes indeed, a woman, in fact a small woman, can succeed in the very macho world of yacht racing – especially ocean racing. A story of grit and determination, highs and lows, and lots of fun.<br /><br /><strong>Cod – The biography of the fish that changed the world.<br />Mark Kurlansky</strong><br />Changed the world? So the author suggests. A fascinating little history that has been selling well for some time.<br /><br /><strong>The Swarm<br />Frank Schatzing</strong><br />A best seller in German for two years, now in English. Science fact, science fantasy, futurology, technology and philosophy wrapped into a tense exciting thriller. One of the best of the year!<br /><br /><strong>The Lincoln Lawyer<br />Michael Connelly</strong><br />One of America’s best crime writers introduces us to a new character. I think it’s his best yet.<br /><br />Mandy suggests: <br /><strong>Restless <br />William Boyd</strong><br />This is a very well written and engrossing story about a young woman discovering her Mother’s secrets from World War II. Full of intrigue and adventure, you can’t help but admire the courage and resourcefulness of the older woman. It’s a very believable storyline, full of suspense, some very unpleasant characters, and an insight into espionage during wartime.<br /><br />Julia suggests: <br /><strong>Jasper Fforde </strong>(anything and everything)- he is a very clever writer! He creates futuristic literary worlds where the crime rate is exceedingly high and the villains are from popular literature and nursery rhymes! A must for lovers of word play and book nerds!<br /><br />For other great, engaging reads, check out books by <strong>Eliott Perlman, Marcus Zusak, and Mark Haddon.</strong><br /><br />Gemma suggests: <br /><strong>Anna Karenina<br />Leo Tolstoy</strong><br />Like a Russian soap opera. Love, loyalty, betrayal. Complex characters and lots of wit. My favourite. <br /><br />Mark suggests: <br /><strong>What if I had Never Tried It <br />Valentino Rossi</strong><br />Great read if you are into bikes. <br /><br />Kathy suggests: <br /><strong>Morland Dynasty <br />Cynthia Harrod-Eagles</strong><br />A great way to absorb (mainly) English History. Very well researched, easy to read, with believable characters. She also writes about British Police procedurals with a good dose of dry humour, featuring DI Bill Slider.<br /><br />Anything by <strong>Sarah Dunant </strong>who writes brilliant historical fiction set in renaissance Italy.<br /><br />Anything by <strong>Mark Billingham </strong>– great crime fiction set in London.<br /><br />Wilma suggests: <br /><strong>Gilead <br />Marilynne Robinson</strong><br />This award winning book is a fabulous read and will keep readers turning the pages to hear the wisdom of an elderly minister reflecting on his life. It will appeal to secularists and people of faith who will be carried away with the beauty of his thoughts.<br /><br />Megan suggests: <br />Anything by <strong>Haruki Murakami</strong><br />A fantastic mix of crime, the absurd and modern Japan. <br /><br />Matt suggests: <br /><strong>Purity of Blood<br />Arturuo-Perez Reverte</strong><br />The second book in the Captain Alartriste series picks up the swashbuckling where the first book left off. One for fans of Dumas, these books are jam-packed full of swordplay, intrigue and adventure! Keep an eye for the cinematic version of Captain Alartriste next year, starring Viggo Mortenson of Lord of the Rings fame! <br /><br />Rob suggests: <br /><strong>A long way down<br />Nick Hornby</strong><br />A flowing and easy to read story (without venturing into escapism) featuring characters that are entirely unlovable, but sure to resonate. A wry and compassionate look at despair, loneliness and the ego.<br /><br />Kate suggests: <br />Anything by <strong>Shaun Tan</strong><br />The most beautiful, adult picture books, with poignant and visually intriguing illustrations. <br /><br /><strong>Be My Enemy <br />Christopher Brookmyre</strong><br />All his books are brilliant and uniformly hilarious in a very Scottish way! Has been described as Agatha Christy on manky crack!! Which is the most apt description I have ever read!!! <br /><br />Try also <strong>Annie Proulx </strong>and <strong>Alice Munro </strong>for there ability to conjure up palpable images of North American and Canadian places and people. I particularly liked Bad Dirt and Post Cards by A.P and Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro.<br /><br />Fiona suggests: <br /><strong>Shadow of the Wind <br />Carlos Ruiz Zafon</strong><br />The story of a young man in Spain who finds a forgotten book and is drawn into the world of its mysterious author. A rich, compelling, satisfying novel. I loved it! <br /><br /><strong>Don't forget to come in and see our new shop, across the mall from our old one. we love it!!</strong><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116476021118369607?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1164595057391527482006-11-27T13:04:00.000+10:302006-11-27T13:07:37.400+10:30The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation<br /><br />by M.T. Anderson<br /><br />This is a truly extraordinary novel. It tells the tale of an African slave, that as part of a scientific experiment, is raised in Colonial America with the finest of classical educations. The result of this education in Octavian’s consequent life induces us to explore the issues of slavery, imprisonment and freedom. This is the first time I have been interested in the history of colonial America due to the clear and authentic voice of this author. As I read I always believed that what I was experiencing was a possible reality, and a universal one at that.<br /><br />Several parts of this book are challenging (like the dense first 25 pages or so), but well worth the effort. As a bonus the hardcover presentation is beautiful and only $24.95. A late runner for my favourite book of the year.<br /><br />Ages 16 to adult.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116459505739152748?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1161320198694140432006-10-20T14:17:00.000+09:302006-10-20T14:26:38.710+09:30During our recent move we discovered a growing anomaly in our cataloguing system for ages 6-9. We had many discussions over what could be considered a “series”. So many authors for this age group now write multitudes of books using the same characters or type of character that it is bewildering. As a consequence, we have decided to do away with the category “series” for this age group and combine all novels into the one section. Therefore this Newsletter is about those books that authors have applied the adage “If you are on a good thing.. stick to it!” to. Enjoy!<br /><br />Don’t forget to come in and see our new shop, we just love it. Downstairs is dedicated entirely to Kid’s books (and New Releases), while upstairs is light and airy, with a huge amount of books to choose from, and plenty of friendly staff to help out. <br /><br />Readers<br /><br />We can source all your reader needs, but for now, here are some we currently have in stock.<br /><br />Series Title: Fitzroy Readers<br />Price: $44.95<br />Comment: Graded, 10 Reader sets often used by schools. Teachers’ guides and word skills activity books also available.<br />Example: Stories 1-10<br />ISBN: 1875755926<br /> <br />Series Title: Usborne Easy Words to Read<br />Price: $9.95<br />Comment: Eight different readers with a phonics emphasis. Larger than usual format with colourful pictures and some fun flaps.<br />Example: Fat Cat on a Mat<br />ISBN: 0746030258<br /><br />Series Title: Starter Series by Walker Books<br />Price: $9.95<br />Comment: A different kind of reader for beginners, as it incorporates several different media (posters, letters, signs, etc). There are about 16 in this series of readers.<br />Example: Maggie Magic<br />ISBN: 184428929X<br /><br />Series Title: Hachette Reading Corner <br />Price: $10.95<br />Comment: Arranged by Grade and then Level, these are pretty much your traditional reader but with excellent illustrations.<br />Example: Blushing Becky<br />ISBN: 0749661461<br /><br />Series Title: Orca Echoes<br />Price: $9.95<br />Comment: For ages 7-9, these readers are great because they have real, interesting stories in a novel form. 17 titles in the series so far.<br />Example: Sea Dog<br />ISBN: 1551434067<br /><br />Series Title: Usborne Beginners – Information Books<br />Price: $9.99<br />Comment: Great hardcover information books graded for beginning readers, over 30 in the series.<br />Example: Pirates<br />ISBN: 0746074417<br /><br />Series Title: Hachette Starters – Information Books<br />Price: $24.95<br />Comment: Hardcover information books. <br />Example: Heat - Too Hot or Too cold<br />ISBN: 0746074417<br /><br />Series Title: Blue Bananas<br />Price: $12.95<br />Comment: Simple Stories for early readers in a colourful A5 format with fantastic illustrations. Also available in yellow for newly fluent, red for building confidence and green for first readers. Impressive series.<br />Example: Mr Crookodile<br />ISBN: 1405222298<br /><br />Series Title: Rascal Stories (by Paul Jennings)<br />Price: 9.95<br />Comment: For the very early independent reader, bright colourful and unique illustrations, and text that can be read with a little help from a parent or teacher. The stories are about a naughty dragon. Now also available in picture book format.<br />Example : Rascal in Trouble<br />ISBN: 0143300377<br /><br />Look also for the Aussie Nibbles / Bites / Chomps Series. These are favourites of mine because they are genuine stand alone novels that have interesting stories written by quality Australian authors. You don’t need to know complex reading levels, and are excellent to recommend to those parents who ask you for suggestions. What’s more you can now also access Aussie Bites online activities designed for the classroom! Go to: http://www.penguin.com.au/puffin/Features/AussieBitesKidsClub/teachers/teachers.cfm<br /><br />Teenage Reluctant / Struggling Readers<br /><br />Many of these readers are of limited availability due to their specialist market. All the examples given are available at the time of writing, but there are also plenty of other titles in each group.<br /><br />Series Title: Barrington Stoke Reluctant Readers for Teenagers<br />Price: $16.50<br />Comment: Popular titles with simplified text for an 8+ reading level. Designed so that older readers can enjoy more complex narratives in an easy to read form. These publishers (part of Heinemann Education) also do reluctant readers for younger ages.<br />Example: Until Proven Guilty by N. Hinton<br />ISBN: 1842993690<br /><br />Series Title: Orca Currents<br />Price: $12.95<br />Comment: Aimed at the middle school, these books look like mainstream texts but are written for the struggling reader. Currently 10 in the series.<br />Example: Dog Walker<br />ISBN: 1551435225<br /><br />Series Title: Orca Soundings<br />Price: $12.95<br />Comment: Same as Orca Currents but for ages 12+<br />Example: Stuffed<br />ISBN: 1551435004<br /><br />Series Title: Shades<br />Price: $13.50<br />Comment: There are at least 33 independent titles in this series of books with very serious themes. The text is quite large and easy even though the content is gritty. For ages 12+.<br />Example: Cry, Baby<br />ISBN: 023752810X<br /><br />Series for Ages 5-12<br /><br />In this section I have listed “Most recent” in each series. Just a warning that it is better to interpret this as “there are at least this many” in the series, as publishers bring new titles out sometimes at a very fast rate, and sometimes even 4 at a time! Just give us a call and we can help you further with this.<br /><br />Author: Jackie French<br />Series: Animal Stars<br />Most Recent: The Goat that sailed the World - $14.95 (August)<br />ISBN: 0207200777<br />Age: 9-12<br />Comment: The first in a series of books with a factual narrative about a real animal associated with important historical figures. In this case it is Captain Cook and his goat!<br /><br />Author: Michael Panckridge with Brett Lee<br />Series: Toby Jones - $14.95<br />Most Recent: Toby Jones and the Timeless Cricket Match Book 4 (October)<br />Age: 7-12<br />ISBN: 0207200467<br />Comment: A Time Travelling cricketer! Toby takes part in some of histories greatest cricket matches, and solves mysteries at the same time. One for the cricket fans.<br /><br />Author: James Maloney<br />Series: Doomsday $14.95 <br />Most Recent: The Doomsday Rats Book 5 (September)<br />Age: 9-12<br />ISBN: 0207200580<br />Comment: Classic Animal Fantasy<br /><br />Author: Kim Wilkins<br />Series: Fantastica Series 1: The Sunken Kingdom $9.99<br />Most Recent: Book 4 – The Star Queen<br />Age: 8+<br />ISBN: 1862916551<br />Comment: For reluctant readers, a new series similar to Deltora Quest. This one is set in a drowned world. The first Book has the bonus of being illustrated by D.M. Cornish of Monster Blood Tattoo fame.<br /><br />Author: Jenny Oldfield<br />Series: My Magical Pony<br />Most Recent: Silver Mist (2 so far)<br />Age: 6-8<br />ISBN: 0340903244<br />Comment: Jenny Oldfield is a bit of an old hand at these kind of production line series, also writing “Jess the Border Collie”, “Half Moon Ranch” and “Watch out Daisy". This one is what you would expect, a flying horse that helps to solve crimes etc. <br /><br />Author: Tracy West<br />Series: Pixie Tricks<br />Most Recent: The Wicked Wizard – Book 8<br />Age: 6-8<br />ISBN: 0439179858<br />Comment: Much like the Rainbow Magic Series, but this time with naughty fairies, tricking pixies, dwarves, sprites, elves, wizards, gremlins and Goblins! Nice big print for easy reading.<br /><br />Author: Emma Thompson<br />Series: Felicity Wishes<br />Most Recent: Pink Paradise – Book 15<br />Age: 6-9<br />ISBN: 034091193X<br />Comment: Felicity Wishes was very popular before it was over-run by Rainbow Magic. Fairy stories for the really girly girls!<br /><br />Author: Felice Arena and Phil Kettle<br />Series: Boyz Rule!<br />Most Recent: Bird Crazy – 32<br />Age: 6-9<br />ISBN: 1420204904<br />Comment: The boys are always getting themselves into exciting adventures in this series of books. With text aimed at 6-9 year olds, written with a generous splattering of kids colloquialisms, these books have been very popular.<br /><br />Author: Duncan Ball<br />Series: Selby<br />Most Recent: Selby Scrambled – Number 12<br />Age: 7-12<br />ISBN: 0207199116<br />Comment: The ever popular and humorous Selby the talking dog who is very competent at sorting out the problems of humans.<br /><br />Author: Darrel and Sally Odgers<br />Series: Jack Russell: Dog Detective<br />Most Recent: The Sausage Situation – Number 6<br />Age: 6-10<br />ISBN: 1865047880<br />Comment: For animal lovers Jack Russell is a dog that takes his detecting very seriously. Plenty of dog puns and silly situations… Who stole the sausages??? My favourite title has to be "Jack Russell and the Lying Postman".<br /><br />Author: H.I. Larry<br />Series: Zac Power<br />Most Recent: Night Raid (not numbered)<br />Age: 6-12<br />ISBN: 1921098759<br />Comment: A fantastic new series of adventure stories that are easy to read. Zac is an international spy, even though he has only just hit his teens!<br /><br />Author: Rebecca Lim<br />Series: Whiffy Newton boy detective.<br />Most Recent: The Riddle of the Two-Toned Trousers<br />Age: 7-10<br />ISBN: 1741670349<br />Comment: Get ready for plenty of toilet humour in this visually appealing series of books, with reasonably complex story lines. One definitely for silly boys!<br /><br />Author: Sue Lawson<br />Series: Diva<br />Most Recent: Finale (4th book)<br />Age: 6 - 12<br />ISBN: 1921167211<br />Comment: Not the most challenging of reads but this book has a very specific market. It follows the progress of a girl in the “Diva” competition (basically Australian Idol). All those budding Divas out there will love it.<br /><br />Author: Jackie French<br />Series: Wacky Families<br />Most Recent: My Aunty Chook the Vampire Chicken (Number 7)<br />Age: 6-12<br />ISBN: 0207200793<br />Comment: A lovely bit of nonsense from Jackie French. Much like the Captain Underpants books but without the obvious toilet humour. One for the boys and the girls. Quite a lot of text for somewhat silly stories so are perfect for your young advanced readers.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Author: R.L Stine<br />Series: Rotten School<br />Most Recent: The Great Smelling Bee<br />Age: 6-9<br />ISBN: 0007216181<br />Comment: Another series populated by smelly, naughty boys….. From the author of the Goosebumps Series.<br /><br />Also look for Too Cool by Phil Kettle (13 in series), Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey (currently 8 in series), Go Girl by Rowan McAuley (13), Tashi by Fienberg and Gamble (13), My Secret Unicorn by Linda Chapman (10), Chestnut Hill by Lauren Brooke (a new Horse Series), Squeak Street by Emily Rodda (at least 7), Geronimo Stilton (at least 23), and Lily Quench by Natalie Jane Prior (at least 6).<br /><br />Best selling Children’s Book of August<br /><br />The Cat on the Mat is Flat – $14.95<br />Andy Griffiths<br />One of my favourites from last month has proven popular with customers too. It is a book full of Cat in the Hat parodies.<br />ISBN: 033042260X<br /><br />New Releases for Independent readers<br /><br />A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Thirteenth - $19.95<br />Lemony Snicket - October release<br />The long awaited final book should be available on October the 13th.<br />ISBN: 0064410161<br /><br />Wildfire - $17.95<br />Chris Ryan 12+<br />An exciting thriller set in a recognisable South Australian bush. It explores the consequences of deliberate fire-starting and terrorism. One of Chris Ryan’s “Code Red” adventures.<br />ISBN: 1862301662<br /><br />Actual Size – 27.95<br />Steve Jenkins 5+<br />This large, hardcover children’s picture book is well worth a look. It has illustrations of some of the worlds largest animals in their actual size. How big is a giant squid’s eye? <br />ISBN: 1845075668<br /><br />Just in Case - $17.95 <br />Meg Rosoff 12+<br />Gemma, one of the staff from Dymocks, tells me this is the most beautiful teen novels she has ever read! It deals with one boy’s struggle to establish his identity..<br />ISBN: 0141321814<br /><br />The Floods: Home and Away - $14.95<br />Colin Flood<br />Ever wondered how the Flood family came into existence? This action packed tale will reveal all about their escape from Transylvania Waters. The Floods are a special favourite of mine!<br />ISBN: 1741660327<br /><br />Framed - $14.95<br />Frank Cottrell Boyce 10+<br />I’m a big fan of this author of “Millions”. He can write light hearted novels that deal with some very heavy issues, and his characters have complex moral dilemmas. This one deals with a 9 year old boy whose father leaves the family to fend for themselves.<br />ISBN: 033043425X<br /><br />Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story - $14.95<br />Kate De Goldi and Jacqui Colley 8+<br />This book has busy illustrations to engross the reader. The text deals with the traumas that can be associated with the dreaded school-yard “club”, and issues of exclusivity. It is advertised as a teen picture book, but I think it has application from 8+.<br />ISBN: 174114891X<br /><br />Christine’s Favourite<br /><br />Eats, Shoots and Leaves (for kids!) - $24.95<br />Lynne Truss and Bonnie Timmons<br />What a clever idea this book is! A picture book with clear illustrations that highlight the importance of getting your commas in the right place!<br />ISBN: 1861978162<br /><br />Coming in November<br /><br />This Newsletter is for September and October due to the position of the school holidays, therefore November will be the last for the year and will be all about you guys! I’m hoping to provide a collection of great holiday reads for teachers, collected from all our staff here at Dymocks to provide something for everyone. If you have an absolute favourite book, literary or just a rollicking good read, email the title to: schools@dymade.com.au so I can include yours too!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116132019869414043?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1161319650337118862006-10-20T14:11:00.000+09:302006-10-20T14:17:30.340+09:30Just a short Newsletter this month due to the move, with some very important information for ESL and LOTE teachers. It would be great if you could pass it on to them if they don’t usually get to see the Newsletter!<br /><br />Foreign Language Services <br /><br />You may not be aware that we have 3 distinct Foreign Language Services in our store. To make it easy for you to discover what you need I have listed the services under the “resident experts”!<br /><br />Pia – Foreign Language Dictionaries, Course Books and Travel Guides.<br /><br />We have a very large range of these books. Unlike other stores, our buyer also works in the department which means Pia has a wealth of experience and knows what our clientele need. You will be amazed at her knowledge of these resources and she is only too happy to help you out. Pia works weekdays.<br /><br />Katerina – Books written in other languages.<br /><br />It also surprises many that we have books written in other languages. From very simple picture books for kids, right up to adult literature. While we have a reasonable collection on the shelf, you may need to talk to Katerina to sort out your particular requirements. Katerina is a native German speaker who has been developing our selection with Mandy, the store owner, for the last 2 years. Katerina works casually but can be found in the store most weekdays.<br /><br />Daniel – ESL<br /><br />Daniel used to work in the textbook shop we operated several years ago. During his time there he oversaw the development of the ESL section. We now have a very large section for learners of English as a Secondary Language, including dictionaries and course books etc. This section is a very specialised area so if you need help, speak to Daniel. Daniel is a casual so is not always in the store during the week, but can often be found on the weekend. Charlotte, the Manager of Computer and Management Books, is always in the shop during the week and can also help you with this section.<br /><br /><br />Best selling Children’s Book of July<br /><br />Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – $14.95<br />J.K. Rowling<br />Why is this suddenly number one again you ask? Well because it has finally come out in paperback of course! And no…. we don’t know when the final one is due…<br />ISBN: 0747584680<br /><br />New Releases for Independent readers<br /><br />The Story of…Alexander the Great - $17.95 <br />The Story of Series <br />ISBN: 1846960002<br />There are 6 titles in this new series written in a traditional comic format. Other titles include:<br />Elizabeth 1 and the Spanish Armada ISBN: 1846960045<br />Anne Frank ISBN: 1846960010<br />Julius Caesar ISBN: 1846960053<br />The Building of the Giant Pyramid ISBN: 1846960037<br /><br />Chew on this – $16.95<br />Eric Schlosser<br />The children’s version of Schlosser’s Bestselling “Fast Food Nation”. Prepare to be shocked!<br />ISBN: 0141318449<br /><br />We are the Weather Makers – $19.95<br />Tim Flannery<br />Another Children’s version of a Best selling adult non-fiction title, this time Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”<br />ISBN: 192114534X<br /><br />The Cat on the Mat is Flat – $14.95<br />Andy Griffiths<br />I wish this one had come out in time for my poetry Newsletter! I am positively in love with this nonsense. It is a book full of Cat in the Hat parodies, and I believe there has to be a special award for a man who can rhyme “Shonky”, “donkey” and “wonky”.<br />ISBN: 033042260X<br /><br />Like Father, Like Son – $12.99<br />Tony Bradman<br />As an ex-teacher from a boys’ school I am very impressed by this book. It is a collection of 12 contemporary short stories about the various relationships between fathers and their sons. Useful in the classroom.<br />ISBN: 0753411199<br /><br />Hugo Pepper - $24.95<br />Chris Riddell and Paul Stewart<br />This book is the latest of the award winning Far Flung Adventures. A visually pleasing hardcover, it also has a wonderful, mythical feel to the story telling. For all ages up to 12.<br />ISBN: 0385607253<br /><br />Octavius Omalley and the Mystery of the Exploding Cheese - $14.99<br />Alan Sunderland – Late August release<br />Octavius is a detective rat that takes himself very seriously indeed, even though he is always falling into strife. Reminds me of Maxwell Smart from the classic “Get Smart” TV show. Charming little character for ages up to 12.<br />ISBN: 0207200483<br /><br />New Teaching Resources in Store<br /><br />We have just received in store a range of teacher resources from Hawker Brownlow Education. This range is affordable and practical, packed full of reproducible worksheets. We have in store now:<br /><br />Prep- 2 Problem Solving $24.95. <br />Draper and Kotros <br />Mathematical problem solving.<br />ISBN: 1740255348<br /><br />Open the Door to Great Student – Teacher Rapport $29.95.<br />Gloria Jean Berry<br />This is a great little book for the Middle Years as it provides activities for home group teachers to use in those scary 20 minute home group sessions (well, they used to scare me anyway!!).<br />ISBN: 1741013976<br /><br />Happy Hats - $24.50<br />Mary Doerfler<br />Cost Efficient patterns to help you actually make hats for plays, celebrations and parties!<br />ISBN: 1864013222<br /><br />MI (Years 4-8) Activities for the Australian Classroom - $37.50<br />Steve Wayne<br />Multiple Intelligence Worksheets covering SOSE topics. These can be very expensive so it is worth a look.<br /><br />A to Z Thinking Warm-ups - $40.95 (with CD)<br />Steve Wayne<br />Plenty of worksheets for encouraging the learning and retention of new words.