Non-fiction

I have paid my respects at Anne Bront√´’s grave but not at that of my own great-grandmother. Graves haven’t figured at all in my sense of myself as a person with biological progenitors, yet they’ve played a part in my attempts to connect with individuals whose artistic achievements I admire. ‘

I also had the sensation of ‘growing up’ as a result of reading Brennan’s book. This statement expects no flabbergasted reaction. Many of us know that books have tracked our lives – and with Garner, it is from inner-city, communal living in Monkey Grip, to families in The Children’s Bach, to the enigma of the spiritual in Cosmo Cosmolino, to death in The Spare Room.

‘Stuart Jeffries’ group biography, Grand Hotel Abyss tells the story of the Frankfurt School, its central figures, and their most significant affiliates. The collective accomplishment of these thinkers, it shows, was to develop a critical theory with which to apprehend what it means to live and think through an historical period during which the left would achieve fewer and fewer victories.’ ‘

Nothing is simple in this philosophical arena, where rattling spears and tjurunga contend with sextants and theodolites; cans of spray paint with the sepia tones of old colonial photographs. The question is how to make a future. If the Dreaming was always about eternity poured into time, the problem the Enlightenment brought with it—along with its Cartesian accoutrements—was how to protect eternity from time.

On first encounter, oral history seems both straightforward and innately subversive, an approach to narrative history that offers unmediated access to an…

They Cannot Take the Sky gathers thirty-five stories of men and women who have experienced Australia’s detention regime. Some are now living in Australia and others remain locked up. Each oral history, told to one of the book’s editors, transcribed and translated, bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit and to its fragility. Together these stories are a condemnation of the border policies that have permitted the long-term incarceration and criminalisation of refugees and asylum seekers.

‘Her upbringing in a tiny village far from China’s urban elite, and her late transposition to Britain, allows Guo to bring a coolly analytical eye to both cultures, dissecting the strengths and foibles of each with wit and precision. In short, the complex process of cross-cultural negotiation Guo traces in her novels makes her a keen commentator on the experience of globalisation for everyday people, and the impact on global culture of China’s opening and rise.’

Can we separate the authority of the authored text from that of the critic whose skill is to establish credibility by providing reasoning for her appraisal?

‘is this book worth reading? A book review—while it can be many things—is not really a review unless it offers some form of explicit or implicit evaluation in a way that meaningfully answers this question.’

In writing No Way But This Sparrow seeks to reanimate not only the ghost of Paul Robeson but those of his family, friends and comrades. In other words, this book has an avowedly political goal. It revives Robeson as a model of integrity and bravery – someone who, despite the precarity of his social position, risked his life and career for the ideas of workers’ rights, black liberation, anti-colonialism and international socialism.