‘Can animals really love us?’ An excerpt from The Inner Life of Animals
When the misanthropic beasts among us, insecure in humanity’s well-established place atop the food chain, wish to further establish the difference between humans and animals, they inevitably suggest that the emotional intelligence we attribute to animals is rooted solely in our own projections. They say we imagine their reactions to be like ours because of […]
Why Sigmund Freud still cannot be dismissed
Cover of ‘Freud’ by Elisabeth Roudinesco. (No Credit) FREUD By Élisabeth Roudinesco Of the three (mostly) 19th-century figures who loomed over 20th-century thought—Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud—many scholars would say only the first retains his relevance. Marx is probably a lost cause, since even the Chinese Communist Party has gone capitalist. As for […]
A boy’s-eye view of the Vietnam War
SUCH A LOVELY LITTLE WAR By Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel Often rendered in watercolour-like strokes (in muddy greys and faded pinks), the look of this terrific graphic memoir consistently invokes sepia—and episodes at the very edge of memory, or belonging to another time and place. Recalling events from his childhood more than 50 […]
Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa talk about music
Cover of ‘Absolutely on Music’ by Haruki Murakam and Seiji Ozawa. (No Credit) ABSOLUTELY ON MUSIC: CONVERSATIONS By Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa The high-culture shelf in the celebrity literature section gets a rare addition with this book, a transcription of conversations between two of the most famous (in the West) Japanese artists: writer Haruki […]
Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and instability in gender and race
TRANS By Rogers Brubaker In Western culture, gender and race were traditionally thought to be unchangeable and fixed for life. Black or white, male or female: These were forever separated by the binary logic of absolute difference. But even as the old colonial theories of racial determinism have long been discredited, the notion of changing […]
Book Review and Giveaway: The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs
Title: The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie Author: May Gibbs Published: October 1st 2007 Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers Australia Pages: 272 Genres: Fiction, Children RRP: $39.99 The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie combines in one edition May Gibbs’ much loved classics, the Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (first published in 1918) and its two sequels, Little Ragged Blossom (1920) and Little Obelia (1921). Quintessentially Australian, these delightful […]
My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry
Do you remember, as a young child, that one fantastical story which captured your imagination? Of course you do, because it’s the story that molded your childhood. It’s the story that filled you with a new wonder about the world around you, and of all that was possible. For me it was the story of […]
‘A purposeful departure’: Jennifer Egan takes a detour into the past with Manhattan Beach
By Kat Johnson Manhattan Beach By Jennifer Egan Scribner 448 pp; $37 Anna Kerrigan, the headstrong young heroine at the centre of Jennifer Egan’s new historical novel Manhattan Beach, is not an angel. Or so she admits early in this intricately researched tale of New York and the sea during the Great Depression and […]
David Sax pens a nostalgia-evoking love letter to analog
Cover of ‘The Revenge of Analog’ by David Sax. (No Credit) THE REVENGE OF ANALOG By David Sax Two-thirds of the way through this book full of middle-aged, middle-class white people finding markets for products that remind them of their childhood (vinyl, board games, paper notebooks, etc.), a Detroiter at a dive bar downs a […]
New Release Book Review: The Treatment by C.L. Taylor
Title: The Treatment Author: C.L. Taylor Published: October 19th 2017 Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers Australia Pages: 384 Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Young Adult, Thriller RRP: $19.99 Rating: 3.5 stars “You have to help me. We’re not being reformed. We’re being brainwashed.” All sixteen year old Drew Finch wants is to be left alone. She’s not interested in spending time with her mum and stepdad and […]