Reviews
Poisoned Waters: Fukushima: The Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns
In Fukushima: Japan’s Tsunami and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns, Willacy writes about small towns like Rikuzentakata and Namie, where the destruction of the earthquake and the tsunami meet the invisible radiation menace. His book is an important contribution to the understanding of Japan’s ‘nuclear village’.
The Australian Face: Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas
Barracuda continues the unlikely project, initiated by Tsiolkas’ fourth novel The Slap, of bringing troubling ideas about the Australian mainstream within the view of a mainstream readership. Tsiolkas is better than anyone else writing in Australia today at thinking about the affective pull and the sharp edges of communities: ethnicity, family, friendship, class, nation.
Heroes, certainly: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is Flanagan’s literary offering to history and national culture. It works hard to turn the memoirs of the prisoners of war into a work that is emotionally charged and accessible for readers too young to remember the aftermath of war.
Dare to know! The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters
All of this – the contradictions, the about-faces, the progressions and regressions, the many and varied strands of argument and implementation – is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Which makes the title of historian Anthony Pagden’s latest book, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, puzzling. How can it not matter?
Inexorably winnowed: Fairfax: The Rise and Fall & Killing Fairfax
There is a pungent irony in the publication of these two books about the declining fortunes of the Fairfax Media company written by two of its most experienced and respected journalists. Media companies matter and journalism matters, but it is entirely possible that Fairfax will in the next year or two be dissolved or broken up or taken over by Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart.
Oh Walt, you’re a leaky vessel
Readers of Lawrence who are curious, as we should be, about how these poems came into being – their provenance and history, how each one is related to Lawrence’s circumstances at the moment of his writing and where it stands in the complex development of his thought – have every reason to be grateful, both to Christopher Pollnitz, the editor, and to the press.
The Worst That Could Happen: Tenth of December by George Saunders
The classic Saunders story, like a classic Dr Seuss, is most easily distinguished by the author’s use of language, where he is brilliantly at work on several levels. Saunders has what Thomas Pynchon calls ‘an astoundingly tuned voice’.
Lives of the Publishers
In his posthumously published masterpiece 2666, Roberto Bolaño is clear-sighted enough to know that a visionary writer amounts to little without a visionary publisher. What would Benno von Archimboldi, the ‘great black shark’ of world literature, have been without Jacob Bubis, the German publisher unconditionally committed to him?