<br />ISBN: 1741013518<br /><br />Blooms Multiple Intelligences Themes and Activities - $24.50<br />Brown et al<br />This book is full of lesson plans that have actually been used for mixed ability classes in primary catholic schools of Armidale and Lismore diocese.<br />ISBN: 1864017570<br /><br />Masterminds: Skill Boosters for the reluctant Maths Student (Middle Years) - $31.50<br />Brenda Opie and Douglas McAvinn<br />Activity sheets to build skills and encourage higher-order thinking skills.<br />ISBN: 1741010438<br /><br />Don’t forget to email me with any feedback, please e-mail Christine at schools@dymade.com.au<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116131965033711886?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1161319246573925152006-10-20T14:05:00.000+09:302006-10-20T14:10:46.596+09:30Welcome back. <br />I have always been a big fan of poetry. Not so much the reading of it, but in the cathartic effect of writing it. Not everyone can access the rigid requirements of prose, but there is undoubtedly a poetic form for everyone, from the sonnet to free verse. It can be hard to get kids involved in the writing of poetry but immensely rewarding when you see the products. So this Newsletter is to help them on their way. When those poems are written, why not enter them into the Spring Poetry Competition, especially if your students have different voices that need to be heard. Entries Close on August 18 and information should soon be available on the SAETA (South Australian English Teachers Association) website http://www.saeta.org.au/ . At the time of publishing this newsletter only 2005 info was available, but they have informed me that 18 August is the closing date. Alternatively contact them on 8332 2845.<br /><br />I indicated last month that I would also be including those books that kids love but we hate, but alas, there isn’t enough room! So stay tuned…<br /><br /><br />Poetry<br /><br />Down the Back of the Chair - $27.95<br />Margaret Mahy 5+<br />This lively, eccentric poem is a visual explosion of fun and imagination, featuring dragons, pirates, treasure, lions, elephants and many more.<br />ISBN: 1845074408<br /><br />The Ravenous Beast (New ed) - $14.95<br />Niamh Sharkey 5+<br />The ravenous beast is hungry; he's hungry, hungry, hungry. But is he the hungriest animal of all? "Nonsense smonsense," scoff the other animals, and "Hokum Pokum!" But they want to watch out or the ravenous beast might just gobble 'em up and swallow 'em down!<br />ISBN: 1844284972<br /><br /><br />Poetry: Middle and Upper Primary - $29.92<br />Ideas that Work Series 8+<br />As part of Rigby Heinemann’s Blackline master series for primary classes, there are 26 photocopiable poetry resources that address multiple learning styles.<br />ISBN: 174140102X<br /><br />Poems to Make You Puke and More Poems to Make You Puke - $5.95<br />Tulip Kilbourne 7+<br />Includes epic poetry such as "Nude Dude", "Pooper Scooper" and "Spiders"!<br />ISBN: 095784221X <br /><br />My Granny Went to Market - $14.95<br />Stella Blackstone with Christopher Corr 5+<br />I love this one. Big colourful pictures to look at while a magic carpet <br />flies around to the markets of 10 different cultures. Similar to the 12 days <br />of Christmas, count upwards to 10 as granny buys trinkets ... and it is <br />all in rhyme.<br />ISBN: 1905236387<br /><br />Off to the Sweet Shores of Africa and Other Talking Drum Rhymes - $17.95<br />Uzo Unobagha 5+<br />Why not introduce some rhyming from other cultures? This is a thick picture <br />book with West African influences.<br />ISBN: 081185101X<br /><br />Sing a Song of Poetry - $66.00<br />Gay Su Pinnell and Irene C. Fountas<br />This series contains 250 reproducible poems to introduce each year level to poetry. It also has suggestions on how to use poetry to build phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency.<br />Year K ISBN: 0325006555<br />Year 1 ISBN: 0325006563 <br />Year 2 ISBN: 0325006571<br /><br />Heavy Words Lightly Thrown - $24.95 <br />Chris Roberts 12+ or teacher resource<br />Was Little Jack Horner a squatter? Baa Baa Black Sheep a bleat about taxation? Is Jack and Jill about loss of virginity? Read and find out!<br />ISBN: 1862077924 – PaperBack<br /><br />Naked Bunyip Dancing - $14.95<br />Steven Herrick with Beth Norling 7+<br />A novel in accessible poetry with quirky line drawings. I like this book very much as it doesn’t need to be read chronologically, each page has a little event in the school year. Combined we learn about the kids of 6C.<br />ISBN: 1741146550<br /><br />About Poetry - $38.95<br />Mary Manning 12+<br />This book covers everything you need to know about poetry, with handy glossaries and examples from the best. It is very visual and very complete.<br />ISBN: 0195507169<br /><br />Don't forget Dr Seuss! We try to keep a full range of Dr Seuss books, and they happily fit into both the poetry and nonsense genres! Only $8.95 for the regular paperbacks.<br /><br />Silly Verse for Kids - $10.95<br />Spike Milligan ALL AGES<br />Spike Milligan is well worth the effort. I was surprised to see as I read through this that the song "Ning Nang Nong" which is so popular on Play school is one of his rhymes. <br />ISBN: 0140303316<br /><br />Far Out Brussel Sprout - $14.95<br />June Factor with Peter Viska ALL AGES<br />There are 5 in this fun series that re-lives all those atrocious school yard chants.<br />ISBN: 1877035270<br /><br />Edward Lear's Nonsense Verse - $19.95<br />Edward Lear with Jonathan Bentley 6+<br />Another classic much like Spike Milligan, but this edition has large colourful pictures and is more song like than Milligan.<br />ISBN: 1851497048<br /><br />Crow Feathers - $18.00<br />Edited by Rebecca Edwards and Janelle Evans 12+<br />A collection of contemporary indigenous poems, designed to add an important voice to the lexicon of Australian poetry. The book also has black and white drawings from indigenous artists.<br />ISBN: 186334005X<br /><br />English for the IB Diploma - $52.25<br />Steven and Helen Cross 16+<br />Once your students have learnt to write poetry, this handy textbook will teach them the nuts and bolts of writing essays about poetry. Although it is geared towards the IB it has really practical advice on how to write essays. Worth a look.<br />ISBN: 0199124167<br /><br />Once Upon a Tomb : Gravely Humorous Verses - $27.95<br />J. Patrick Lewis with Simon Bartram 6+<br />A book of poetry and surreal artwork, consisting of comically grim tales of death? Intriguing to say the least…..<br />ISBN: 0763618373<br /><br /><br />Nonsense<br /><br />Just a few to tantalise you!<br /><br />So Gross: Animals - $9.99<br />In association with DMAG 8+<br />Finally a book that tells us those things we really need to know: Why flies vomit on everything they eat, why whales do the world’s biggest farts, and much more!<br />ISBN: 1865049670<br /><br />The Quangle Wangle’s Hat - $27.95<br />Edward Lear with Louise Voce 5+<br />Climb to the top of the Crumpetty Tree and meet the Blue Baboon, the Fimble Fowl, the Dong with a luminous nose - and, of course, the Quangle Wangle in his huge and lovely Hat!<br />ISBN: 0744567947<br /><br />Silly Book - $27.95<br />Stoo Hample 7+<br />A collection of silliness, both verbal and visual.<br />ISBN: 0763622567<br /><br />Goom - $14.95<br />Joshua Wright<br />Atypical of this kind of book, Goom is part story, part comic. My son loves this book very much and puts in mind the dichotomy between what we want our kids to read and what they actually like reading. I found this one more appealing than some of the others, but still there are marauding vampires being blown away by garlic laden bullets and assassination attempts galore. Utter nonsense? You be the judge! <br />ISBN: 1741144353<br /><br />Best selling Children’s Book of June<br /><br />Power of Five: Evil Star - $16.95<br />Anthony Horowitz<br />The second action-packed chiller in the supernatural series from this author. After his experiences at Raven's Gate, fourteen-year-old Matt Freeman thinks his days of battling evil are over, but he is pulled into another horrifying adventure when he discovers a second gate exists. <br />ISBN: 1844286207<br /><br />New Releases for Independent readers<br /><br />The Last Viking - $17.95<br />Terry Deary as part of the FYI series 6+<br />These books are a great new idea. Currently there are about 6 in the series <br />and they are easily fiction texts full of real facts. I would say ages <br />anywhere from 6 to 12 would enjoy this attempt to get non-fiction readers <br />into fiction! Other titles include Traitor's Gate (Edinburgh 1314), and <br />Connor's Eco-den.<br />ISBN: 1842992910<br /><br />Home To Mother - $16.95<br />Doris Pilkington Garimara with Janice Lyndon 9+<br />A younger reader’s version of “Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence” written by the original author and with new illustrations.<br />ISBN: 0702235466<br /><br />Dateline: Troy - $16.95 Pub 1 AUG.<br />Paul Fleischman 12+<br />An interesting non-fiction text that re-tells the story of the Iliad and compares it with modern day conflicts. As a result the unending nature of war is highlighted.<br />ISBN: 0763630845<br /><br />Urchin and the Heartstone: The Mismantle Chronicles Book 2 - $15.95<br />M.I. McAllister 9+<br />In the tradition of Watership Down and Duncton Tales, this series have lots of animals doing wondrous things. Marion (our schools’ rep) loved it!<br />ISBN: 0747578109<br /><br />The Plague - $12.95<br />Philip Wooderson – From the My Side of the Story Series 10+<br />What a great idea! One side of this historical novel is from the viewpoint of Robert, flip the book and then get the viewpoint of Rachel.<br />ISBN: 0753413264<br /><br />Finding Heroes - $19.95<br />Dr Jon Carnegie and Jim Stynes 10+<br />There are lots of great releases this month! This is a visually stimulating motivational book for adolescents written by the wonderful Jim Stynes. It covers material that most adolescents would cringe at, but since it gives real life stories of socially accepted heroes they will probably accept it. I was impressed!<br />ISBN: 1741147573<br /><br />Library Lion - $27.95 Pub 1 AUG.<br />Michelle Knudsen with Kevin Hawkes 5+<br />A sweet story about a helpful lion who is trying to be very well behaved in the library, but what will he do one day when he needs to roar? <br />ISBN: 0744598591<br /><br />So Few of Me - $24.95 Pub 1 AUG.<br />Peter H.Reynolds 4+<br />This author is the illustrator for the Judy Moody books. This is a very important fable for all those anxious, over-achieving children out there, that it is better to do your best than to do everything!<br />ISBN: 1844282694<br /><br />Chat Room - $14.95<br />Barbara Biggs with Jennifer Dabbs 12+<br />Not before time, a novel that explores the dangers that can be involved with chat rooms.<br />ISBN: 0977511200<br /><br />Spiked! - $17.95<br />Sandra Glover 14+<br />An easy to read teen novel with a very important message. While celebrating her exam results Debra carelessly leaves her drink unattended and suffers the consequences.<br />ISBN: 1842705202<br /><br />Christine’s Favourite<br />The Aussie A to Z all Ages Amazing Alphabetical Alliterations - $19.95<br />Roger Twiname ALL AGES<br />I was very excited when I stumbled upon this book in our Australiana for Children section. Huge colourful paintings by the wonderful artist Roger Twinane with fantastic alliteration for all letters from A to Z. Read it to any of your primary school aged kids (some of the vocab is quite advanced but still sounds good), and maybe even try it on your secondary students!<br />ISBN: 0957848153 <br /><br />Where to find us from August… We are moving to a new store in August, which is directly opposite our present one. Our main phone number will REMAIN EXACTLY THE SAME (82235380), but please don’t try the direct childrens’ number until further notice!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-116131924657392515?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1159504818850319532006-09-29T14:09:00.000+09:302006-09-29T14:10:18.866+09:30Since arriving in 1999 at the <em>Herald Sun </em>– Melbourne’s Murdoch-owned equivalent of <em>The Advertiser </em>– Andrew Bolt has made his column, if not quite the heartbeat, then at least a major artery of the city’s ‘mainstream’ opinion.<br /><br />But what do we mean when we say ‘mainstream’? Bolt has clear ideas, and it has nothing to do with Left-wing politics, multiculturalism, the ABC, broadsheet newspapers, expressive female sexuality, university humanities courses, or art he doesn’t understand. <br /><br />If a thing has ‘mainstream’ appeal – by which we mean that it’s popular – it is, for Bolt, imbibed with a moral value that makes it virtuous. This is not merely to say that a thing is legitimised by its popularity; for Bolt, it is undeniably Good and Right.<br /><br />Unless he disagrees with it.<br /><br /><em>Still Not Sorry </em>is a collection of some of Bolt’s ‘best’ (self-defined) columns between 1999 and 2005, on such pet topics of his as the global warming and stolen generations ‘myths’, the inherent Left-wing ‘bias’ of educators, and ‘our’ problem with Islam. The columns are grouped under twelve category headings, and are supplemented by further editorial comment that often provides interesting context.<br /><br />Bolt, I think, genuinely cares about his world, but here I would emphasise the word ‘his’. There is one remarkable consistency throughout the selection of columns, and that is his unerring inability to Imagine the Other. He deploys wickedly acerbic wit and (ab)uses an obvious gift of rhetoric to clamour for the preservation of his world, as he sees it, according to him.<br /><br />This inability, which derives sometimes from incomprehension and at others from sheer unwillingness, is a problem. Not for the News Ltd-owned Herald & Weekly Times, which prizes Bolt for his ‘controversy’ factor that leaves as many readers outraged and scandalised as it does appreciative – either way, it sells papers. And certainly not for Bolt, who receives every appreciative email as representative of a hundred silent majoritarians, and whose prejudices are thus reinforced by the reader whose own prejudices were at first instance confirmed by Bolt’s column.<br /><br />No, the problem with a popular writer who does not (or cannot) Imagine the Other is that his audience won’t do so either. But our ability to Imagine thus is our social expression, our desire to live in peace with other people. Bolt laments expressions of hatred on the so-called ‘Left’ (Mark Latham, Frenzal Rhomb, Max Gillies), but so obviously hates the ‘Howard-haters’, ‘Left-wing propagandists’ and the ‘green industry’ (represented by Bob Brown) that his pleas for calm seem cute at best.<br /><br />He values women as wives and mothers, and at work only if they behave like men – no, like himself. He values people with coloured skin so long as they behave like white-skinned members of ‘mainstream Australia’ – as defined by him. He values Muslims as long as they behave like he thinks Christians should behave, as nation-builders. (Christians who don’t behave thus – who are overly concerned with individual and minority rights – come in for fierce criticism.) Always evocative of Alan Jones’ famous ‘Lowitja who?’ tirade in 1992, if Bolt hasn’t heard of you, you aren’t worthy of respect.<br /><br />It’s not as though Bolt is unintelligent. On a number of issues, such as euthanasia and late-term abortions, he articulates a coherent, ethical position with which one does not need to agree but must respect. But then, too often, he slips into a gloating, ideological fervor that consistently buries any sound point he’s trying to make.<br /><br />His account of his December 2005 debate with RMIT’s head of social science, Rob Watts, on ‘Group-think and the university’s Left’ contains much valid criticism of university humanities departments, many of which are in danger of adopting an ideological oppositionism rather than promoting the techniques of debate. But Bolt, in the tradition of the radio shock-jock, uses one example to ‘prove’ his case. That he may be onto something – and we’ve seen similar instances such as Macquarie University’s inadequate response to Andrew Fraser’s clearly racist statements in mid-2005 – is potentially lost in his method of delivery. <br /><br />His effect is more likely a perpetuation, or even mutation, of the problem, such as when his sustained and ignorant attack on the procedure for government funding of research and literature led last year to a startling intervention by then-Education Minister Brendan Nelson.<br /><br />The contempt he displays for things he doesn’t understand, like various performances at one year’s Melbourne Arts Festival, is typical of one who, fearful of uncertainty and therefore privileging Reason above all other human values, expects to understand, and feels – what, affronted? confronted? silly? – when he doesn’t.<br /><br />He is at his most ridiculous – and ideological – when he writes on global warming. While a healthy scepticism should always be the disposition of a journalist, he respects neither evidence nor the scientific method, and holds those few remaining ‘sceptics’ (like the economic ultra-rationalist Bjørn Lomborg, though even he now admits CO2 emissions are a major causal factor in an overall warming of the planet) up as gods. <br /><br />Without the ability to Imagine the Other, Bolt betrays his profession, and his audience. His critical nationalism does not, unfortunately, extend to criticism of the government (or, more particularly, of the Prime Minister), and so Bolt slips easily into the role of apologist for John Howard’s administration – an administration that must be held to account by journalists for its flagrant depreciation of human values and for its abuse of state power. <br /><br />Bolt would argue that such sentiment is simply ‘anti-Howard’ and therefore ‘Left-wing’ and eminently capable of dismissal. But in characterising it thus, Bolt encourages individuals to Identify with the powerful state over the welfare of other, relatively powerless, individuals. He would be wise to examine the rise of popular National Socialism (Nazism) in 1930s Germany in terms of such identification, rather than to attempt to attribute it to the ‘green movement’, as he does in one column.<br /><br />Like most journalists, Bolt will not be an historical figure – though some of those he dismisses out-of-hand (such as Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and his increasingly reluctant sparring partner on ABC’s <em>Insiders</em>, David Marr) will be. Nevertheless, this collection of columns is useful reading for those of all political persuasions committed to the reform of public discourse, as an example of the rhetorical form and populist content that must be engaged with, not ignored.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115950481885031953?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1159504638482162132006-09-29T14:05:00.000+09:302006-09-29T14:08:38.320+09:30Humanities lecturer and political historian David McKnight has written arguably the most cogent, compelling and fair-minded examination of the current state of Australian politics (I want to say ‘ever’).<br /><br />In this remarkable volume, McKnight – a former member of the Communist Party whose philosophies on life changed dramatically after a six-month stint as a stay-at-home father during the early 1980s – urges a ‘new politics’ for Australia that goes beyond the traditional Left-Right spectrum, which he argues is increasingly meaningless.<br /><br />The Left originated out of the French Revolution’s ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ before being heavily influenced by various socialisms (including Karl Marx’s) during the nineteenth century; for the past forty years it has focussed increasingly on the rights of minority groups. Without the class identity upon which support for socialism was built – class is all but irrelevant to the lived experiences of individuals today – the Left’s support for minority causes has alienated the mainstream. In a disastrous response to the Right’s recent radicalism, and in the absence of any clear articulation of its own core values, the main party of the Australian Left has effectively abandoned much of its long-standing commitment to social democracy.<br /><br />The Right originally advocated the preservation of the ‘pillars of the [European] nation’ – the church, the state, the law, the landed aristocracy, the monarchy and the middle class. Having developed a healthy respect for liberalism as a political philosophy, the Australian Right until recently was imbibed with a social conscience that favoured, or at least tolerated, state intervention to redress imbalances. Recently, however, the traditionally conservative Right has radicalised – it now privileges globalisation above nation, free trade above human rights, and the privatisation of public concerns (e.g. public good utilities, unemployment, and antisocial business sector behaviour).<br /><br />McKnight argues that the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, which essentially refer to different philosophies on how to distribute material resources, are increasingly irrelevant. They hold no solutions for some of the biggest problems facing us now, including global warming. Why should ‘environmentalism’ (a conservative movement) be associated exclusively with the Left? Why should public morality be the purview of the Right?<br /><br />In advocating a new political philosophy, McKnight is careful not to discard those aspects of existing philosophies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism, feminism, etc) that remain relevant to today’s world. To these aspects, McKnight wants to add a ‘new humanism’ that would privilege common values, ecological sustainability and an ethic of care (which originated in a branch of feminism).<br /><br />McKnight’s book is beautifully easy to read. He constantly engages on issues which the Left has traditionally avoided (morality, nationalism, the mainstream) or uncritically taken as gospel (the importance of equality and multiculturalism), and addresses the concerns of those who may disagree. His style is neither elitist nor simple-populist, and his message is timely and imperative.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115950463848216213?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1159504429845268482006-09-29T14:01:00.000+09:302006-09-29T14:03:49.856+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/G.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/G.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />The 1972 Booker Prize winner is hardly as accessible as more recent recipients, such as Peter Carey’s <em>True History of the Kelly Gang </em>(based on the Jerilderie Letter) and DBC Pierre’s <em>Vernon God Little</em>. This raises questions over a possible commercialisation of the award since the year of Whitlam’s election, when Berger experimented with form and content to produce a work that is as provocative as it is frustrating.<br /><br />The story’s ‘central protagonist’ is not given a name, just ‘G.’ for ‘convenience’: evocative of Kafka’s ‘K.’? It’s true that neither character is, for unique reasons, at home in the world he must inhabit, though I doubt the link is any less fragile than that.<br /><br />We are introduced to G. before he is born, and we bear witness to particular, seemingly random, episodes in his life. His story is not merely told (in the absent third-person); it is told by someone, to us. Berger here is cognisant of the falsity in assuming an apparently objective position in telling a story, though whether the narrator’s voice is his own, or another unnamed, unknown character, is unclear. It is at once immaterial and important.<br /><br />Born as the nineteenth century was beginning to consider drawing to a close, G. is the bastard son of an Italian merchant and an English divorcee. His illegitimacy doesn’t seem to affect his social standing, but perhaps in some way informs his increasingly bizarre emphases on sexual conquest, which he may or may not mistake for love. Whether he’s a great lover or an ammoral deviant (you’ll no doubt fall somewhere between the two extremes, if you choose to judge at all) will depend on your own prejudices, and on which of Berger’s hints you choose to privilege.<br /><br />The backdrop to G.’s life is a period of excessive radicalism in Italian society, whose revolutionary sentiments drew blood more than once. We visit the Boers in South Africa, and are presented with contextual analyses of the conflicts in the Balkans and the events that triggered the so-called Great War.<br /><br />Interspersed with the narrative are constant, interruptive asides from Berger’s narrator, who imparts on us his perceptive knowledge of the world. These asides read something like excerpts from a hundred humanities papers, and will please as many readers as they repel.<br /><br />Surely original, Berger’s <em>G.</em> is a complex masterpiece, written by an art critic motivated by a desire to understand his world.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115950442984526848?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1157692542837601952006-09-08T14:38:00.000+09:302006-09-08T14:45:42.846+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/48%20shades.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/48%20shades.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Think back to your final year of high school. Despite the sky-rocketing divorce and separation rates among baby-boomer couples and those impressive stats showing only 7 per cent of Australian families are ‘nuclear’ (the mum, dad and kids thing), most of us will have completed year 12 (or an equivalent) with mum or dad – or even both – setting curfews and cooking meals.