Non-fiction

This short but ambitious book is more revealing of its author’s shortcomings than anything I have read by him. Notwithstanding its posthumous publication and the fact that, had he lived a bit longer, Dworkin may have sharpened up his arguments, I emerged from it with a powerful sense that he was pulling a philosophical fast one.

In Report from the Interior, Auster describes the impact of his Jewishness on his remembering and subjectivity. He stands apart from the typical American boy he has hitherto imagined himself to be. His younger self does not attempt to resist this separateness. He refuses to blend in with the assumed and compulsory Christianity of his education.

Taking God to School is instructive reading for anyone interested in understanding how we have reached the stage where towards a third of students attend private schools, nearly all of a religious character, with many receiving substantial support from the federal government. For Maddox, it has been downhill ever since the high water mark of public school attendance in the late 1970s.

Eisenlauer identifies a number of predefined paths into which Facebook channels its users’ activities – status updates, comments, ‘likes’, shares – and suggests that in doing so, Facebook moulds the interactions between people to such an extent that, in any conversation between two of its users, it can be said to comprise a ‘third author’.

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka not only succeeds in bringing women’s presence on the Australian goldfields vividly into focus, but it also considers the instrumental role they played in transforming power relations within the fluid and often turbulent social and political formations of the goldfields community, which reached boiling point in the Eureka uprising.

Most of The Hamlet Doctrine is taken up with exegeses of key philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamlet. For readers familiar with continental philosophy and critical theory, there is much to engage with here.

‘Our marriage wasn’t always unhappy’: so begins this ‘memoir of a marriage’ between Australian writer Mandy Sayer and her first husband, the Afro-American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. What follows is the chronicle of a deeply troubled relationship from the point of view of the poet’s wife.

Walter Benjamin was born on 15 July 1892, mere hours after the commemoration of Bastille Day. It is hard to avoid making something allegorical of this insignificant contingency, given that for the rest of his relatively brief life Benjamin would almost invariably arrive a little too soon or a little too late.

It cannot escape notice that, by King’s telling, things really start to go screwy when a much wider range of people get access not merely to politics, but to the political self-expression that was hitherto the preserve of the author… his sometimes acute analysis of particular deployments of notions of offence treats them as akin to an act of state censorship, a charge the Right relies on almost obsessively.

As Tom Keneally observes in his contribution to A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers, governments of both persuasions have designed policies on the supposition that ‘people can be frightened out of trying to escape terror or likelihood of death’, an assumption shared by many people in the community. Yet when we understand the horror so many are fleeing and the fact that there is no protection worthy of its name in our region of the world, we can understand why travel to Australia is often the only option.