<br /> <br />Dan, the protagonist in Nick Earls’ 1999 novel <em>48 Shades of Brown</em>, won’t have these experiences. His parents have moved to Geneva, leaving the 16-year-old in Melbourne for the ‘most important year of his life’. To the delight of his best mate Chris, Dan moves in with his 22-year-old aunt Jacq and her housemate, the lovely Naomi.<br /> <br />Jacq and Naomi are real-life, bona fide university students, with all that entails. Messy rooms. Late nights. Watching videos with the lights turned off. Boyfriends. Sex. University parties.<br /> <br />But while Chris – whose idea of women is informed by pixilated internet images that respond to his every desire – is drooling over the possibilities, Dan isn’t so sure. How can he, with his school uniforms and folded socks, fit into this undergraduate world of cool detachment? And what happens when he falls in love with Naomi?<br /> <br />Earls has written an enjoyable, relevant book for older adolescents that strikes a similar chord to Melina Marchetta’s <em>Looking for Alibrandi</em>. Dan is a sensitive and reflective paragon of virtue, displaying a wisdom that belies his sixteen years – one suspects his voice is Earls’, rather than his own, but this makes the story no less appealing. Dan’s character adds much to the novel’s overall restraint, one of its most attractive qualities.<br /> <br />Penguin has re-issued the book to coincide with the release of Daniel Lapaine’s film adaptation.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115769254283760195?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1156606314454809692006-08-27T00:59:00.000+09:302006-08-27T01:01:54.456+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/saul.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/saul.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Saul cuts a swathe through the ‘greats’ of western philosphy in this masterful attempt to address the Big Question: How Are We to Live?<br /><br />The Canadian author’s major project is to reveal the privileged position Reason is afforded by our civilisation, and to cut it down to size. He doesn’t reject the positive role of Reason in our individual and social lives, but argues that Reason is merely one of six common values, shared by all humanity.<br /><br />Saul nominates the remaining five as Ethics, Common Sense, Memory, Intuition, and Imagination. Among the points he returns to, again and again, is that we should see each of these six values as equals, instead of privileging Reason, and denying the others, to the detriment of ourselves. Good decisions, he argues, are those that result from a swirling, democratic consensus involving all common human values equally.<br /><br />The point is that these values are all dependent on each other. Reason can’t exist properly without Ethics and Memory; Intuition without Imagination and Common Sense becomes romantic fantasy. Yet he sees our world – that of the early twentieth century – consumed by a ridiculous ideology that purports to get by with ‘Reason’ alone, flowing from the erroneous assumption that ‘the world is rational’.<br /><br />Rather, we can be rational (or not), just as we can be ethical, or not. Because Reason, according to Saul, is ‘thought and ideas’. So a tree can’t be rational. Neither, for that matter, can technology, though we often claim that it is. Saul suggests that this mistake comes from our confusion of Reason for ‘Instrumental Reason’, that illusory ‘quality’ that turns universities into vocational training centres, permits technology to lead society, and which allows a lie as great as ‘Iraq has weapons of mass destruction’ through the world’s ‘intelligence’ systems.<br /><br />Saul notes that it is (purely) rational to order the extermination of people who don’t conform, or who are ‘different’: see Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany. That was Reason on its own: the problem – Jews; the expedient solution – ethnic cleansing. Reason without conscience. Saul demands we see the Nazi Party not as a problem for Germany’s past: the pure rationality of the processes that led to Nazi Germany is a problem owned by all of Western civilisation, from Athens onward.<br /><br />Because he must, he assures us he’s not ‘anti-Reason’. Thought and ideas are essential to any proper society. But Reason must be tempered – and enhanced – by our other values, as they must be by it.<br /><br />He is confident, Saul. He takes on the utilitarians and the instrumentalists – Plato, Bertrand Russell, John Rawls – and the romantics alike. His contempt for the short-sighted managerialism, with its blinkered, instrumentalist focus on immediate cost-cutting, annual profits, ‘efficiency’, ‘growth’ and ‘productivity’, almost assumes an ideological tone. Almost. But he’s right: while utilitarianism has its place (he explains that a toilet is indeed useful), it cannot be the basis for social order. The ideologues who ‘believe’ in free markets (though not in ‘intellectual property’, nor when transnational corporations become monopolistic, it seems), are really just this century’s version of those who claimed God was ‘The Truth’. <br /><br />And before we criticise Saul of hypocrisy, his book is argument, rather than mere statement of ‘fact’. He lays down no law, unlike the doctrinal churches and economic ‘rationalists’. He brings philosophy to the people (and urges the people to it), rather than reserve it for a privileged, educated few. He is as accessible as Peter Singer, though Saul’s argument makes infinitely more sense than the utilitarian Singer’s ‘practical ethics’. Ethics, Saul reminds us, does not necessarily pay – it is an expression of the social, of friendship, of The Other.<br /><br />Rather than ‘rationalist’, ‘utilitarian’ or ‘humanist’, Saul calls his approach ‘animist’. This may alarm some readers, given the connotations that word has attracted after centuries of romantic instrumentalism. But fear not: he articulates his position well.<br /><br />Throughout its 330 pages, I found my pragmatic voice – that of fear, fear of uncertainty – losing its pervasiveness. Saul’s words inspire courage (not romantic fantasy, if read properly). He advocates a ‘responsible individualism’ that requires constant effort for its own sake – a difficult notion in an epoch of unlimited desire, pragmatic politics, and an expectation of puerile ‘happiness’.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115660631445480969?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1156606161520089922006-08-27T00:11:00.000+09:302006-08-27T00:59:25.503+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/caldicott.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/caldicott.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />The title of veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Dr Caldicott's latest book will leave no doubt as to where she stands on the issue, if you didn't already know. A physician specialising in the medical effects of radiation, Dr Caldicott's second career as figurehead for the global campaign began with a letter to <em>The Advertiser </em>in 1972, raising awareness of the French nuclear tests. That letter led to interviews and an audience with Gough Whitlam, who "wasn't much interested". But the Unions were, particularly when she started to talk about testicular effects of radiation, and before long she had inspired a 24-hour Railways Workers' Union strike that afforded her front-page publicity.<br /><br /><em>Nuclear Energy is Not the Answer </em>focusses on the global situation, with a heavy emphasis on the United States. She spends all of two pages discussing Australia, which means that while its contents may be of use to the local debate, you won't find any information about John Howard's Nuclear Taskforce (led by Ziggy Switkowski) or what she believes is really going on at Lucas Heights - suffice to say that the "medical isotopes" claim (they can apparently be constructed without the need for a reactor) is probably bogus.<br /><br />The book's strongest sections are those utilising Dr Caldicott's personal expertise: radiation medicine. In these chapters, she presents a highly convincing case against the mining, refinement, use and storage of radioactive matter for use in power generation and weaponry, from a medical perspective. Indeed, she has characterised the entire nuclear "issue" as primarily a "medical" one.<br /><br />Her weakest chapters are those dealing more broadly with nuclear power and weapons proliferation. In these aspects of her argument, she is most certainly an ideologue (which she admits to, without seeming to understand the full implications of such a charge). Worryingly, she appears to have no compunctions about finding references to "fit" her argument: her first two chapters, in which she presents the full costs of the nuclear fuel cycle from extraction and reactor construction to storage and decommissioning, are based solely upon the un-refereed findings of two retired Netherlands scientists. She openly advocates Google as a tool for finding facts "you already know".<br /><br />This hard, ideological bent to her work comes from years of confrontation with the nuclear industry and its political voices, and from what she sees as the media's acquiescence in the industry's deceptiveness. The result is an unfortunate cheapening of the debate to stark "facts" and figures, upon which there is no agreement by each "side" and from which the lay citizen can learn very little.<br /><br />Dr Caldicott's major mistake, it seems, lies in thinking that the debate can be won with education of "the facts". But facts can be twisted, and are rarely irrefutable. Like many scientists, she puts enormous faith in her own science and is frustrated at politicians' scientific and medical "illiteracy".<br /><br />But politicians represent the non-expert citizenry, who must be persuaded according not only to Reason, but also to Common Sense and Ethics. The debate will move forward not upon the final agreement on "facts", but on an application of Values. Dr Caldicott claims that, contrary to the industry's claims, nuclear power is not "clean and green", will hardly decrease CO2 emissions and is certainly not "safe", but she misses probably the easiest argument against nuclear power: that it fails to address the two major problems associated with coal-fired power. Coal is extracted from the Earth's crust (necessarily an unsustainable activity), and its conversion to energy creates a toxic by-product.<br /><br />If Caldicott's title is correct (and it must be, given a dispassionate examination of the problems), her book fails to convince, though parts of it make useful contributions to the "facts and figures" debate.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115660616152008992?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1155264951280650132006-08-11T12:21:00.000+09:302006-08-11T12:25:51.283+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/Longest-Decade.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/Longest-Decade.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Adorned with an uncommonly nondescript photograph of Paul Keating and John Howard together, George Megalogenis’s second book (after 2003’s <em>Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia</em>) is an attempt to interpret the last fifteen years of Australian politics, with reference mainly to the (almost) unbroken period of economic growth that has informed them.<br /><br />Megalogenis is a trained economist and was, between 1988 and 1999, a member of the Canberra press gallery, that gaggle of soundalike journalists competing to repeat the most politician spin-bytes for endless news bulletins. While those eleven years gave the author closer access than most to the ‘corridors of power’ during a period of great political, economic and social change, one has the feeling the book benefits more from his seven years outside the gallery since.<br /><br />His project is to examine the claims made by Keating, Howard and their respective apologists to the sole responsibility for the last decade-and-a-half of prosperity. His main thesis is that both Prime Ministers, despite arriving from the opposite sides of the materialist spectrum, had almost identical views on economic reform, and thus should be remembered as equally responsible.<br /><br />Such insight is true, though hardly new. Howard (as treasurer, Opposition leader and Prime Minister) and Keating (as treasurer and PM) both wanted deregulation, privatisation, labour market reform, free trade, surplus budgets, low inflation and lower taxes: essentially, the neoliberal project. Where they differed was on social policy, yet while he spends time on Hansonism and asylum seekers, Megalogenis’ bias is toward the politics of inflation and the rates of interest and unemployment (as opposed to their social costs).<br /><br />Whatever such an emphasis was intended to achieve, its (perhaps unintended) effect is to reflect the biases of the Keating and Howard governments by relegating human rights to a level of secondary concern (with a few notable exceptions for the former). In defence of Megalogenis, one might argue that his project was to merely describe and analyse the politics of reform and the egos of its instigators, but another might ask how well such a thing could ever be done without questioning the very delineation of ‘economic’ from ‘social’ that informs much of that ‘reform’.<br /><br />Where Megalogenis’ book is useful is in its restatement of the many memorable lines that have been strangely forgotten by the press gallery over the years, notably the distinction of ‘core’ from ‘non-core’ promises and the ‘never ever’ GST promise, and in both Keating and Howard’s thoughts on past events, gained through hours of one-on-one interviews conducted by the author. Despite the quality research, though, this is hardly the <em>End of Certainty </em>for the Nineties.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115526495128065013?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1155263338978580672006-08-11T11:57:00.000+09:302006-08-11T12:18:45.640+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/revelation2.1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/200/revelation2.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/revelation.3.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/200/revelation.0.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />In a state of high alertness as the credits rolled for Ana Kokkinos’ new film <em>The Book of Revelation</em>, my one resolution among ephemeral half-thoughts was to read the novel it came from. The following morning, a copy of the 2000 paperback edition (sporting a $10 sale sticker on account of its redundancy now that the film tie-in cover has arrived) found me from a sale table at work.<br /><br />Dominating the otherwise white cover of my edition is a crimson light bulb, hanging from a line of text that originally appeared in the <em>Guardian </em>newspaper. ‘An exceptional book…It is perfect’. Discerning readers like to think such marketing babble doesn’t influence them, but of course it does – particularly when the <em>Guardian </em>calls something ‘perfect’. Of course, I had already made the decision to buy (I must admit, the $10 sticker helped me along), but the <em>Guardian </em>was telling me I wouldn’t regret it – and I was inclined to listen.<br /><br />After flicking through the four pages of positive criticism inside the front cover (which begins, ironically, with the <em>Independent</em>’s assessment that the book ‘is so good it doesn’t need a marketing campaign’), I arrive at the first line, which looks suspiciously like a cliché: ‘I can see it all so clearly, even now’. But what follows in the 264 pages hence is a story told so well that to even consider the application of adjectives is to perpetrate an act of debasement.<br /><br />Daniel, who is written with such subtle surety that, by book’s end, my mental image of his character is no longer Tom Long (who plays the role in Kokkinos’ film), is a renowned dancer to whom something occurs that is so monstrous it causes him to lose his identity. That such a thing would never occur in real-life – he is abducted by three masked and cloaked women who (ab)use him for their sexual gratification – is a strength and attractiveness of literature. This hint of the fantastic, bringing human characters into the extremes of experience and imagining their responses, has informed the popularity of the fictional narrative since before a jealous Oedipus killed his father, and certainly well before Raskolnikov was confronted by his own murderous capacity. The technique is used to devastating effect by contemporary Melbourne authors Elliot Perlman (<em>Three Dollars</em>; <em>Seven Types of Ambiguity</em>) and Christos Tsiolkas (<em>Loaded</em>; <em>Dead Europe</em>).<br /><br />I wonder what it would be like to read <em>The Book of Revelation </em>without having seen the film first – without knowing the story. Even anticipating the savage final twist (perhaps because I knew what was coming?), the story affected me, emotionally and unexpectedly. Its 264 pages, all of which were read during the course of two return train trips from La Trobe University to Flinders Street, are at various times excrutiating (I felt physically ill at one point), truly happy, and indescribably sad. After ‘I can see it all so clearly, even now’, Thomson avoids clichés, even when describing love.<br /><br />Did I empathise with Daniel especially because of the role-reversal (if anyone were to be abducted by three members of the opposite sex, we would expect her to be a she)? More worrying is the possibility that my empathy derives primarily from our shared gender. I don’t really give that interpretation much credence, preferring to believe the story’s authenticity is invested by the brilliance of the writing.<br /><br />Both book and film deserve ten times the audience they’ll attract, though a general warning should accompany these very adult texts: readers and viewers will be confronted by some highly disturbing scenes. Now I’m on the lookout for Thomson’s other novels.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115526333897858067?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1154674579654173912006-08-04T16:21:00.000+09:302006-08-04T16:26:20.226+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/impact%20of%20inequality.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/impact%20of%20inequality.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />In his important but rather polemical <em>Growth Fetish </em>(2003, ISBN 1741140781), Clive Hamilton asks the basic but subersive question: why economic growth? More accurately, Hamilton asks why modern, industrial (or postmodern, post-industrial) societies – the so-called ‘western world’ – pursue policies designed to produce growth in Gross Domestic Product of 4 per cent every year, despite the fact that the ‘economic problem’, that of access to scarce resources, has been ‘solved’ for the vast majority of its populations.<br /><br />Richard Wilkinson takes the question further in his new book, <em>The Impact of Inequality </em>(2005, ISBN 1565849256). Despite his role in the University of Nottingham’s School of Medicine, where he is Professor of Social Epidemiology, Wilkinson is not your garden-variety medico: rather than looking for causes of illness in microlocations within the bodies of individuals and then confining treatment to sites as limited as ‘the bronchial tract’ or ‘the tonsils’, he searches for social effects on individual and collective health.<br /><br />In many ways, Wilkinson’s argument is new and revolutionary (though, as he points out during the course of his book, this was not always the case). We know prolonged stress has consequences for individual health, for example. What if we then find that one of the greatest potential causes of stress is interaction with other people? We know (now) that depressive illness is real, and is often characterised by low levels of seratonin in the brain. But what if we then find that differences in seratonin levels among individuals may be functional in a hierarchical society, as high-status individuals exhibit higher seratonin levels than low-status individuals?<br /><br />Wilkinson cites studies that confirm such findings, and others. His central thesis is that inequality itself is a causal factor in many social ills and individual illnesses, from homelessness, violence and teenage pregnancies to obesity, depression and even the common cold. A society marked by relatively large status inequalities is more likely to be one in which its members interact competitively and self-interestedly; hence, individuals are likely to trust others less, have less close friends, and be more susceptible to consequential depression and/or viral infections.<br /><br />He does run the risk of alienating readers by presenting a ‘magic bullet’ theory to explain every negative aspect of modern living, but his analysis, sincerity and qualified use of peer-reviewed research is highly convincing. At the very least, Wilkinson’s work challenges the view propagated by today’s political leaders, who argue that competition in market terms is necessarily good, that (undemocratic) corporatism is the way of the future, and that inequality is okay so long as there exists ‘equality of opportunity’. His prose is somewhat repetitive, although he does warn his readers of this tendency in his introduction.<br /><br />In an age in which we are increasingly encouraged to see things through a utilitarian economist’s narrow lens of costs and benefits, and in which social interactions are being whittled down to the bare necessities of consumer transactions (soon a second human won’t even be required), Wilkinson asks us to think about the consequences, with reference to our most important individual ‘asset’: our quality of life.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115467457965417391?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1153539935704758022006-07-22T13:12:00.000+09:302006-07-22T13:15:35.716+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/growthfetish.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/growthfetish.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />For the past thirty years (and particularly during the last ten), we've heard a lot about Growth. The related projects of population increase, boosting exports, expanding share portfolios, and the big one, Economic Growth, have assumed central importance in the expectations modern Australians have of their governments.<br /><br />"Growth" is consistently presented as a self-evident good, to the point that arguments in its favour are now little more than empty statements of pro-Growth rhetoric. There simply MUST be constant and steady Growth in our Gross Domestic Product (within the parameters set by consequential inflation and interest rates), our leaders urge, or else.<br /><br />The rhetoric is applied in increasingly bizarre circumstances. Queensland's ostensibly Labor Premier Peter Beattie uses the phrase "nation-building" - code for Growth - to justify policy positions that are actually right-wing.[1] The right factions at national Young Liberal conferences declare that the ABC's youth radio station, Triple J, must Grow or suffer the consequences of "stagnation". <br /><br />Growth...but for what purpose? Just why does our Economy (never our "society") need to Grow faster, stronger, better?<br /><br />In his role as Executive Director of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton takes this question as his starting point in his 2003 book <em>Growth Fetish </em>(ISBN 1741140781). That question arises from a political-philosophical belief that the widespread, uncritical acceptance of an idea often hides the existence of a relatively small class of benefactors who usurp political power by setting the paradigms within which the majority operates, speaks and thinks. The Australia Institute is often described as a "left-wing" think tank, but while Hamilton's critical approach has its origins in Marxist thought, he is no Marxist: he believes in "false consciousness" and the existence of social classes, though he doesn't believe class any longer substantively informs our identities.<br /><br />In asking the whys and hows of Economic Growth - in requiring its adherents to provide sound rationale for their pro-Growth rhetoric - Hamilton engages in a deeply subversive exercise. He wants progressive thought to engage itself with the situation at-hand: as he sees it, the thirty-year campaign of the pro-market, anti-regulation ideologues has succeeded in winning the battle for our minds, but its corrosive and deeply disturbing social impacts means that it will never win our hearts.<br /><br />It's a simple question, "why Growth?". Why, indeed, when the major justification for our mass-fetish - a marked increase, across the board, in material wealth - has not made us any happier? Hamilton points to evidence that suggests that the extreme emphasis placed on productivity, flexibility, efficiency and so-called "choice", at the apparent expense of quality relaxation time, relationships, stability and mental, physical, social and spiritual well-being, is actually causing great harm.<br /><br />We all know the survey results. Financially rich people do not report that they are significantly happier (or even more financially comfortable) than financially poor people. In his <em>Quarterly Essay </em>(ISBN 1863951822) published earlier this year, Hamilton adds more startling statistics: only 5 per cent of those living in households with incomes above $100 000 describe themselves as ‘prosperous’; an identical percentage (9%) of those in the lowest and highest income groups say they are ‘totally satisfied’ about their financial situations; almost half of the richest 20 per cent of Australian households say they can’t afford to buy everything they really needed, despite the financial wealth of Australians having increased threefold since the 1950s.[2]<br /><br />Hamilton is not anti-growth, or even anti-market. He recognises that growth is necessary to pull people, societies and nations out of situations of material depravation. But he does argue that, once material depravation is no longer an issue for the vast majority of the population, the use of Growth to make already comfortable individuals wealthier - a use that promotes widespread acts of overconsumption - raises ethical and health-related concerns. The globalisation of information flows has made it possible for ‘us’, in the ‘West’, to see (if we want to) that our lifestyles, characterised by material über-wealth, comes at major material, social and health costs to others – in the Africa of human guinea pigs for commercial pharmaceutical companies, in the Asia of sweatshop labour, in the Middle East of international, antidemocratic intervention, and in the South America of public good commodification by corporate multinationals. Of course, we don’t want to see these things, and, guided by ratings, corporate media respects our need for ignorance.<br /><br />The ethical problems of overconsumption are more fully explored in Richard Wilkinson’s <em>The Impact of Inequality </em>(2004, ISBN 1565849256), but they derive from an inherent characteristic of capitalistic societies: that ‘winning’ comes at the cost of another’s ‘loss’.[3] Purely within Australia, those ‘losers’, in material (and often wider wellbeing) terms include those living outside cities, members of minority groups (including, significantly, Indigenous Australians, whose life expectancy is now 20 years lower than other Australians), people on low incomes, unemployed people, non-citizens and refugees, unskilled people and those with low levels of education, outer-suburban dwellers, and those living in hazardous environments. That we now ascribe a negative moral value to each of these categories in an attempt to justify our lavish overconsumption is itself indicative of massive (and unjust) inequality.<br /><br />Hamilton goes one step further, and argues that such overconsumption is actually detrimental even to the wellbeing of those who ostensibly benefit in material terms. The phenomena of lack of social engagement, the devaluing of civic institutions, overwork, stress, depressive illness and suicide are on the rise in, peculiarly, the societies of material abundance. His project is to open our eyes to the current state of affairs by lifting the veil of spin, and then to persuade us to change it.<br /><br />Hamilton’s work provides a starting point for a new progressive politics. It is not, however, a blueprint: <em>Growth Fetish </em>suffers from unnecessary polemicism, and in its failure to provide evidence for a number of correlations and conclusions. This is unfortunate, because in not being properly armed, his argument is wide open to misappropriation and even dismissal by those with high stakes in the current regime. Rather, <em>Growth Fetish </em>is aimed at progressives searching for a politics beyond that of the traditional Left, which has become merely an alternate expression of the importance of material wealth. [Russell]<br /> <br />[1] Beattie, interviewed by Maxine McKew, ABC TV's <em>Lateline</em>, 14 July 2006.<br />[2] Hamilton, ‘What’s Left? The death of social democracy’ (2006), 21 <em>Quarterly Essay</em> 1 at 22-23.<br />[3] See Bob Blain, as interviewed by Phillip Adams, <em>Late Night Live</em>, ABC Radio National, 18 July 2006.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115353993570475802?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1152763042794259442006-07-13T13:22:00.000+09:302006-07-13T13:27:22.816+09:30<p class="MsoNormal"><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Marion</st1:City></st1:place> [I-work-in-the-kid’s-section-&-rarely-read-adult-books-any-more-cos-kid’s-ones-are-so-great!!] recommends:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The Dragon of Lonely <st1:place st="on">Island</st1:place> by Rebecca Rupp<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Isbn 0763628050<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>$14.95<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Reading age<span style=""> </span>9-12yrs<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Hannah, Zachary and Sarah Emily Davis spend the summer on an island belonging to their Great-great Aunt Mehitabel.<span style=""> </span>Exploring the house, they discover a beautiful wooden box in their aunt’s old desk and find a hidden cave, home to Fafnyr Goldenwings, a story-telling Tridrake…….that’s a three headed-dragon to you & me!<span style=""> </span>The children are caught up in the dragon’s fabulous stories & tales of adventures past.<span style=""> </span>Fafnyr has a kind heart, and slightly unpredictable temper and a memory that spans twenty thousand years and the three siblings spend a summer they will never forget!<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I read this one in a night, I loved the story and was also transported by the stories the dragon told the children.<span style=""> </span>Fantastic adventure and beautifully written.<span style=""> </span>A must for all fans of dragons and adventure.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The Return of the Dragon by Rebecca Rupp<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Isbn 0763628042<span style=""> </span>$14.95<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Reading age<span style=""> </span>9-12yrs<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">The children return to <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">Lonely</st1:PlaceName> <st1:placetype st="on">Island</st1:PlaceType></st1:place> and again meet up with Fafnyr.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">His safe haven is perhaps under threat from a strange billionaire who anchors his white yacht off the island.<span style=""> </span>The children cannot work out if he is a friend or foe and by listening to more of Fafnyr’s stories, they are guided to think for themselves and make the right decisions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I devoured this sequel to The Dragon of Lonely Island.<span style=""> </span>The children have some tough choices to make as their aunt has trusted them with a huge secret.<span style=""> </span>Great adventures continue for them and the reader, who will not be disappointed! <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Coming 26^th July, 2006:-<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Clued Up: Book 1<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Faster than Lightning by Michael Panckridge & Pam Harvey<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Isbn 0207200653<span style=""> </span>$14.99<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Reading age 9-12plus<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Angus is 12 and lives for his horses.<span style=""> </span>His father is a trainer and Angus helps him out before school each morning.<span style=""> </span>One morning he is training a young colt and a group of erratic riders push him into the railing…..and so starts a bit of a mystery.<span style=""> </span>Angus and his friends discover shady goings-on at a local stud farm.<span style=""> </span>Is it possible that they have discovered something more sinister than a special horse-breeding program?<span style=""> </span>Angus must find out if they are cloning famous race-horses before it is too late.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Michael Panckridge’s books are great.<span style=""> </span>Some are co-written with an expert on the topic [ Brett Lee with the cricket ones, Laurie Daley with the rugby league ones.]<span style=""> </span>The books have lots of true facts and trivia at the back and the stories are exciting as well!<span style=""> </span>The sport-orientated Legend series and Anniversary Legend series by him are good also <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"> </span></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Coming 1 September, 2006:-<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">TheFlight of the Silver Turtle by John Fardell <o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Isbn 0571226914<span style=""> </span>$15.95<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Reading age<span style=""> </span>9-12plus<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">This is a follow-up to The 7 Professors of the Far North.<span style=""> </span>Sam is back in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Edinburgh</st1:place></st1:City> with Zara, Ben & the Professor.<span style=""> </span>The children are helping to build an electric-powered flying boat, when they come across a mysterious old photograph.<span style=""> </span>This leads them to find clues pointing to the existence of a long-hidden, secret invention of world-changing proportions!<span style=""> </span>Sinister people are after the secret too and the children are caught up in another adventure which takes them from the roof-tops of <st1:city st="on">Edinburgh</st1:City> to <st1:place st="on">Lake Geneva</st1:place>.<span style=""> </span>Look out for this one and please read the 7 Professors of the Far North before September, as it is just as good!<span style=""> </span>Action-packed and full of wonderful characters and inventions. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">These two books are also perfect titles to encourage reluctant readers.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115276304279425944?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1152632654798658892006-07-12T01:09:00.000+09:302006-07-13T10:00:57.276+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/qe22.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/qe22.jpg" border="0" /></a> <em>Quarterly Essay</em> is fast becoming an institution in the promotion and circulation of ideas in Australia. Having commenced in 2001 with La Trobe politics professor Robert Manne’s scathing and agenda-setting polemic against what he saw as the blatant, ideological denial of the existence of the Stolen Generations by the intelligent Right,<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a> <em>QE</em> has increased in circulation and power to become a true challenger to the economically radical/regressive (WorkChoices = good) and socially ultra-conservative agenda being set by publications like News Ltd’s <em>The Australian</em> newspaper, PBL’s <em>The Bulletin</em>, and the journal <em>Quadrant</em>.<br /><br />Published by entrepreneur and property developer Morry Schwartz’s Black Inc label, <em>Quarterly Essay </em>began in 2001. Since its establishment in 2000, Black Inc has also published the annual <em>Best Australian Essays</em> and <em>Best Australian Stories </em>anthologies (to which it has more recently added <em>Poems</em>, <em>Sports Writing </em>and <em>Profiles</em>) as well as a range of other books (most notably a reprint of Ken Inglis’s <em>The Stuart Case</em> and a number of Manne collections<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a>) and the increasingly important <em>The Monthly</em> magazine.<br /><br />John Birmingham lifted the lid on the so-called ‘Jakarta Lobby’ which has been hiding and trivialising Indonesia’s crimes against humanity for decades in the interests of realpolitik.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a> Germaine Greer sent tongues wagging with a call for Australians everywhere to internalise an ‘Aboriginality’ in order to both understand the problems confronting Indigenous people and save their nation from environmental destruction.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[4]</a> Oft-quoted by supporters and critics are Guy Rundle’s assessment of John Howard’s populism,<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn5" name="_ednref5">[5]</a> John Button’s evaluation of the Australian Labor Party,<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn6" name="_ednref6">[6]</a> and John Martinkus’s account of the West Papuan independence movement.<a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[7]</a><br /><br />In <em>Voting for Jesus </em>(ISBN 186 395 2306), Amanda Lohrey takes a critical approach to the mainstream narrative that suggests that Christianity is having an increasing influence on Australian politics, through the apparent popularisation of evangelical churches, the election of Family First members to Parliaments, and the over-representation in the two major Parties of committed Christians like the Liberals' Tony Abbott, Peter Costello and Kevin Andrews (who nevertheless seem to display no discomfort when locking asylum seekers away indefinitely on remote islands despite their total innocence of any crime, causing the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq outside the scope of international law, and unashamedly stealing oil resources from one of the world's newest nations, Timor Leste) and Labor's Kim Beazley, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy. Lohrey's thesis is that while there appears to be a creeping religious aspect to many hot public debates, the lack of consensus among Christians on such issues as the Iraq war, gay rights and abortion suggests that 'Christianity' is being used by some as a political wedge-issue to justify their own indefensible prejudices. She adds much to a line of secular-liberal argument begun by David Marr in <em>The High Price of Heaven</em> (1999) and continued through Marion Maddox’s <em>God Under Howard</em> (2005) that is inherently sceptical of Church-based national politics.<br /><br />She describes well the two main schools of traditional Christianity in Australia: the liberal school, which essentially holds that Christ’s message was one of love, acceptance and tolerance in each individual had the responsibility to live the ‘good life’ and in which judgement was left to God; and the strict-moralist school, which holds that humans are born wicked and must be guided by churches, which require adherence to stringent codes of conduct. A humanist to some degree, Lohrey naturally prefers the former, and, acknowledging her lack of theological training, is unconvinced of the theological merits of the new, market-driven Christianity that pervades institutions like Hillsong. She questions the anti-gay, anti-Green, anti-abortion messages from the churches (old and new), as well as the increasingly slippery tactics they use to mobilise political support.<br /><br />It’s a perceptive and thoughtful contribution to a debate that Australians increasingly find themselves having, as the apparent rise of a new Christian constituency that almost exclusively votes Liberal (some after giving first preference to Family First). [Russell]<br /><br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> Manne, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right’ (2001), 1 <em>Quarterly Essay</em> 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> Including: Manne (ed), <em>Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History</em> (2003); Manne, <em>Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977-2005</em> (2005); Manne and Peter Beilharz (eds), <em>Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays</em> (2006).<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> Birmingham, ‘Appeasing Jakarta: Australia’s complicity in the East Timor Tragedy’ (2001), 2 <em>QE</em> 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> Greer, ‘Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood’ (2003), 11 <em>QE</em> 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[5]</a> Rundle, ‘The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction’ (2001), 3 <em>QE</em> 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[6]</a> Button, ‘Beyond Belief: What Future for Labor?’ (2002), 6 <em>QE</em> 1.<br /><a title="" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[7]</a> Martinkus, ‘Paradise Betrayed: West Papua’s Struggle for Independence’ (2002), 7 <em>QE</em> 1.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115263265479865889?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1152339980711128842006-07-08T15:26:00.000+09:302006-07-13T10:08:46.946+09:30<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/coming%20to%20party.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/coming%20to%20party.jpg" border="0" /></a>Mike Steketee of News Ltd's <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Australian</span> sings a familiar tune in his recent derision of the latest collection of essays from Labor members. "Labor is very good at dissecting its problems in Opposition", he writes. "It needs to try harder to look like an alternative government".[1] Thus at first instance, Steketee (or at least the creator of his headline, "Enough of the autopsy") appears to advocate the abandonment of reflexivity if Labor is to become a serious contender for government.<br /><br />It is difficult to set such criticism apart from the general anti-intellectualist argument that runs through News Ltd papers. Assuming Steketee is sufficiently independent from his corporate bosses for us to interpret his critique of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Coming to the Party</span> as genuine - and his recent analyses of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Latham Diaries</span>[2] and the Howard government's plan to excise the entire Australian continent from the operation of the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Migration Act</span>[3] suggest that he is - then his analysis may not be so much anti-intellectual as a plea for Labor to balance is self-criticism with some of the structural change its members have been demanding for the past decade.<br /><br />Of the twelve contributors to Barry Jones' volume, only four are Parliamentary members of the ALP, and all of them - John Faulkner, Julia Gillard, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner - are firmly on the Party's Left.[4] Four of its remaining contributors are also associated with the Left: Jones and John Button, both Ministers in the Hawke governments, were on the so-called "Independents" ticket (though that ticket almost always voted with the Socialist Left faction),[5] and ex-MPs John Langmore and Susan Ryan were members of the now-defunct Centre Left faction. Only Evan Thornley, “Beaconsfield” Bill Shorten, Rodney Cavalier and Joshua Funder have no formal ties to the Left (and only Shorten has any formal ties to the Right). Thornley, an internet entrepreneur who now owns Pluto Press, attempted to establish his own independent “Labor First” faction. As National Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, Shorten owes his allegience to the right-wing Labor Unity faction, though he also has the support of ex-Leftie Dean Mighell’s breakaway Union and Community Alliance. A former Education Minister in the Wran NSW government, Cavalier is a stalwart of the Party’s Southern Highlands branch, voicing his criticism of the Party’s structure in that branch’s newsletter, which he edits. And Funder, who holds a BSc, an LLB, an LLM and a DPhil, and has lived in Blair’s Britain and Clinton’s USA, is currently a Branch Secretary with no apparent factional allegiance.<br /><br />It’s important that it be recognised that this is not a collection of the Right, which currently dominates inside the ALP across the country. The views expressed inside are all progressive. As Jones points out, social progressives are concerned with the improvement of society, which must occur through government intervention, where appropriate. He argues specifically against the “pragmatism” advocated by the Party’s Right, with its emphasis on small-target “triangulation”, a term borrowed from Clinton campaign organiser Dick Morris, who argued that political candidates must avoid publicly committing themselves to any particular ideology or philosophy. While this is a practice employed by (the electorally successful) John Howard, the Prime Minister holds right-wing, small-government (or rather pro-market) ideas which inherently lend themselves to a small-target tactical approach to politicking. Jones, among others in the volume, argues that progressive politics must flow not from the intended outcome of electoral success, but from the basic and well-articulated philosophies of social democracy, such as those articulated by Bob Hawke and Neville Wran’s 2002 National Committee of Review Report:[6]<br /><ul><li>the collective responsibility of society</li><li>unqualified opposition to discrimination</li><li>recognition of prior Indigenous custodianship</li><li>an independent foreign policy</li><li>protection of the natural environment</li><li>the right of workers to organise and bargain collectively</li><li>a “correct and humane” policy for asylum seekers.</li></ul><br />Such a statement of principles would, Jones argues, inevitably lead to policies of fundamental difference to those currently promoted by the Liberal government, which believes that the unencumbered market will automatically deliver everything humans truly value, that the historical dispossession of Indigenous peoples must be revised to accommodate present-day national interests, that Australian interests are best served by alligning itself firmly with the world’s only superpower, that the environment must run a distant second to the “realities” of economic growth, and that unions and all forms of collective workplace association necessarily impedes the productivity of business. Currently, with its pragmatic emphasis on winning elections at the expense of a well-articulated statement of philosophical belief, the ALP is little more than an alternative brand of the same government, and the Australian political landscape resembles the battle between McDonald’s and KFC for “market share”. In such circumstances, why wouldn’t “consumers” (which is what citizens have been reduced to) simply go with the brand they trust?<br /><br />Jones has assembled a lively collection of essays that is capable of true inspiration for those interested in the state of Australian democracy (which, dare one say it now in the era of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Big Brother</span> and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Desperate Housewives</span>, iPods and plasma TVs, should be all of us). All twelve contributors decry the disproportionate power of the factional “apparatchiks” (an old word of the Left!), who have, unforgiveably, used the time spent in Opposition since 1996 together with the shrinking size of the ALP organisation to feather their own nests. There is plea after plea to the factional bosses to finally democratise the Party, which presently sounds inauthentic and hypocritical when it demands democracy in wider society (much like the US administration). Many of the contributors directly or subtly attack the leadership of Kim Beazley, who personifies the very worst of the present ALP structure: he is reactionary (content to “oppose” instead of provide alternative solutions), right-wing (though he doesn’t like to make a “big target” of himself by admitting it), factionally hamstrung (and after he saw what the power-brokers did to Mark Latham, who could blame him?) and woefully uncharismatic (compared with Latham, Hawke, Whitlam and Paul Keating).<br /><br />Thornley asks his readers to remember that the neo-liberals ('economic rationalists' in Australia), led by Milton Friedman and Lewis Powell in the United States and the HR Nicholls Society - through which Peter Costello earned his political stripes - here, had to sustain decades of principled work for their ideas of individual economy and market fundamentalism to become 'mainstream'. When Powell sent his famous memo to the American Chamber of Commerce in 1971, 'mainstream' Australians were thinking about the wonderful, leisurely future that would occur with the expectant reduction in working hours. After all, Keynes' economic problem had essentially been solved.[7] Thornley urges social progressives to commit themselves to an equally gruelling project of social reform, instead of simply expecting their adopted party - the ALP - to develop high-impact policy six months out from each election.<br /><br />There are some great ideas in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Coming to the Party</span>, the main focus of which is the structural reform of the “once-great” Australian Labor Party. It is reassuring to know that there are at least some within the Party who are prepared to stick their neck out and criticise the system that privileges a few at the expense of the many. It is a cause for some distress that the contribution of Gillard, a genuine leadership contender, is arguably the weakest, in that she collates a number of policy positions without articulating the crucial philosophical platform from which they should flow. However, as Funder reminds us, social progressives should never expect to leave all the reform to the Parliamentary Labor Party. Each person has the capacity to influence in their respective social and technical spheres.<br /><br />It used to be that when Barry Jones spoke, the nation listened. After all, this is a man who has been intimately involved in Australia's coming of age over the past four decades. After gaining notoriety as a TV quiz show champion in 1960, he campaigned vigorously against the hanging of Ronald Ryan to the point of having the death penalty outlawed. With Phillip Adams, he engineered the revival of the local film industry through his involvement in the Australian Film Development Corporation. And as Minister for Science from 1983, he oversaw the consolidation of the CSIRO as a truly innovative and widely respected institution for all Australians (contrast that with its present empty commercialisation, thanks to the managerialist culture that is pervading the public service and government authorities). Now, it's probably safe to say that Jones doesn't have the influence he once did. Australia is a sorrier place for it. [Russell]<br /><br />[1] Steketee, 'Enough of the autopsy, Labor needs a new life', the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Australian </span>(Sydney), 1 July 2006 at 23.<br />[2] Steketee, 'Poison diary holds some bitter truths', the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Australian</span>, 22 September 2005 at 10.<br />[3] Steketee, 'Nauru solution hurls principles overboard', the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Australian</span>, 22 June 2006 at 10.<br />[4] Faulkner, Lawrence and Tanner are prominent members of the national Socialist Left faction, while Gillard is the leading light of the Victorian-based Ferguson Left.<br />[5] See Andrew Landeryou's blog: andrewlanderyou.blogspot.com/2006/02/poison-gnome-button-attacks-alp.html<andrewlanderyou.blogspot.com><br />[6] Available online: <http:>http://www.australianpolitics.com/parties/alp/02-08-09_hawke-wran-review.pdf<br />[7] For further discussion of how the mainstream milieu has changed since the 1970s, see Clive Hamilton, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Growth Fetish</span> (2003).<br /></HTTP:></ANDREWLANDERYOU.BLOGSPOT.COM><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115233998071112884?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1152246453858556022006-07-07T13:44:00.000+09:302006-07-07T13:57:33.876+09:30Welcome to June’s Newsletter. Since it is International Asperger's Year, marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Hans Asperger, discoverer of Asperger's Syndrome, let's celebrate that diversity in the classroom.<br /><br />Christine Cornell<br /><br />Pre - Readers<br /><br />As you would imagine, there are many books on this topic for the youngest age group. Many of these following titles you may also recognise as brand new releases.<br /><br />You're Different And That's Super - $19.95<br />Carson Kressley and Jared Lee<br />Carson Kressley brings us the story of a one-of-a-kind pony who learns that it's our differences that make us super.<br />ISBN: 1416900705<br /><br />Wheelie Girl - $28.95<br />Miriam Latimer<br />Molly thinks she can't do anything because she has wheels instead of feet. One day a butterfly reminds her that everyone can do something so Molly sets off to discover her talents!<br />ISBN: 0340884150<br /><br />Looking After Louis (Big Book also available) - $14.95<br />Lesley Ely with Polly Dunbar<br />Louis has autism, but through imagination, kindness, and a special game of soccer, his classmates find a way to join him in his world. Then they can include Louis in theirs.<br />ISBN: 1845070836<br /><br />Baa Humbug! - $16.99<br />Mike Jolley & Deborah Allwright<br />This picture book is about a “unique sheep”, who isn’t afraid to have a mind of his own.<br />ISBN: 0864617038<br /><br />A Tale of Two Goats - $14.95<br />Tom Barber with Rosalind Beardshaw<br />From the illustrator of Snog the Frog, there is a new tale about 2 very different goats from neighbouring farms who learn to put their differences behind them when it really matters.<br />ISBN: 1862336083<br /><br />The Lamb-a-roo - $24.95<br />Diana Kimpton with Rosalind Beardshaw<br />Another Rosalind Bearshaw illustrated text. This is a subtle introduction to adoption (a kangaroo adopts a baby lamb) which shows that it is our differences that make us special.<br />ISBN: 1862336024<br /><br />Clancy the Courageous Cow - $24.95<br />Lachie Hume<br />During a cow wrestling contest Clancy learns about overcoming your differences and getting on with your neighbours.<br />ISBN: 1862915636<br /><br />Christine’s Favourite:<br /><br />Round Fish Square Bowl - $24.95<br />Tom Skinner with Mini Goss<br />This is an autobiography in a children’s picture book! The author is a self-proclaimed “square peg” and explores this with a little fish stuck in a square bowl. Not available until September but I couldn’t resist this beautifully illustrated text.<br />ISBN: 1921042966<br /><br /><br />Primary<br /><br />Different Like Me - My Book of Autism Heroes $39.95<br />Jennifer Elder<br />Did you know Hans Christian Anderson and Andy Warhol were autistic? This fantastic non-fiction book gives portraits of some of the world’s most successful people and clearly shows how some of the typical characteristics of autism actually aid their genius in many different fields. From the viewpoint of a boy with Asperger’s.<br />ISBN: 1843108151<br /><br />On the team - $12.95<br />Rachel Flynn<br />Two best friends with very different abilities find their own way to being who they want to be. Written in humorous episodes.<br />ISBN: 014330044X<br /><br />Birdwing - $24.95<br />Rafe Martin<br />Marked by difference (one arm is a magical wing) Ardwin sets out to discover who he is – bird or boy; crippled or sound; cursed or blessed. This is a fairy tale novel that scholastic recommends for ages 7+, but has also won awards for the 12-18 age group.<br />ISBN: 0439211670<br /><br />Australian 2006 Educational Toy of the Year!<br />Do you have a really difficult student that responds well to computers? This device may help. You can’t use it on a whole classroom basis, as the Quizmo device itself is $15.95 (ISBN: 1904797253), but perhaps as a reward for good behaviour, or a recommendation for parents at parent teacher night! There are many different books in the series for primary kids, all at $14.95. Some examples:<br />1905439245 - FOOTBALL INTERACTIVE QUIZ<br />1905439016 - SUPER SPELLING TUTOR<br />1904797016 - TIMES TABLES TUTOR<br /><br />Thomas has Autism - $32.95<br />Like Me Like You Series, Jillian Powell<br />These non-fiction books are written in the first person and focus on following a child with a certain illness or disability through the day. Includes plenty of illustrations and photos.<br />ISBN: 0237530333<br /><br />Best selling Children’s Book of May<br /><br />Monster Blood Tattoo: Book 1, Foundling - $24.95<br />D.M. Cornish 9+<br />Marion, our schools’ rep, went to the launch of this book and was very impressed by the young author / illustrator. This trilogy is set in a world of “tri-cornered hats, frockcoats, monsters, potions and surgically altered people”!<br />ISBN: 1862916055<br /><br /><br /><br />Late Primary / Secondary<br /><br />There's A Boy in the Girls' Bathroom! - $14.95<br />Sachar, Louis<br />Bradley is a bit of a bully and nobody likes him. This story shows us how often bullies feel unhappy about themselves as people, but can change their ways as they build self esteem.<br />ISBN: 0747552576 <br /><br />The Last Book in the universe - $14.99 (published late June)<br />Rodman Philbrick. <br />This book is not only an excellent teaching text, but one the students will probably read. It is a post-apocalyptic futuristic novel, with a lot to say on many philosophical topics. One of the main themes concerns what is “normal”, and why do we all desperately want to be better than normal? The main character has epilepsy and this too is treated in an interesting and sensitive way. Great book.<br />ISBN: 0746074395<br /><br />Blame My Brain - $16.95<br />Nicola Morgan<br />While it is a given that we are all different, it is also a given that many teenagers want to feel the SAME as everyone else and it can cause a great deal of stress. This non-fiction book doesn’t give teenagers an excuse for anti-social behaviour, but goes a long way towards explaining it.<br />ISBN: 0744583683<br /><br />My Mum’s from Planet Pluto - $14.95<br />Gwyneth Rees<br />Not exactly a barrel of laughs this one, but introduces the often taboo area of having parents who are troubled in some way. The two protagonists are dealing with separate mothers who have alcoholism and type 1 Bi-polar. The Bi-polar descriptions are very accurate.<br />ISBN: 0330437283<br /><br />Wish - $14.95<br />Felice Arena<br />The author of the fantastic Specky Magee series has written this novel about a boy with Downs-Syndrome. Seth is worried about his sick mother and with a few friends tries to help her get better.<br />ISBN: 0143302124<br /><br />First Crossing: Stories About Teen Immigrants - $24.95<br />Donald R. Gallo<br />There are so many ways we can feel different to those around us, but it must be especially difficult for teenagers moving to another country. These are 10 fictional accounts of various immigrants to America.<br />ISBN: 0763622494<br /><br />My Father's Notebook - $29.95 Late May Publication<br />Kadar Abdollah Older Readers<br />I am very keen to read this very new publication about a deaf mute boy. On a holy mountain in the depths of Persia there is a cave with a mysterious cuneiform carving deep inside it. Aga Akbar from the mountain develops his own private script from these symbols and writes passionately of his life.<br />ISBN: 1921145196 <br /><br />New Releases for Independent readers<br /><br />Stink and the Incredible Super-Galactic Jawbreaker - $24.95<br />Megan McDonald with Peter H. Reynolds 5+<br />For those of you who know and love the Judy Moody books, the author and illustrator also write about her brother Stink. This is the 2nd in the series.<br />ISBN: 0763621587<br /><br />Nathan Nutboard, Family Matters - $16.95<br />Anthony Eaton 10+<br />A humorous tale about living with a grandparent. Much in the vein of the "Lockie Leonard" books, but overall more light hearted. This one centres on a Scottish grandfather moving in with the family.<br />ISBN: 0702235474<br /><br />River Girl: Growing up around the Murray River - $18.00<br />Glenda Andrew<br />I really like this book. It is an autobiography written in a very visually appealing way with sketches and photos. It gives a wonderful insight into one person's indigenous upbringing in a way that children can easily access. For ages 9-12.<br />ISBN: 1863340130<br /><br />The Ultimate Teen Book Guide - $35.00<br />Ed. Daniel Hahn and Leonie Flynn<br />Have you got a class full of Year 12 students desperately trying to find paired texts? Give this book a try. It has over 700 books recommended by popular authors, aimed at teenagers, from all genres. It includes a handy “what's next” section that recommends texts that will expand upon the first. Many of the texts are classical literature, as they’ve been recommended by adults. A must have for Year 12 Teachers!<br />ISBN: 0713673303<br /><br /><br />Senior / Independent Text Choices<br /><br />Rhubarb - $24.95<br />Craig Silvey<br />This book was my favourite new release of 2005. If you want a story that poignantly shows the difficulty of coping with difference this is it, as two very damaged people struggle towards understanding each other.<br />ISBN: 1920731911<br /><br />My Sister's Keeper - $21.95<br />Jodi Picoult<br />A child who is conceived purely for the purpose of providing bone marrow or her sister, eventually rebels and demands to be known as an individual.<br />ISBN: 1741145058<br /><br />Cartoon Guide to Chemistry - $27.95. <br />Larry Gonick and Craig Criddle<br />Don't be fooled by the word "Cartoon", this book has full blown Year 12 level concepts. If you have a visual learner this may be just the book to boost their confidence. Also available for Statistics, Physics and Genetics<br />ISBN: 0060936770<br /><br />Classic Texts about Different Mental States:<br /><br />The Curious Incident of the Dog in<br />the Night-time Mark Haddon<br />Lucinda Brayford Martin Boyd<br />Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte<br />I am the Cheese Robert Cormier<br />Tell Me I’m Here Anne Deveson<br />As I Lay Dying William Faulkner<br />The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner<br />Tender is the Night Scott F. Fitzgerald<br />One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey<br />Briefing for a Descent into Hell Doris Lessing<br />The Crucible Arthur Miller<br />The Bell-Jar Sylvia Plath<br />The Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Ryhs<br />The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks<br />Awakenings Oliver Sacks<br />King Lear Shakespeare<br />Macbeth Shakespeare<br />The World is Made of Glass Morris West<br />Riders in the Chariot Patrick White<br />The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams<br />A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams<br /><br />Classic texts about Strengths and Weaknesses / Understanding People:<br /><br />The English Patient Michael Ondaatje<br />Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides<br />Hunting the wild Pineapple Thea Astley<br />Room at the Top John Braine<br />Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte<br />Wake in Fright Kenneth Cook<br />Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane<br />Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald<br />The Collector (Crime) John Fowles<br />The Power and the Glory Graham Greene<br />Night of the Fox J. Higgins<br />Innocent Blood (Crime) P.D. James<br />The Well Elizabeth Jolley<br />Home at Last Barbara Kaye<br />Ballad of the Sad Café Carson McCullens<br />Friends and Romans John Miller<br />Animal Farm George Orwell<br />Hamlet Shakespeare<br />Oedipus the King Sophocles<br />The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck<br />Uncle Tom’s Cabin H.B. Stowe<br />The Tree of Man Patrick White<br /><br /><br />Christine’s Favourite<br /><br />Woolvs in the Sitee - $26.95<br />Margaret Wild<br />This very interesting picture book has possibilities as an introduction to lateral thinking for ages 16+. Ben lives alone in a basement flat, looking at a world gone mad. The city is almost abandoned and garbage is everywhere, and the very few people that remain live in fear. Why does Ben have such bad spelling? Is Ben suffering from a mental illness? Stretch students minds before getting into full length texts. Definitely not for small children this picture book! You can download teachers’ notes on this title from www.puffin.com.au.<br />ISBN: 067004167X<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115224645385855602?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1152004203261697522006-07-04T18:36:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:06:26.623+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/infernal.0.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/infernal.0.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Jaivin’s Zeki tells an horrific story in the way that some outlandish Ali G – <em>Pizza</em> hybrid would tell it, laced with irreverent humour and simple insight that always allows the reader to appreciate the injustice of his position.<br /><br />Jaivin’s name is associated with erotica in various forms. Her previous works include <em>Dead Sexy</em> (a murder mystery with a sex columnist in the lead role), <em>Rock’n’Roll Babes from Outer Space</em> (aliens land in Sydney in search of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll), 1998’s self-explanatory <em>Eat Me</em> and her autobiographical collection <em>Confessions of an S&M Virgin</em>. The product of many visits to the Villawood Immigration Detention Centre since 2001, <em>The Infernal Optimist</em>, in which the undescribed sex is relegated to a peripheral, mostly comedic, role, constitutes a bold literary departure for the author.<br /><br />Despite the number of writers who have identified publicly with programs such as A Just Australia: Australians for Just Refugee Programs, there are surprisingly few novels that tackle Australia’s regime of mandatory detention of ‘unlawful non-citizens’. Tom Keneally’s <em>The</em> <em>Tyrant’s Novel</em> (2003) placed its main character inside a detention centre, having escaped an oppressive dictatorship which could only have been Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Morris Gleitzman’s children’s novels <em>Boy Overboard</em> (2002) and <em>Girl Underground</em> (2004) each told fictional stories of great escapes, throughout which the detention regime figured prominently in the experiences of the protagonists. (While Phillip Ruddock largely ignored any popular culture references to refugee policy, his successor as Minister for Immigration, Amanda Vanstone, accused Gleitzman in 2004 of peddling political propaganda, saying without any apparent hint of irony that ‘one of the greatest things we can give kids is a childhood. Let them have a childhood as long as they can without burdening them with some of the difficult decisions that have to be made later in life. There’s no political gain to be had here. Kids don’t vote. Why ruin their childhood?’<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a>)<br /><br />Jaivin’s Zeki was born in Turkey, but arrived in Australia at the age of six months. He neglected to properly follow through with his naturalisation; now in his twenties, and as a permanent resident rather than a citizen, he’s fallen foul of section 501 of the Migration Act, which allows the Minister to revoke a person’s visa if s/he spends more than 12 months in jail.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a> Zeki’s habit of stealing, which he views as evidence of ‘Australianness’ given this nation’s convict history, lands him initially in prison for 13 months and then in Villawood indefinitely. There, he awaits deportation to Turkey, where he won’t even know the language. (This mirrors the recent real-life cases of Robert Jovicic, who was deported to Belgrade despite not knowing any Serbian, and despite having lived in Australia since he was two years old, and Fatih Tuncock, who was at one stage facing deportation to Turkey despite having arrived in Australia when he was six.)<br /><br />Through his ignorance and foolish confidence, Zeki manages to stay positive for most of his time inside Villawood IDC, even as those around him sink into chronic depression (and worse). Presumably, Jaivin wrote the cheeky and untroubled Zeki to appeal to as wide an audience as possible; through him, she manages to recount many of the major IDC incidents that occurred across Australia between 2001 and 2005 without seeming too preachy or political. While in Villawood, Zeki endures a fictional version of the riots, protests, escapes and hunger strikes that dogged Woomera between 2000 and 2002. The Bakhtiyari children, who escaped Woomera in June 2002 and resurfaced in Melbourne, resurface again in Zeki’s Villawood, as did the forty asylum seekers who escaped Villawood in 2001. The accounts of detained children recall the sad case of Shayan Badraie who, after arriving as a five-year-old by boat with his parents in March 2000, developed severe psychological trauma after witnessing hunger strikes and suicide attempts, was separated from his parents for periods and was continously detained despite pleas by medical professionals.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a> The accounts of severe chronic depression are consistent with the work of psychologists Zachary Steel and Derrick Silove and Iraqi medical practitioner (and former detainee) Dr Aamer Sultan, who identified that people in IDCs for more than 3-6 months would invariably develop lasting psychological disorders similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[4]</a><br /><br />All writing is political, in the sense that it is based on the assumptions and biases of its authors, and privileges a particular world-view. <em>The Infernal Optimist</em> is more overtly political than most novels, in the sense that it takes a principled stance against current government policy. Its package is somewhat eclectic; its intended audience is obviously wider than the ‘converted’ to whom, say, Bob Brown preaches in his <em>Memo for a Saner World</em> (2004), and so its aim is to challenge and influence, rather than to merely confirm. Published by HarperCollins’ ‘independent’ Fourth Estate imprint (ultimately owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation since 1990), its cover reveals little of its ‘controversial’ content, as if it somehow hopes to entice readers who wouldn’t otherwise be attracted to a ‘political’ story. The voice of Zeki is ostensibly ‘neutral’ and ‘apolitical’, giving the reader the opportunity to grow into political awareness with him.<br /><br />There is a nagging inauthenticity to this approach. Jaivin is clearly passionate, and occasionally drops Zeki’s first-person voice to make points Zeki never would. And even if the book’s ‘apolitical’ presentation and Zeki’s ‘neutrality’ were to somehow attract ‘unconverted’ readers, there is the very real chance that the flawed nature of Zeki’s character will make him an object of judgement (‘he’s a criminal! He deserves all the punishment he gets’) rather than the bridge to compassion for asylum seekers, visa overstayers and ‘unlawful non-citizens’ detained in IDCs. (Those who were unable to identify with Amir in Khaled Hosseini’s <em>The Kite Runner</em> – and there were a few – will not emphathise with Zeki.)<br /><br />The presentation of <em>The Infernal Optimist</em> is in stark contrast with that of Miles Franklin Award-winner Andrew McGahan’s next novel, <em>Underground</em> (due out in October). Set in approximately 2020, with the Liberal Party still in power, the War on Terror has assumed gigantic proportions, and is being used to justify a constant State of Emergency whereby Parliament has been disbanded and the Prime Minister has assumed the functions of all three powers of government. Despites its ‘airport novel’ tone, its publisher, Allen & Unwin, is unashamedly targeting the ‘converted’ with a huge ‘guerrilla marketing campaign’ directed at that 'half' of Australians who have been 'waiting' for just such a book.<br /><br />So <em>The Infernal Optimist</em> isn’t for everyone. Indeed, Zeki’s distinctive and improper vernacular, full of ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, ‘a’ instead of ‘of’, and the consistent misuse of particular words (‘me and me boy had a conversational with Mrs Palmer’; ‘I’m virtuosically outta here’; ‘me snoring made it hard for the others to mediterrate’), may put as many readers off as it charms.<br /><br />I, for one, was charmed by Zeki’s innocence, his unique colloquialisms, and his plight. But then again, my own awareness of the inhumane horror of the federal government’s refugee policy dates back to 2001-02, and, specifically, newspaper articles by Julian Burnside and (of all people) Gerard Henderson. Jaivin should be commended for attempting to draw attention to a government policy that unapologetically denies individuals basic human rights, goes directly against the spirit of international law, and breaches all standards of common decency and respect for fellow humans. Whether Jaivin influences any readers, which seems to be at least one of her intentions, remains to be seen. [Russell]<br /><br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> Senator Vanstone, quoted in Sue Williams, ‘Vanstone attacks children’s author’, the <em>Australian</em> (Sydney), 3 July 2004, p.5.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> <em>Migration Act 1958</em> (Cth), s.501(2) (‘The Minister may cancel a visa that has been granted to a person if the Minister reasonably suspects that the person does not pass the character test, and the person does not satisfy the Minister that the person passes the character test’); s.501(6)(a) (‘a person does not pass the character test if the person has a substantial criminal record’); s.501(7)(c) (‘a person has a substantial criminal record if the person has been sentenced to a term of imprisonment of 12 months or more’).<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> For further information on the Badraie case, see: ABC TV, <em>4 Corners</em> (13 August 2001); Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, <em>Report of an Inquiry into a Complaint by Mr Mohammed Badraie on behalf of his son Shayan regarding acts or practices of the Commonwealth of Australia</em>, Report No.25, 2002.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> See for example the <em>Medical Journal of Australia</em>, volume 175, issue 11.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115200420326169752?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1151938445137329722006-07-04T00:19:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:06:42.430+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/ethics%20eat.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/ethics%20eat.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Eating, like everything we do that affects others, is a political act. Each time we eat McDonald’s, for instance, we provide implicit support to that organisation’s corporate structure, to its treatment of its young staff, to its outrageously unhealthy menu (which it sells at an ostensibly low dollar price to consumers, many of whom are children or parents of young people, influenced by its shiny advertisements).<br /><br />In their new book, Singer and Mason don’t spend a lot of time on fast-food chain ‘restaurants’, perhaps because their lack of food ethics is obvious. (If anything, the authors tend to applaud McDonald’s recent changes to the way it does business, many of which were brought about when two activists, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, successfully defended a number of claims they made against the corporation in the longest-running libel case in UK history.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[1]</a>)<br /><br />The authors are more concerned with investigating the hidden histories of the foods we buy from supermarkets, butchers and fish shops when we think we’re buying healthy and ‘better’ alternatives to fast food. They encourage us to step outside the neat retail-consumer paradigm that allows us to conveniently ignore every stage in the food production process prior to our selecting the packaged item from the shelf to the soothing soundtrack of easy-listening pop.<br /><br />The book’s emphasis is on food production in the United States (Mason is a US citizen, and Australian-born Singer is the part-time Ira W DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values), where standards are apparently well below those in Australia and Europe. The sheer cruelty of the practices of many US factory farms is horrific, and the industry does everything in its power to prevent its consumers from knowing anything about them. What’s described in this book is enough to potentially put most readers off eating any meat, poultry or fish products in that country. Cattle and pigs suffer major depression from being kept in total physical confinement (without even the ability to turn around) on concrete floors for their entire lives. Chickens, stuffed in battery cages to bursting point, have the most sensitive parts of their bodies – their beaks – sawn off, without anaesthetic, to prevent them pecking other chickens to death.<br /><br />Beyond such obvious examples of problematic production processes, Singer and Mason ask some difficult questions. If we had to hunt and kill our own meat, would we do so? Many consumers of meat products would not. Indeed, the severe separation between between the production and consumption phases serves not only the meat industry, but also meat-eaters themselves.<br /><br />That question is far less difficult, ethically speaking, than the question of whether humans have the right to kill animals for their own purposes at all. Apart from the dogmatic Christian justification (that humans, created in the Christian god’s image, are separate from and ‘above’ other living things, and actually have the responsibility to exploit ‘natural resources’), the most common argument advanced for the continued consumption of meat by humans is that humans possess a special and unique quality which gives them the right to treat non-humans differently than they would each other. As the authors point out, however, this ‘argument’ is really a justification, based on a prejudice they call ‘speciesism’: humans define the boundaries of human-ness in order to justify their treatment of non-humans. Even if some reasonable and universal delineation between humans and non-human animals were agreed upon (and such delineation is all but impossible), there is still no obvious reason to cause suffering to other living creatures. Recall, for example, that the same reasoning was used by past societies to justify such practices as slavery, colonisation and ethnic genocide.<br /><br />The book continues Singer’s quest to make ethics ‘practical’. He and Mason have collaborated previously, on the 1985 publication <em>In Defense of Animals</em> (re-published in an updated edition last year). <em>The Ethics of What We Eat</em> is perhaps a little drier than Singer's most recent books, <em>The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W Bush</em> (2004) and, with Tom Gregg, <em>How Ethical is Australia?</em> (2004), but is no less explosive or thought-provoking. In terms of contextual evidence, it is less relevant to Australian readers than to Americans, though its discussion of ethics is universal and important. [Russell]<br /><br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[1]</a> <em>McDonald’s Corporation, McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd v Helen Marie Steel and David Morris</em> [1997] EWHC QB 366 (19 June 1997). See Steel and Morris’s website: www.mcspotlight.org<www.mcspotlight.org></www.mcspotlight.org><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115193844513732972?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1151493617691307172006-06-28T19:48:00.000+09:302006-06-28T21:04:10.103+09:30By <a href="http://www.leehopkins.net/">Lee Hopkins</a><br /><div align="center">~~~<br /><br /></div><p><a href="http://www.leehopkins.net/hewitt_blog_book.html" target="_blank"></a>A true measure of a book's value to me, I have discovered over the years, is the number of post-it notes it has sticking out by the time I've finished reading it. </p><p>Some books only have a few stickies, some none at all (and the books' authors usually never get another chance with me). In the case of <a href="http://hughhewitt.com/">Hugh Hewitt</a>'s book 'Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation that's changing your world' I thought it was a case of a book with far too few stickies in it to be of importance. I was wrong. </p><p>Although the book started with few stickies, now that I have finished it the book is festooned with little yellow flags. </p><p>Let me get what I <em>don't</em> like about the book out of the way, so that I can concentrate on the many things I <em>do</em> like. </p><p>Firstly, Hugh hectors. He is a political commentator and chat show host in North America and he bashes his point home relentlessly. The point? That blogs are here to stay companies, individuals and especially CEOs (the target audience for this book) had better figure out a strategy for dealing with them. </p><p>Most assuredly, he <em>does</em> give example after example to support his argument. But the problem with the examples he uses are that they are probably only known about or relevant to North American bloggers. There is a very large world out here that doesn't have a clue what Rathergate is about. Sure, he explains it, but the emotional punch is missing because we outside of the US don't have an emotional attachment to Dan Rather. </p><p>About half of the book is taken up talking about North American politics and North American bloggers. For instance, I didn't know that Glenn Reynolds of <a href="http://www.instapundit.com/">instapundit.com</a> (the subject of a <a title="Book review: An Army of Davids by Glenn Reynolds" href="http://dymade.blogspot.com/2006/06/review-blog-understanding-information.html">previous book review</a>) is a highly regarded Law Professor at a major university and the most widely read blogger on the planet (at least as far as Hugh is concerned). Which again smacks of cultural snobbery -- like I'd automatically <em>know</em> who Glenn was and so there's no need to put any background info about him on his book jacket. </p><p>But such cultural snobbery (and strong whiff of imperialism) aside, Hugh's book is absolutely chock-a-block with insight and 'this is a great point' moments (hence the plethora of stickies in the second half of the book). </p><p>Here's just a few snippets: </p><p>* The blogosphere was directly responsible for the downfall of Senator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trent_Lott">Trent Lott</a> by highlighting a 'throw-away' comment and how it linked into his previous political record. Mainstream media (the 'MSM' such as traditional newspapers, radio, tv and other such outlets) couldn't afford the in-depth background research that the amateur, unpaid blogosphere regularly conducts. </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* The newspaper the <em>San Antonio Express</em> discovered and 'outed' a serial plagiarist junior at the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times">New York Times</a></em>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair">Jayson Blair</a>. But it was happened afterwards that defined the blogosphere as a fact-checking force, because as one pundit said, "who seriously believes that a blogger doing what Blair did could have survived more than a few months without being caught out?" It was the relentless discoveries and attention paid to the <em>Times'</em> management, and in particular editor Howell Raines, by the 'pyjamahadeen' (a brilliant term coined by Jim Geraghy of <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/kerry/kerryspot.asp">KerrySpot</a> for the bloggers who created massive and relentless blog storms around issues of truth in reporting) that led to Raines' resignation and the serious besmirching of the <em>Times'</em> reputation. </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* The blogosphere was directly responsible for the 'outing' of Senator John Kerry's "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry_military_service_controversy">Christmas in Cambodia</a>" and other fabrications </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rathergate">The RatherGate Affair</a>: Dan Rather, the host of <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_II">60 Minutes 2</a></em>, ran a story asserting that now-President George 'Dubya' Bush had, in 1973, disobeyed direct orders, using as 'proof' of these allegations memos allegedly written by his then superior, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Within hours of the show airing serious concerns about the authenticity of the memos was airing across the blogosphere, including concerns about the font used, font kerning and the 'slip' that caused a 'th' to be superscripted, much as Word automatically does with dates. Word didn't exist in 1973, nor was the machinery to create such superscripts in use other than with industrial printers and certainly not military Lt. Colonels and their typists. The amount of hard evidence collected in a few scant hours by the <a href="http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=76637">pyjamahadeen was beyond staggering</a>. </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* Hewitt, himself a Christian, likens the Information Reformation of now with the Reformation brought on, largely, by Gutenberg's gift of the printing press and the spread of the Bible from the 'elite' clergy to the masses. For the first time the masses were able to read God's Word for themselves and make their own minds up on it, not have a power-broker (clergy) tell them what to make of it. With the spread of ideas that printing made available, the church's grip on theological absolutes was gone forever. So too with today's Information Reformation: now that publishing is so easy and free (there are plenty of sites you can create a blog for free), <strong>ANYONE</strong> can become an information producer and publisher. </p><p></p><p>* The power of the lone voice is no longer located only in the lone voice -- one voice can influence millions. Witness the aforementioned Glenn Reynolds -- <a href="http://www.instapundit.com/">his blog</a> attracts over 500,000 visits a day. I doubt Australia sells that many newspapers across the whole continent. And the crucial currency of blogs -- trust -- is slipping away faster from a constrained mainstream media faster than you can say 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'. </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* Even though <a href="http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/05/100.html">Technorati</a> finds that, of around 46.2 million blogs, only around 55% are still 'active' three months later, that is now 25 million new publishers up against mainstream media -- direct competition to MSM but curiously not themselves. Bloggers take great delight in not only telling and pointing out the truth (because they know that a lie is so easily found and publicised) but also in linking to each other, like a kind of virtuous circle. Oh, and according to Technorati, about 50,000 new posts are made each hour, 24 hours a day, around the world. </p><ul><br /></ul><p>* Hewitt asks the very relevant question: if the blogosphere were around in 1985 would CocaCola have made such a hash of it? Would they have preferred to pose important questions around New Coke to the relentlessly opinionated world of first-person open journalism?<br /><br />After having presented us with a full platter of facts and figures on 'why' the blogosphere exists, Hewitt then brings the argument closer to home to his target audience: what CEOs can do themselves. </p><p>He outlines a three-point strategy:<br /></p><ol><li><strong>Prepare a chain of command</strong> -- a blog storm <em>will</em> eventually hit your company; you just need to decide who has the authority to move quickly to address the storm when it hits<br /></li><br /><li><strong>Prepare a policy on employee blogs</strong> -- you already have bloggers in your company, whether you are aware of it nor not. Attempts at banning employee blogs is futile; they'll just do it behind your back. So you need to think through and articulate a clear policy on employee blogging, what is acceptable and what is not, guidelines on the use of company information, best practise examples and what the consequences are for clear breaching of the rules<br /></li><br /><li><strong>Prepare for transparency</strong> -- the 'biggie' because most CEOs and senor managers are paranoid about telling the truth, and most employees want nothing less than the truth and know they are highly unlikely to ever receive it, even at their Annual Performance Review. The blogosphere thrives on truth and transparency; professional cynics can spot a lie or an obfuscation at a thousand paces. So when the swarm attacks you don't lie, don't insult them (because that will infuriate them more and you will deserve all you subsequently receive) and put you and your senior managers on record. Admit errors if errors have been made but if there is no error then repeatedly defend your position with patience, humility and a sense of humour. Respond quickly, clearly and transparently. Nothing stirs up trouble more than rumours borne of darkness.</li></ol><br /><br /><p>Finally, Hewitt goes to some length to show the benefits of CEOs writing their own internal blogs -- the engagement scores that can go up, the trust in the CEO and the company, the leadership shown by embracing this new and 'won't go away' medium.</p><p>For example, how happy do you think employees would be to read the following in the CEOs blog one morning: </p><blockquote style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px"><p>Before we get caught up in end-of-year inventory, I'd like to take a moment to thank James Jones, Sarah Smith, and Archie Young. Their manager, Joe Grounds, sent me an email that these three spent their weekend here, churning out the report we needed to provide the compliance manager at CalOSHA. Without that report, we'd have gotten some dings for lateness. Instead we are on time, our report is professional and complete, and we can report that we have had no injuries at the Jackson plant for the fourth year in a row. This stuff counts. You did a great job, James, Sarah, and Archie -- and you too, Joe. I checked. I understand you were here with them. Thanks to you all. </p></blockquote><p>What would the effect of that post be on the CEOs four thousand employees? Those mentioned would love the CEO forever, other employees would notice that effort was noted, and managers would get the idea that their efforts are appreciated as well. Plus, the CEO would get a growing number of emails from managers and staff, allowing them to have a much greater 'handle' on their company and what is <em>really</em> happening within the company walls.</p><p>Hewitt sums up the blogosphere nicely on page 155: </p><blockquote style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0px"><p>The key to keep in mind is that trust drives everything. To build and maintain trust is a tremendously difficult thing, requiring patient attention to detail and discipline over long periods of time. Mistakes by bloggers will be forgiven, but not deception and certainly not stubborn attachment to falsehood. </p></blockquote><p><strong>A fantastic book</strong>. <a href="mailto:Bruce.macky@dymade.com.au?subject=Blog_book_Hewitt">Email Bruce now</a> and reserve your copy -- I can guarantee you won't regret the AUD$32.95 purchase. </p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115149361769130717?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1151453496936420412006-06-28T09:39:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:07:06.780+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/home%20to%20mother.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/home%20to%20mother.jpg" border="0" /></a>**Published early July 2006**<br /><br />Earlier this year, Nugi Garimara (Doris Pilkington) was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her services to Indigenous literature. Born in 1937 on Balfour Downs Station in the East Pilbara (encompassing Marble Bar and Jigalong, names which have been etched onto the national psyche during the past decade), she was stolen from the station and removed to the Moore River Settlement, reliving the trauma of her mother a decade before her. Her mother was Molly Craig, another name that now haunts the national psyche as much as Robert Tudawali, Truganini and Max Stuart. Molly was the eldest of the three girls who, in 1931, escaped the same Moore River Settlement just north of Perth, and trekked 1600 km north, back to the East Pilbara, Marble Bar and Jigalong. This is the story for which Nugi Garimara is most famous; after the initial publication of <span style="font-style: italic;">Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence</span> in 1996, and the 1997 release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report <span style="font-style: italic;">Bringing Them Home</span>, the story achieved international fame and recognition upon the release of Philip Noyce's film adaptation in 2002. European Australians could no longer, in good conscience, convince each other that the story was unimportant. (That they then did so in bad conscience, under the guidance of their Prime Minister, is historically significant.)<br /><br />Now, Garimara has published a "younger reader's" edition of her 1996 book under the title <span style="font-style: italic;">Home to Mother</span>. While this continues a recent marketing-driven trend in children's book publishing (think of the board book editions of Eric Carle's <span style="font-style: italic;">Very Hungry Caterpillar</span>, Mem Fox's <span style="font-style: italic;">Possum Magic</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Where is the Green Sheep?</span>, and the sickening proliferation of Sam McBratney's <span style="font-style: italic;">Guess How Much I Love You</span> franchise), there is much in <span style="font-style: italic;">Home to Mother</span> that is intrinsically valuable, above and beyond the cynical marketing worldview. One can imagine it as the perfect "class novel" for years 3 and 4, as a framework for a discussion of the ambiguities of Australian history, and the personal experiences of Indigenous groups and individuals. [Russell]<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115145349693642041?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1150855325256125352006-06-21T11:26:00.000+09:302006-06-21T11:53:45.793+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/cover-army_of_davids.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/cover-army_of_davids.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />My teenage stepson is named David, so I was half expecting a book about an army of teenagers that ransack bedrooms and lay waste pantries.<br /><br />Instead I am treated to a mind-stretching tour through the collapse of big business and big government 'Goliaths' as the countless millions of little 'Davids' beat them at everything from business flexibility to aiding the underprivileged.<br /><br />Along the way I am exposed to the leading thinkers of the day as nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence and futurist philosophers have their ideas discussed and in some cases dissected.<br /><br />This is not a book for Luddites, for it will give them no comfort. Predictions based on allegedly proven and sound mathematics offer scenarios where by 2050 man-made intelligent machines will self-replicate, self-improve and outstrip us. By 2050 we can expect to be able to free of all known diseases, including aging, should we so choose.<br /><br />The book starts gently enough. Roberts looks at the new publishing freedom created by the latest web developments, leading to an online environment many are calling 'Web2.0' as a reflection of how 'improved' it is from the 'Web1.0' we are all used to. Pointing out that this 'new' internet allows much more self-publishing freedom, grass-roots interactivity and 'conversation', Roberts shows how it is the grass-roots levels that are where innovation and change come from, not from 'top-down' Goliaths.<br /><br />He then leads us through the decline and eventual fall of the Goliaths of business and government, as the Davids out-pace, out-think and out-smart them. Profuse with examples, author, scientist and advisor to governments Glenn Reynolds spells out clearly why he believes the role of Government will wind back to encourage and develop more and more Davids; clearly at the expense of the slow-moving monolith corporations.<br /><br />Along the way, because of the increase in self-employment and work-from-home opportunities the new economy of mass-creation / individual-customisation we are currently just entering will create, local crime will drop, individual satisfaction will increase but all with the caveat that those who are unwilling to embrace the 'new' will be left behind.<br /><br />As the Institute of Future Studies in Copenhagen points out, in the near future there will be two classes of worker: 'creative' and 'non-creative'. As the non-creative work gets 'farmed out' to economies with lower costs of production, so there will remain only the creative jobs.<br />'Creative', for them, means the willingness to embrace flexibility, uncertainty and, as Charles Handy says, create portolios of work for themselves; 'to be self-employed consultants' is another way of thinking about it.<br /><br />Reynolds has his own blog, of course -- <a href="http://www.instapundit.com/">Instapundit.com</a> -- but I found the blog curiously unsatisfying after the book. Instead of weighty ideas, the blog just contains links off to material with very little editorial thought or content to accompany these links. Disappointing.<br /><br />Reynolds is not shy of using examples to back up his viewpoints. Consider, for example, the most recent computer revolution to touch my own life: wireless broadband. By using my laptop, a wireless card and a wireless connection to broadband I can sit with the whole family in the kitchen and still work. I am no longer tied to my home office, squirreled away from the rest of the family and their conversations -- I can now partake in family life <em>and</em> get my work done.<br /><br />This 'third place' of working is becoming so popular that coffee bars, restaurants, even churches, are installing wireless broadband connections so that small office/home office ('SOHO's) operators bring much valued custom to them -- even to the point of having meetings there. Reynolds cites one commercial realtor who says such a move away from small offices to coffee shops and restaurants is creating havoc and growing redundancy in the small office market.<br /><br />As an example of the power of Davids (one of many that Reynolds cites), there was an informal co-operative arrangement between the ferry and small boat operators around the Twin Towers after 9/11. They kept an emergency supply and resupply operation for the emergency workers going <strong>for four days</strong> before an 'official' agency took control. The unofficial Davids used their ferries and small craft, in an operation similar to the small vessel floating armada that outwitted the Germans at Dunkirk in World War II, to bring in and take out water, fuel, food, steel cables, pylons, structural ironworkers, boots, oxygen and oxyacetylene cylinders. It wasn't just an evacuation: it was a whole alternative logistic system that sprang up out of need and without any 'assistance' or intervention from government agencies. An army of Davids who self-organised to meet a need. Reynold's book is stuffed full of such examples.<br /><br />Consider, too, how NASA is repositioning itself away from the 'only' brains trust that can investigate space travel. Now they finance competitions to get reusable craft into space and the money they are now paying to individual Davids in prizes is small change compared to what they themselves so appallingly squandered, but (and this is the really clever bit) they only pay out for proven technology. Not one tax payer dollar is wasted on experimentation and failure! The cost of failure and experimentation is instead paid by an army of entrepreneurial Davids who, in turn, are not risk averse and catapult the space industry forward at a time when NASA can only snail crawl.<br /><br />His views on terraforming Mars to enable the establishment of human colonies are fascinating!<br /><br />And how's this for an amazing piece of trivia: when your word processor launches, the brief pause before the screen opens involves the equivalent of about two thousand years of pen-and-paper calculation.<br /><br />The book is a 'cracker', as they say in Northern England. As a guide to understanding where business and government are currently heading, and why if they don't change direction they will go bankrupt, the book is a worthwhile read.<br /><br />But it is the near-future ideas that make the book compelling -- whether you agree such changes are for good or evil, the chances are very real that what you read about in this book will come to pass within the next 40 years (or sooner).<br /><br /><a href="mailto:bruce.macky@dymade.com.au?subject=An_Army_of_Davids">Contact Bruce</a> and reserve your copy now. Price: AUD$49.95 (+ shipping if appropriate).<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115085532525612535?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1150439803518300632006-06-16T16:05:00.000+09:302006-06-16T16:06:43.526+09:30Books Reviewed by Bruce on ABC 891 Friday 16 June<br /><br />Some or all of<br /><br />The Murrumbidgee Kid Peter Yeldham<br /><br />Dry Water Tammie Matson<br /><br />Piece of my Heart Peter Robinson<br /><br />The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton<br /><br />Crime Beat Michael Connelly<br /><br />A Rare Interest in Corpses Ann Granger<br /><br />Digging Around Coober Pedy Anne Johnson<br /><br />Also like, a mention of “The Swarm” by Schatzing, and Beverly Connor.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-115043980351830063?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149824344060552852006-06-09T12:59:00.000+09:302006-06-09T13:09:04.076+09:30<p class="MsoNormal"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Marion</st1:place></st1:City> recommends......<br /><br /><b>The Wind Tamer by P R Morrison<br />isbn 0747584516 <span style=""> </span>$15.95<br />Reading age 9-12 years<br /><br />Archie Stringweed lives in a small Scottish fishing village and is sure that the wind talks to him and watches him. The mystery deepens on his 10th birthday when a little ball of green light appears, along with a seagull carrying a mysterious coin in a pouch. His Uncle Rufus, an intrepid explorer, comes to visit and suddenly Archie finds himself in the middle of a huge adventure. He must learn more about the curse of Huigor, which he has to break to restore the courage and honour of his family.<br /><br />I loved this one, it is exciting, fast moving and just a little bit different!<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span style="">Marion</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style=""> recommends…..<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Percy Jackson & the <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">sea</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:placename st="on">Monsters</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> by Rick Riordan<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>isbn 0141381507<span style=""> </span>$19.95<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Reading age 12 plus<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Percy Jackson is back after having a quiet year.<span style=""> </span>He returns to <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">Camp</st1:PlaceType> <st1:placename st="on">Half-Blood</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> only to find there is trouble everywhere.<span style=""> </span>The camp which is a safe haven and training ground for young demigods, is under threat and no longer safe.<span style=""> </span>Percy and Annabeth set off on a quest along with his new friend Tyson, [who Percy later finds out, is not all he seems] into the <st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on">Sea</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:placename st="on">Monsters</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> to search out the Golden Fleece, save the camp, and fight for their lives.<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>If you haven’t already met Perseus <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Jackson</st1:place></st1:City>, then you are missing out on a great new character.<span style=""> </span>He is a troubled kid who happens to have Poseidon as a father, hence he is a demigod.<span style=""> </span>He also has an affinity with water of course, and learns he has some very strange talents!<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b>Read his first adventure Percy Jackson and the Olympians – The Lightning Thief…<span style=""> </span>……..also brilliant.<span style=""> </span>I couldn’t put these books down and what a great way to brush up on your Greek Mythology.<br /> <o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Marion</st1:place></st1:City> recommends……</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">Rue for Repentance<span style=""> </span>The Janna Mysteries #2<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">isbn 1741661137<span style=""> </span>$19.95<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">Reading age 14 plus<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">Janna is a young woman<span style=""> </span>living in medieval times.<span style=""> </span>Her home is burnt to the ground and she is forced to flee for her life.<span style=""> </span>She is taken in at a manor farm but then a child goes missing and she is one of the suspects.<span style=""> </span>She has to solve the mystery to clear herself and find out if Hugh, the handsome nobleman who stands to gain much if the child dies, is innocent or guilty.<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">The second one of a brilliant medieval mystery series which started with <o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">Rosemary for Remembrance.<span style=""> </span>Janna is a feisty heroine and I thoroughly enjoyed both these books.<o:p></o:p></b></p><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114982434406055285?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149651528334195592006-06-07T13:04:00.000+09:302006-06-07T13:08:48.336+09:30<strong>World Cup Fever!<br /></strong><br />I would be very remiss if I didn’t include some books about soccer (or should I say football?) in the lead up to the World Cup. We have many of these, especially in the Children’s Series section. Here are some of the most interesting ones:<br /><br />The Keeper - $16.95 May Publication<br /><em>Mal Peet</em> 9+<br />A wonderful mixture of action and spirituality set in South America, this book won the Bronze Award in the Nestle Smarties Book Prize. It tells the tale of how a poor logger’s son becomes a world cup player with the help of the mysterious “Keeper”.<br />ISBN: 1406304107<br /><br />Book of Lists World Football - $25.00<br /><em>Steve Foster<br /></em>For those who are interested in statistics this book is for you.<br />ISBN: 1921145277<br /><br /> World Cup 06 Fact File - $19.95<br /><em>Kier Radnedge<br /></em>More statistics but in a large format with pictures.<br />ISBN: 073331872X<br /><br />Wicked World Cup 2006 - $10.95<br /><em>Michael Coleman<br /></em>Love Horrible Histories and Wicked Science? This is in the same vein.<br />ISBN: 0439949998<br /><br />Goal! - $18.95<br /><em>Robert Rigby<br /></em>Official movie tie-in; includes 16 pages of photographs from the movie. The story of a young Latino boy living in Los Angeles who dreams to be a world-class soccer player. It tells of how he flies halfway across the world to trial for one of England’s top clubs. This is a gripping tale about the world’s most popular and exciting sport.<br />ISBN: 0552554030<br /><br />Toocool Series - Soccer Superstar - $9.95<br /><em>Phil Kettle</em><br />The story of Toocool and his soccer team the Legends, and their secret weapon, his dog. Includes a question and answer with Toocool and a soccer quiz.<br />ISBN: 1865044717<br /><br />Banned! - $10.95<br /><em>David Bedford<br /></em>A book in the ‘The Team’ series, which also includes The Soccer Machine, Top of the League, Soccer Camp and Superteam. This story tells of what happens when The Team’s captain Harvey has been banned from playing soccer by his teacher, due to not spending enough time on his schoolwork.<br />ISBN: 1877003913<br /><br />Offside, Upfront - $14.95<br /><em>Michael Panckridge</em><br />A story in the Anniversary Legends series. Discover how a girl, Luci Rankin, tries to get into a soccer team. You have to be good to make the team, but if you are a girl you have to be even better.<br />ISBN: 1876372494<br /><br />Goal! How Football Conquered the World - $16.95<br /><em>Catherine Chambers<br /></em>A comprehensive and fascinating history of football, that is easily read by children.<br />ISBN: 1876372982<br /><br />Gracie Faltrain Takes Control - $16.95<br /><em>Cath Crowley</em><br />The sequel to The Life and Times of Gracie Faltrain. A soccer book written specifically for teenage girls, that has been labelled the Australian answer to Bend it Like Beckham.<br />ISBN: 0330422294<br /><br />Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend) No.3 – The Finals - $14.95<br /><em>Deborah Abela and Johnny Warren<br /></em>The Rovers get a new coach who only cares about winning and suddenly playing isn’t fun anymore. Can the team get it together before the big final?<br />ISBN: 1741661005<br /><br />Christine<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114965152833419559?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149651156779281382006-06-07T12:48:00.000+09:302006-06-07T13:02:36.793+09:30A Newsletter full of reviews for teachers, and anyone else who loves Children's Books!<br /><br />This month we are focussing on Scientific enquiry, in time for schools to consider entering the Oliphant Awards. These awards are great for those kids who are interested in science, inventing, drawing, writing, or making things. As you can see there are categories to suit many learning styles and students can work alone, in pairs or in groups. My science teaching contact, Ms Maria Caruso from Walford Anglican School for Girls, tells me the best way to get started is to become a member of SASTA (South Australian Science Teachers Association) as their publication has ideas, examples of good entries, etc. There is also an electronic newsletter that teachers can subscribe to. Visit the official SASTA website for more information www.sasta.asn.au. In the meantime this newsletter is full of resources that encourage critical thinking and explore the scientific method.<br /><br />Somewhere down the track, I am going to put together a newsletter that concentrates on books that are extremely popular with children, regardless of whether we think they are read-worthy or not! There is actually an organisation dedicated to finding out what these book are by managing the Kanga Awards, and their official site is www.thekangas.org.au. If you are interested in giving children their own voice, have a look at the site and get registered (it’s free!). The good news is, the Kangas’ Focus List can also be used for the Premier’s Reading Challenge, so it will be as simple as voting during the challenge.<br /><br /><strong>Pre/Early Readers</strong><br /><br />To make up for the fact that there aren’t many books on scientific enquiry aimed at this age group I have included extra new releases for the early readers in a later section.<br /><br />Star Seeker - $27.95<br /><em>Theresa Heine</em>. <br />In this tour of the solar system, readers can ride into the night on the bridle of Pegasus, stir up boiling volcanoes on Venus, and even swim across Jupiter's gigantic seas. They will also learn all kinds of facts about the solar system and the mysteries of the night sky. ISBN: 1905236352 - Hardcover<br /><br /><strong>Primary</strong><br /><br />What easier way to begin observation than with plants and water?<br /><br />Vegetables: Plants Series - $22.95<br /><em>June Loves</em><br />Includes life-cycle charts, a simple introductory growing activity to get them started, and some amazing facts to keep them interested. Five other titles in this series for junior primary.<br />ISBN: 0732997054<br /><br />Water Quality: A Water Report Series - $28.95<br /><em>Michael and Jane Pelusey</em><br />Includes diagrams of the water cycle, case studies, facts and tips. Five others in the series for mid to upper primary.<br />ISBN: 1420203118<br /><br />Way Science Works - $39.95<br /><em>Robin Kerrod ;Sharon Ann Holgate</em><br />This book explains key theories in clear and accessible language. Students can test scientific principles and learn by doing.<br />ISBN: 0751339814 – PaperBack<br /><br />Art Ideas Miniature Edition - $14.95<br /><em>Fiona Watts</em><br />Posters on science are popular with first timers and the younger age group. Why not give them a head start with this book that suggests some interesting ways to present pictorially. Also a large version available.<br />ISBN: 0746064063 – Hardcover<br /><br />Dotty Inventions - $14.95<br /><em>Roger McGough</em><br />What better way to get the young inventors started than showing them some of the more outrageaous ideas over the years!<br />ISBN: 1845071174 – PaperBack<br /><br />You Can Draw Anything - $11.95<br /><em>Kim Gamble</em><br />Give your students a bit more confidence with their posters by giving them the fundamentals in drawing with this easy guide.<br />ISBN: 1863736808 – Paperback<br /><br />Backyard Science - $16.95<br /><em>Christopher Maynard</em><br />This book is a perfect introduction to first time experimentation, as it is all easily accessible in our own back yards. This should spark lots of exciting ideas.<br />ISBN: 0751362522 – PaperBack<br /><br /><strong>Late Primary / Secondary</strong><br /><br />Mythbusters DVD Volumes 1 to 9 - $24.95 each<br /><em>SBS DVD</em><br />These very popular DVD’s are fantastic because they clearly debunk “common knowledge” by using very rigorous scientific principles. What’s more the kids love them. Volumes 10 to 12 due out soon (Expected in May).<br /><br />On an island - $19.95<br /><em>P.Riley, Survivor’s Science Series</em><br />A key feature of this book, which places scientific learning into a real context, is the use of activities that openly model the scientific enquiry process of observation.<br />ISBN: 0750245344 – Paperback<br /><br />Kids Invent! - $23.95<br /><em>Casey</em><br />Kids love to think they are budding inventors, so why not encourage them?<br />ISBN: 0471660868 - PaperBack<br /><br />Incredible Science - $17.95<br /><em>University of Auckland</em><br />This is a basic introduction to science, with lots of pictures and straight forward explanation of the scientific process for ages 8+.<br />ISBN: 0143519999 - PaperBack<br /><br />Shocking Electricity - $10.95<br /><em>Nick Arnold</em><br />Just one in the series of “Horrible Science” books. Like it’s cousin “Horrible Histories” these books are both funny and interesting.<br />ISBN: 0439012724 - PaperBack<br /><br />The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle - $19.95<br /><em>Catherine Webb</em> 12+<br />This is an interesting book because Horatio Lyle likes to dabble in forensic science (19th century) before it was even invented. There are many early attempts at electricity and other scientific endeavours mentioned that can introduce the history of science. Science teachers and kids who are into machines will love this book.<br />ISBN: 1904233783…and the author was only 16 when writing the book!<br /><br /><strong>New Releases for Independent readers</strong><br /><br />4F for Freaks- $12.95<br /><em>Leigh Hobbs</em> 6+<br />One especially for all you brand new teachers out there (and those who are doing their first teaching prac), the class from hell is conquered by Miss Corker! I don't know about your students but it will give you a laugh!<br />ISBN: 1741140919 – PaperBack<br /><br />Diary of a Spider - $24.95<br /><em>Doreen Cronin</em> 4+<br />If you have any youngsters a bit scared of spiders, this book is aimed at making them more comfortable.<br />ISBN: 0060001534 - Hardcover<br /><br />Midnight Star - $19.95<br /><em>Nette Hilton</em> 4+<br />This is a gorgeous new Australian picture book about a little Bilby who tries to reach the stars. Lots of feel good.<br />ISBN: 187628871X - PaperBack<br /><br />My father the dog - $24.95<br /><em>Elizabeth Bluemle and Randy Cecil</em> 4+<br />You can never have too many tales about how great Dads are. This one is sweet as the little girl is convinced her Dad is really a dog.<br />ISBN: 0763622222 - Paperback<br /><br />Day of the Elephant - $24.95<br /><em>B Wilson</em> 7+<br />Not a brand new one but worthy of a reminder. This book uses a fairy tale approach to try and explain what happened in the recent Tsunami. It even comes with a free sparkly pink elephant for your library staff to fight over!<br />ISBN: 0207200556 – Hardcover<br /><br />Dimity Dumpty The Story of Humptys Little Sister - $27.95<br /><em>Bob Graham</em> 5+<br />Dimity is quiet and shy, unlike her brother Humpty who is always in the spotlight, but when it comes to an emergency she shows everyone her courage.<br />ISBN: 1844280675 - HardCover<br /><br />Let’s Get lost – $16.95<br /><em>Sarra Manning</em> 13+<br />A story about a girl consumed with teenage angst, and how a mysterious stranger helps her to find herself.<br />ISBN: 0340877014<br /><br /><strong>Christine’s Favourite</strong>:<br /><br />Sisters Grimm Bk.1 - $24.95<br /><em>Michael Buckley</em> 9+<br />This author can cleverly mix reality and fantasy in a contemporary setting to deliver a delightful story. It had the feel of Enid Blyton’s Magic Wishing Chair, as two young girls become “Fairy Tale Detectives”.<br />ISBN: 0810959259 - Hardcover<br /><br /><strong>Senior / Independent Text Choices</strong><br /><br />Peeps - $19.95<br /><em>Scott Westerfield</em><br />A cautionary tale about having multiple partners, the main character in this book contracts an insidious parasite that creates vampire like creatures. This book was shortlisted for the Aurealis (fantasy) awards in 2005.<br />ISBN: 0143004794 – PaperBack<br /><br />Great Mythconceptions: Cellulite, Camel Humps & Chocolate Zits - $24.95<br /><em>Karl Kruszelnicki</em><br />One of our most well known Australians explains all those science questions that have long been annoying us – like does chocolate really cause pimples? An excellent read because it demonstrates how wrong “common knowledge” can be without correct scientific enquiry. ISBN: 0732280621 – Paperback<br /><br />Why Do Men Have Nipples? - $19.95<br /><em>Mark Leyner ;Billy Goldberg</em><br />This is pretty much an American version of our very own Karl Kruszelnicki. It is lots of fun as it concentrates on embarrasssing body issues.<br />ISBN: 0752879693 - PaperBack<br /><br />Collins Pocket Guides: Stars and Planets - $40.95<br /><em>Ian Ridpath</em><br />Recommended by the Planetarium, a clear collection of maps of all the constellations, in a pocket book form.<br />ISBN: 0007100795 - PaperBack<br /><br />Planet Finder 2005-2011 - $21.95<br />Pia, our popular science expert, tells me this is the best planisphere on the market. It is the most astronomically correct and is fully compatible with red lighting (to maintain night eyes).<br />ISBN: 0961320737<br /><br /><strong>Best selling Children’s Book of Mar/Apr</strong><br /><br />Specky Magee and a Legend in the Making - $14.95<br /><em>Felice Arena and Garry Lyon</em><br />The latest installment of this series is positively flying from the shelves. A big favourite.<br />ISBN: 0143301896<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114965115677928138?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149562793123032602006-06-06T12:22:00.000+09:302006-06-06T12:29:53.140+09:30<span style="font-weight:bold;">Judy Recommends…</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Poe Shadow</span> by Matthew Pearl<br /><br />This is an eccentric thriller wrapped in the real life mystery of the death of Edgar Allen Poe, who perished in Baltimore in 1849. <br /><br />Quentin Clark, an obsessive Poe fan, sets out to determine what happened during the unexplained last few days of the author's death, to find out why and how he died. He guesses that the Sherlock-Holmes-like character Dupin - who appears in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and other Poe stories - was based on a "real" man, and seeks to identify the model and enlist him in his cause. Clark is single minded in his attempts to resurrect the dead poets reputation, at seemingly great cost to his own…<br /><br />Pearl masterfully combines fact with fiction and presents some genuinely new historical clues that help reconstruct Poe's final days. With an exciting plot, numerous twists and convincing period detail, the Poe Shadow will intrigue from start to finish. I really enjoyed it.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The HORRIFIC SUFFERINGS of the MIND-READING MONSTER HERCULES BAREFOOT: His WONDERFUL LOVE and his TERRIBLE HATRED.</span><br /><br />By Carl-Johan Vallgren<br /><br />(Translated from the Swedish by Paul & Veronica Britten-Austin)<br /><br />On a stormy night in 1813, a doctor is called to the aid of two prostitutes in childbirth. To one is born a healthy girl, to the other, what can only be described as a monster: a boy, Hercules, deaf-mute and hideously deformed, and with the power to read minds.<br /><br />Vallgren paints a cast of grotesques in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe: the swags and tales of the bordello, where Hercules is born; the phantasmagoria of the freak show, with which he travels; the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries, in which he finds both shelter and peril; the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain.<br /><br />Through other's reactions to Hercules very visible disabilities the author cleverly develops a question of the reader: What is it that makes us human? And Hercule, for all his supernatural abilities, reminds us through love, compassion and desire for revenge that he is so very human.<br /><br />Moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre, this novel stretches the bounds of imagination, presenting the bizarre as the everyday and leading you through it like a child, wide-eyed in wonder at a carnival. If you like adult fairy tales I am sure you will enjoy this. I highly recommend it.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Life, Interrupted: The memoir of a Nearly Person</span> by James McConnel<br /><br />James McConnel may have come from a loving and supportive family, been sent to the best schools, and been a gifted piano player from a very young age, but he still grew up knowing that something ‘wasn’t quite right’.<br /><br />The reason? James has Tourette's syndrome – a condition that remained undiagnosed until he was in his early thirties. <br /><br />From the age of six James felt he was not in control of his life. He felt different, 'other' from those around him. What began as an irrepressible urge to sniff, soon transformed into a repertoire of involuntary twitches, jerks and grunts. <br /><br />Worse even than the outward signs of Tourette's is the inner turmoil the condition brings with it. James describes with unflinching honesty and self deprecatory humour what it is really like to be in the grip of obsessive compulsive disorder, to suffer from attention deficit disorder and to have a peculiar fixation with repetitive patterns in numbers and words. <br /><br />For a time, alcohol stayed the obsessions and helped James survive; yet it was only when he stopped drinking that his life truly began again. <br /><br />Highly recommend to those who enjoyed reading ‘Curious incident of the dog in the night time’ or James Frey’s ‘A million little pieces’. This is a very inspirational book.<br /><br />Just a word of caution…a manifestation of Tourette’s syndrome is compulsive swearing, and there is quite a bit of it!!!!!<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114956279312303260?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149430868046007682006-06-04T23:46:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:07:38.926+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/landscape.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/landscape.jpg" border="0" /></a>Months before the April release of <em>Landscape With Animals</em>, tongues were wagging in literary and book industry circles with speculation as to the identity of its author. The ostensible creator, ‘Cameron S Redfern’, is declared a pseudonym on the page usually reserved for a dedication. On May 13, the <em>Sydney Morning Herald’s</em> Catherine Keenan announced that ‘in reality Redfern is Sonya Hartnett, 38, the author of 15 books for children, young adults, and adults’.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a> This was despite a lack of comment by either Hartnett or the book’s publisher, Penguin. Later reviews appeared to rely on this ‘outing’ by Keenan;<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a> others treated the possibility that Redfern and Hartnett are one and the same as rumour.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a> On May 28, Hartnett outed herself in an article in the <em>Sunday Age</em>,<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[4]</a> the headline of which (‘Faking it’) nodded to Peter Carey’s last two novels (<em>My Life as a Fake</em> and <em>Theft: A Love Story</em>) as much as to the debasing act of orgasmic pretense.<br /><br /><em>Landscape With Animals</em> is the story of an illicit love affair: a single and solitary woman sets her mind to seducing a married man, and he sets his mind to exploring the possibilities. There is more than the mere setting of minds, of course; Hartnett explores the messy emotions that accompany such action.<br /><br />Sex dominates <em>Landscape’s</em> relationship, and sex dominates the novel. Leading critic Peter Craven, who until 2004 edited Black Inc’s <em>Quarterly Essay</em> and its annual anthologies <em>Best Australian Stories</em> and <em>Best Australian Essays</em>, and whose influence on the Australian literary scene is larger than perhaps anybody else’s, calls the book ‘Mills & Boon for lubricous layabouts’. He uses an almost Keatingesque turn of phrase (‘tawdry little crotch tickler’) to lambast it and its creator, as if he feels personally betrayed. That may not be far from the truth. ‘Anyone who doesn’t know Hartnett’s work should go elsewhere to encounter the black power and keening poignancy of the finest Australian writer of her generation’.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn5" name="_ednref5">[5]</a><br /><br />It’s the sex, as always, which lies at the heart of the controversy. It’s true that Hartnett leaves very little to the imagination. Craven calls it ‘pornography’. Hartnett denies this charge, and it’s instructive to quote her at length:<br /><br /><em>The book may be colourful and confronting, but I hope it is never ludicrous or crass. Yet it seems we almost invariably associate sex with salaciousness, and jeer at attempts towards its serious portrayal. When literature deals with love, we like it to do so cleanly and with awe, mincing through the business of sex with the most dainty steps. The graphic portrayal of sex has been dropped into the hands of pornographers – hands that are always grubby and belittling – and so we acquaint strong depictions of sex with sordidness and shame; those who appreciate such portrayals are peculiar lowlifes. We rarely face up to the psychological power of physical encounters, the heroin-like, mind- and life-altering potential of sex, particularly between people at especially vulnerable points in their lives. […] If sex is recounted as messy, fleshy, sweaty, urgent, the way it is in real life, we mock it and hurl names at it until it is reduced and ruined. We hate to think that something so base could have influence over the great questions of humanity, yet sex…is an intimate communication that addresses the very essence of what it is to be human: the right to seek affection, the right to have children, the right to care and trust and respect. […]</em> Landscape With Animals <em>is not pornography because it is, at its heart, a book about love…</em><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn6" name="_ednref6">[6]</a><br /><br />Jake Wilson of the <em>Age</em> called the theme of Neil Armfield’s recent film <em>Candy</em> ‘quasi-pornographic’ because it relied on the ‘gradual degradation of a beautiful, sensual young woman’.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[7]</a> This helps to illustrate Hartnett's point. Hartnett is trying, at least in part, to reclaim the monopoly pornographers currently claim over the explicit depiction of sex. As Edgar Crook of the National Library of Australia has noted, ‘In ancient Greece and Rome the writing of erotic poems and stories were an accepted and popular literary form’.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn8" name="_ednref8">[8]</a> The Christian churches attempted to promote ethical sexual relationships but succeeded only in debasing the idea of sex and separating it from the normal sphere of humanity with disastrous consequences. Until very recently in Australia, sex was a taboo topic and was viewed with official disdain.<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn9" name="_ednref9">[9]</a> (In contrast, Indigenous societies placed tremendous emphasis on sexuality,<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn10" name="_ednref10">[10]</a> and many of their stories are as repulsive to westerners as Christos Tsiolkas’ <em>Dead Europe</em>.) It would be surprising if Craven has <em>not</em> been influenced by this taboo, to which many still adhere.<br /><br />The more interesting aspect of Hartnett’s book is its examination of the psychology of wrong love. To an extent, we can’t choose with whom we fall in love (although we do choose how we behave). There is an ethics to love, as there is to most things. What happens when we behave unethically?<br /><br />The man, who knew what what wrong but has let himself be led: ‘He knows he should end it, but also that he won’t. He would like to return to the level and unmarked life he lived before; but she has left a rough-edged scar on him, black and awful as a cigarette burn’. We are all shaped by our experiences. How has this experience, of surrendering to a temptation too tantalising to ignore, affected the way he sees himself, his identity, and therefore the rest of his life? (‘You only live once’ has become a slogan for the selfish hedonists of a succession of “me” generations, rather than a statement of ethic and social propriety.)<br /><br />‘She’d told him no strings, as if she doesn’t know that the world is tied together with string, that everything hangs poised from thread; that string, tied tight enough, slices to bone. Of course she knows it – how impossible it is, to avoid the hideous knots – but she is resolved’. What of her? Is she selfish at her core, if she is selfish enough to ask another to ‘risk the things that make his life fulfilling’? To the extent that society is a reflection of its individuals, how can we behave so unethically and expect our society to be just and equitable? Or have we accepted Thatcher's denial of society's very existence, internalised the neoliberals' view of humans as independent economic units acting in self-interest, and ceased to expect such things as justice and equity?<br /><br />Hartnett’s novel follows Nikki Gemmell’s <em>The Bride Stripped Bare</em> (2003) and Mark D’Arbanville’s <em>The Naked Husband</em> (2004) and <em>The Naked Heart</em> (2005) in exploring the emotion and psychology of infidelity, or wrong love. Whether it works is, of course, a matter of personal judgement. Craven is correct to point out that some of the phrasing seems ridiculous, but as Marion Halligan points out, ‘Sometimes the writing is melodramatic, but then so is adultery. The writing is also surreal – and so is adultery.’<a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn11" name="_ednref11">[11]</a> I remain unsure as to whether sex can ever be adequately reduced to written description. Alan Hollinghurst seemed to me to do it better in <em>The Line of Beauty</em> (2004), though others would almost certainly disagree. [Russell]<br /><br />Notes:<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> Catherine Keenan, ‘From child’s play to adults only’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May 2006, p.3.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> Jane Sullivan, ‘A writer by any other name’, The Age (Melbourne), 20 May 2006, p.17; Peter Craven, ‘Vaseline smears vision in an overblown sex shocker’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May 2006, p.32; Helen Elliott, ‘On the hunt for love’, the Australian (Sydney), 27 May 2006, p.14.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> Fiona Connolly, Sarah Grant and Chris Barrett, ‘Sydney Confidential’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 13 May 2006, p.23.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> Sonya Hartnett, ‘Faking it’, Sunday Age (Melbourne), 28 May 2006, p.18.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[5]</a> Craven, above n 2.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[6]</a> Hartnett, above n 4.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[7]</a> Jake Wilson, ‘Candy adaptation leaves a sour taste’, the Age (Melbourne), 25 May 2006, p.19.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref8" name="_edn8">[8]</a> Edgar Crook, ‘Erotica in Australian Libraries: Are We Negligent Collection Managers?’ (2001), 11(2) LIBRES: http://libres.curtin.edu.au/LIBRE11N2/crook.htm<http:><br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref9" name="_edn9">[9]</a> See Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris, Australia’s Censorship Crisis (1970), and Stewart Cockburn, The Salisbury Affair (1979), esp. ch.11, ‘Pornography and politics’.<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref10" name="_edn10">[10]</a> See Diane Bell, Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin (1998).<br /><a title="" style="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref11" name="_edn11">[11]</a> Marion Halligan, ‘He’s a she who’s master of the art of erotica’, Canberra Times, 3 June 2006, p.13.</http:><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114943086804600768?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149350757282814162006-06-04T01:32:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:07:57.190+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/ambiguit.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/ambiguit.jpg" border="0" /></a>Perlman, becoming a major force in Australian literature alongside names like White, Carey and Keneally, took the title for his most recent novel from the most famous work by literary critic William Empson, first published in 1930. Empson had spent years studying poetry, identifying countless linguistic ‘ambiguities’ in the English language which he grouped into seven basic ‘types’.<br /><br />Empson plays a major part in Perlman’s novel, primarily as Obscure Hero Number One for its deeply flawed protagonist, and then as the name of the protagonist’s dog. Simon is a profoundly intellectual man in his early thirties. Having turned his back on an academic career after being unable to find his own voice amid what he saw as the intellectual strangulation inside humanities departments, he was a passionate primary school teacher before one of his students, to whom he was providing extracurricular tutoring, mysteriously disappeared. Devastated, he lost his job soon afterward, and before long developed an obsession with his university girlfriend whom he had not seen for a decade.<br /><br />That obsession, which may or may not be madness, is nevertheless dangerous. And when Simon commits the stupidest yet most altruistic act of his life, the explosion sets off a chain reaction that deeply affects people he’s never even heard of.<br /><br />Perlman’s first novel was the unputdownable <em>Three Dollars</em> (1998), which was adapted for film by Robert Connolly. That was the story of a university-educated couple, an engineer and a PhD student, whose life together unravels itself with minimal input by each actor. Set against the backdrop of the 1980s economic reforms, her depression and his social conscience are not for the economic rationalist world they inhabit, and they feel its arbitrary power despite their apparent ‘prospects’. <em>Seven Types</em> is a much deeper, scarier, (dare I say it) ambiguous novel, but again, Perlman riles against an insane world which is more interested in contractual rights than citizen rights, that aims to keep people happy by telling them to ‘have a nice day!’, and which consistently rewards bad behaviour.<br /><br />Reading the novel is a rich yet often troubling experience. It requires the reader to set aside judgement, as it plays with our embedded fears, our elusive memory, our hidden conscience. It is superbly constructed, and its effect is often haunting and even depressing, though as Michael Cunningham said recently, what sort of a world has people teetering so close to the edge of mental health that reading a novel can send them over? That is exactly Perlman’s subject matter. [Russell]<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114935075728281416?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149350320198087492006-06-04T01:18:00.000+09:302006-07-08T16:08:34.170+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/single.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/single.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />Fans of last year’s highly entertaining but undersold 7 Network / Burberry series <em>Last Man Standing</em> may take a liking to this new tragicomedic novel. Each is set in Melbourne, and each charts a period in the lives of a group of single men in the relativist twenty-first century. Each text must attract the label ‘postmodern’, not least because of the ways in which their respective creators weaved cringeworthy, warts-and-all, day-to-day realism with high culture. <em>The Dining Club</em>’s author McMahon wants to claim this interweaving as a distinctly Melburnian trait - for example: ‘It is…the only city I know of where sport and art coexist so peacefully’.<br /><br />The cast in the <em>Dining Club</em> are a decade or so older than their counterparts in <em>Last Man Standing</em>, but no wiser. The Club is essentially a group of drinking buddies who, over more than twenty years of singledom, broken only occasionally by a chaotic fling here or a failed marriage there, have devised a strict charter to which each member pretends to adhere. For example, Article 1(1), headed ‘Taking One for the Team’, requires that where two ‘diners’ are together and one of them ‘achieves a measure of success with a member of the opposite sex’, the other ‘diner’ will ‘do the bad thing’ with the woman’s friend, even if she doesn’t ‘conform to what diners may consider their “standards”’, if ‘that is what is required for the other member to do likewise’. Article 55(6) is entitled ‘Boyfriend Trouble and the Comfort Bonk’. Even more dubiously, Article 48(5) advocates the ‘taking advantage of a woman in a state of alcohol-induced helplessness’.<br /><br />Many readers, female and male, may be offended by such apparently overt misogynism (and perhaps more so by the idea that other readers might chuckle along with it), but without giving too much away, the novel’s context is all-important when making judgements of this type. In this reviewer's opinion, McMahon neither promotes nor denounces such conduct, and while ultimate judgement is left to the reader, it's difficult to escape the commentary about the ultimate emptiness (even falseness) of that lifestyle.<br /><br />On the surface, the novel is a good-natured and amusing fictionalised account of single life. It sags in the middle, but it begins and ends surprisingly well – well enough for this reviewer to not be surprised if it makes the longlist for the Miles Franklin Award. Below the surface, and bubbling up in occasional page-long chapters which interrupt the narrative sequence, is a perceptive analysis of aspects of the 'postmodern condition', localised in inner-city Melbourne and the surrounding suburbs of Fitzroy, St Kilda and Richmond. [Russell]<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114935032019808749?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1149349320160081052006-06-04T01:01:00.001+09:302006-07-08T16:08:56.340+09:30<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/1600/Treading_Home_page.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px; float: right;" alt="" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3120/2691/320/Treading_Home_page.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />In <em>Treading Lightly</em>, Swedish management theorist Karl-Erik Sveiby addresses directly the central paradox of modernity: that despite the proliferation of specialised knowledge and the general raising of living standards (at least for modernity’s beneficiaries), our present system of ordering the world is unsustainable and likely, if nothing is done, to end in our destruction. Sveiby’s book lies somewhere near the James Lovelock/Tim Flannery end of the debate, so is far, far away from the ideas of that minority of scientists and others still in denial of the existence of this paradox, the most famous of whom is probably Bjørn Lomborg.<br /><br />Perhaps even more uncomfortable to those clinging to the erroneous idea that today’s globalised system, with its emphasis on individual liberty and material well-being, is the knowledge that there are cultures that have survived – and prospered – for over forty thousand years. Sveiby analyses one of these cultures, the Nhungabarra nation of the Nhunggal country in north-western New South Wales, with the assistance of painter, educator and custodian of Nhungabarra stories, Tex Skuthorpe.<br /><br />Sveiby makes well the point that, while the Indigenous peoples of the Australian continent were able to thrive on this land for over forty millennia, Europeans, with their unapologetic emphasis on exploitation, have largely destroyed that same land in just two hundred years. Often, through unsustainable agricultural and mining practices, the destruction has been ‘achieved’ in one generation.<br /><br />Sveiby believes that, contrary to previously accepted wisdom (which employs evolutionary theory to assert that ‘western civilisation’ is more ‘advanced’ than traditional Indigenous society), the Nhungabarra had developed a highly advanced social structure, central to which was the idea of ‘context-specific’ leadership. There was no supreme leader (like a king or a president); rather, each individual had at least one major leadership role, depending on the particular situation. All decisions were made on a consensus basis, which various anthropologists and political historians have noted is possible only until the population becomes too large. Sveiby argues that a major contributor to the Nhungabarra’s sustainability over such a long period was the rigid control of population size. This can be contrasted with present-day notions of ‘populate or perish’, still propagated by so-called conservative thinkers.<a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a><br /><br />Another major contributor, in Sveiby’s opinion, was the Nhungabarra’s world-view, which saw humans as part of the natural world, rather than as distinct from it. Whereas Europeans (and Asians) have for centuries seen their relationship with land as one of ‘ownership’, and have therefore seen its exploitation as not only appropriate but desirable,<a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a> the Nhungabarra saw themselves as ‘custodians’ of the natural world, the maintenance of which was their primary social objective.<br /><br />To us (and the European explorers, invaders and settlers of the 17th-20th centuries), schooled in ideas of material ‘progress’ (presented as self-evidently ‘good’), the concept of a society ordered around apparent torpidity is deeply troubling. Unable to escape our ‘progress’ paradigm, we search for explanations which privilege progress; thus, the biological theory of evolution becomes a social theory, Indigenous societies are presented as ‘primitive’ and/or ‘inferior’, and our cleverness is confirmed. But Sveiby asks: just how clever is it to destroy one’s own habitat? Of what benefit is modernity, viewed from a holistic perspective? The majority of the world’s population is suffering the consequences of centuries of exploitation by the few; those of us who benefit from this exploitation are shielded from the destruction we and our ancestors have caused.<br /><br />In this sense, Sveiby’s book is the latest in a recent spate of popular science volumes pleading for us to change our ways. Flannery’s <em>The Weather Makers</em> (2005) describes the global warming (or, as the US likes to call it, ‘climate change’<a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a>) phenomenon that is already wreaking havoc around the world. By examining the collapse of past great civilisations, Ronald Wright’s Massie lectures series, published as <em>A Short History of Progress</em> (2004), and Jared Diamond’s <em>Collapse</em> (2005) predict doom for our own. The closest a ‘western’ scientist has come to an Aboriginal world-view is arguably the ‘Gaia’ theory, labelled by William Golding but formulated and developed by James Lovelock. Initially described in <em>Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth</em> in 1979, Lovelock’s theory is that the Earth acts as a huge, self-regulating organism, which is dying after centuries of having its natural processes overrun. His latest book is <em>Revenge of Gaia</em> (2006).<br /><br />By questioning the assumptions that underlie our present social structures, Sveiby’s book makes a valuable contribution to this school of thought, and to the ongoing debate regarding our future. Its strength and its shortcoming is its simplicity, and it could be accused of presenting an oversimplified ‘Aboriginal = good, European = bad’ dichotomy. I don’t believe that was Sveiby’s motivation in writing the book, however, and it does provide a structured way of thinking about sustainability, which much of the discourse to date has lacked. [Russell]<br /><br /><a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> See for example the proceedings of the 2003 National Population Summit in Parliament House, Adelaide, collected in: Australian Population Institute, Australia’s Population Challenge (2004).<br /><a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> For a particularly cogent examination of the ideas of ownership, albeit written within a ‘western’ paradigm, see JW Harris, Property and Justice (1996).<br /><a title="" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=25717611#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> See Steven Poole, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality (2006).<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114934932016008105?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1148857497048876912006-05-29T08:34:00.000+09:302006-05-29T08:39:01.376+09:30<span style="font-weight: bold;">FANTASY/SCI-FI BOOK CLUB</span> (held @ Dymocks Adelaide 6pm, the 1st Monday of every month) <span style="font-style: italic;">All welcome!</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />May</span> (to be discussed Monday 5th June)<br />Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve<br />God of Tarot by Piers Anthony<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">June</span> (to be discussed Monday 3rd July)<br />Devices &amp; Desires by K J Parker<br />Orcs by Stan Nicholls<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114885749704887691?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1148611090673236952006-05-26T12:07:00.000+09:302006-05-26T12:08:10.686+09:30Books Reviewed by Bruce on ABC Radio 26/05/06<br /><br />Some or all of:<br /><br />life, interrupted - The Memoir of a nearly person <br />James McConnel<br /><br />The Swarm – A novel of the Deep Frank Schatzing<br /><br />The Ethics of what we Eat Peter Singer & Jim Mason<br /><br />Voices of War – Stories from the Australians at War Film Archive<br /> Michael Caulfield (Ed)<br /><br />1606 – An Epic Adventure Evan McHugh<br /><br />The Away Game – The Secret Lives of Australia’s Soccer Superstars<br /> Matthew Hall<br /><br />Piece of My Heart Peter Robinson<br /><br />12 Books that Changed the World. Melvyn Bragg<br /><br />Possibly Buried Mark Billingham<br /><br />The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114861109067323695?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1147993398135183512006-05-19T08:27:00.000+09:302006-05-19T08:33:18.143+09:30<strong><em>The Swarm - A Novel of the Deep</em></strong>, by <strong><em>Frank Schatzing</em></strong>, has been a best seller in Germany for some time. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the English translation has just hit the shelves. I say unfortunately because it is 880 pages long, and I have done practically no work sinceI opened it and started reading. Our store manager Judy is having the same problem.<br /><br />Think Clive Cussler, think Wilbur Smith, think Nelson de Mille, think Matthew Reilly. Readers of all of those will love this book, as will almost anyone who cares about what is happening to our planet. <br /><br />Could the earth really fight back against man's destructive habits?<br /><br />A must read, it's on the shelves now.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114799339813518351?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1145598995337055562006-04-21T15:25:00.000+09:302006-04-21T15:26:35.343+09:30Radio Reviews<br />Radio 891 ABC<br /><br />Friday 21 April<br /><br />Reviewed by Bruce Macky<br /> <br />March Geraldine Brooks<br /><br />Innocent Traitor Alison Weir<br /><br />1606 An Epic Adventure Evan McHugh<br /><br />Buried Treasure Victoria Finlay<br /><br />Write Home for Me Jean Debelle Lamensdorf <br /><br />Colour of Law Mark Gimenez<br /><br />The Hard Way Lee Child<br /><br />In the Company of the Courtesan Sarah Dunant<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114559899533705556?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1144714461330606142006-04-11T09:42:00.000+09:302006-04-11T09:44:21.330+09:30Bestsellers<br />Week Ending<br />1st of April 2006<br /><br />1. The Hard Way Lee Child<br /> Random House $32.95 sell for $23.95<br /><br />2. The Tenth Circle Jodie Picoult<br /> Allen & Unwin $29.95 sell for $22.95<br /> <br />3. How to Kill Your Husband Kathy Lette<br /> Simon & Schuster $29.95 sell for $23.95 <br /><br />4. The Last Explorer (Hubert Wilkins) Simon Nasht<br /> Hodder $35.00<br /><br />5. CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Manny Noakes et al<br /> CSIRO $29.95<br /> <br />6. Cross Bones Kathy Reichs<br /> Random House $19.95<br /><br />7. Specky Magee & A Legend in the Making <br /> Felice Arena & Gary Lyon<br /> Penguin $14.95<br /> <br />8. Theft - A Love Story Peter Carey<br /> Random House $45.00 sell for $34.95<br /><br />9. Panic Jeff Abbott<br /> Penguin $29.95<br /> <br />10. Anybody Out There Marian Keyes<br /> Penguin $32.95 sell for $22.95<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114471446133060614?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1144714343718317932006-04-11T09:36:00.000+09:302006-04-11T09:42:23.730+09:30<strong><em>The Hard Way</em></strong><br /><strong><em>Lee Child</em></strong><br /><br />Jack Reacher is still out there, doing what Jack Reacher does best. Solving crimes that no one else can or will touch.<br />This time he takes on other former Army Officers. As usual, he is smarter and harder than any of the others. He manages to travel to the UK for the final showdown, and then disappears.<br /><br />As usual, I can't wait for the next episode. <strong><em>Lee Child</em></strong> has promised to write 21 Jack Reacher novels, one a year. <strong><em>The Hard Way</em></strong> is number 10, so we still have lots of thrills and action to come.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114471434371831793?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25717611.post-1144585071245933872006-04-09T21:46:00.000+09:302006-04-10T13:09:03.363+09:30Dymocks Adelaide are delighted to be hosting the launch of<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">"Write Home for Me"<br />"A Red Cross Woman in Vietnam".</span><br /><br />Jean was one of the first, and one of very few, women to serve with the Australians in Vietnam. This is her story of the time. It is a great story that will be interest to all who served in Vietnam, and all of their families, as it will help the families understand what it was like.<br /><br />The launch is Wednesday 12th April at the Keswick Army Barracks at 6.30. Book through 8223 5380.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/25717611-114458507124593387?l=dymade.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div>Dymocks Books, Adelaidehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02341992794178236797noreply@blogger.com0