Latest Books Reviewed

LATEST BOOKS REVIEWED

• AND WHAT DO YOU DO?: Norman Baker

When conversing with commoners, members of the British Royal Family are instructed to always ask the question ‘And what do you do?’. For, after all, this gives the working class something to talk about – their job. Norman Baker (a former Liberal Democrat Minister in the British parliament) says, however, that it is high time the question was returned in kind by asking of the royals ‘And what do you do?’. So how do the royals fill their day? Let us count the ways............ [read more at The Royals: What Do They Do?]

• DENIS DIDEROT: Two books on Diderot, the Freethinker:

Denis Diderot is now remembered, if at all, only as the name of a Metro railway station in an unfashionable neighbourhood of Paris. In his day, however, the 18th century Enlightenment philosopher was quite the subversive intellectual who parted the ideological fog of religious, moral and political backwardness for a view of the sunnier uplands of today’s society. The

biography of Diderot by Andrew Curran (Wesleyan University Humanities professor) vibrantly displays the radical arc of the life of the effervescent polymath, the son of a skilled cutler who, rather than take to honing knife blades for a livelihood, took to sharpening his mind on the whetstone of Reason instead. As with many revolutionaries of that era, it all started with questioning Christianity ...... [read more at Denis Diderot: Freethinker!]

• • ANZAC: Australia's Most Powerful Brand by JO HAWKINS:

It can be hard sometimes to give a monkey’s if forced to choose between the obligatory, sombre commemoration of war in Australia and the more grubbily commercial profit-making from it, as CONSUMING ANZAC, by Dr Jo Hawkins (University of Western Australia), demonstrates to those who may feel that

neither war nor consumer capitalism have all that much going for them................ [read more at ANZAC: The Brand]

• WHEN FOOTBALLERS WERE SKINT by JOHN HENDERSON:

Bill Leivers (Manchester City, 1953-1964) wryly recalls to the British journalist, Jon Henderson, in When Footballers Were Skint, how the football club owner once rewarded the players on the train home from a successful away game, not with a fistful of sterling for a few drinks all round, but with a packet of Polo Mints.

His contemporary, Tom Finney (England regular and Preston North End), reflects tartly on the £50,000 gate-takings which the English Football Association received from one international fixture at Wembley Stadium – of which the eleven England players shared just £550.

The chasm between the earnings of football’s bosses and players was at its widest in the wage cap................ [read more at When Footballers Were Skint]

• A MUTINY ON THE WESTERN FRONT: 1918 by GREG RAFFIN:

For those who may have been living in a cave without electricity for a while, it may need pointing out that the Australian establishment likes to conduct extravagant khaki-and-slouch-hat festivals to annually celebrate the gore-filled Australian invasion of Gallipoli on April 25^th in 1915.

Whilst Anzac Day thus receives high-rotation airplay, we hear nothing, however, of a day - September 21^st in 1918 – that, of all the days of Australians at war, is actually worth acclaiming, Office........ [read more at ANZAC Mutiny]

• THE RACE TO SAVE THE ROMANOVS by HELEN RAPPAPORT:

Who would be the first to save the Romanovs (Tsar Nicholas and family) from the newly triumphant Reds in Russia? Would salvation come from extreme right groups such as the ‘Union of the Russian People’ with their thirty Tsarist military officers armed with poisoned darts to pick off the guards before hurling

diversionary grenades as they made their escape via getaway cars, engines gunning?........ [read more at The Race to Save the Romanovs]

• A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: The Enigma of Donald MacLean by ROLAND PHILIPPS:

At Cambridge University in the 1930s, Donald MacLean was popularly known as Donald MacLenin because he was a Red-hot undergraduate, a Communist Party member who railed against “the economic situation, the unemployment, vulgarity in the cinema, rubbish on the bookstalls, the public [private] school, snobbery in the suburbs, more battleships, lower wages”. None of his radicalism, however, stopped MacLean from being hired by the Foreign Office........ [read more at Donald MacLean]

• OPERATION CHAOS: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Each Other by MATTHEW SWEET:

When a number of American GIs in Vietnam deserted in 1968 and “joined a movement that wanted to bring that conflict to an end and build a more just and equitable world”, only to “then meet Lyndon LaRouche and kiss reality goodbye”, their idealistic revolt descended into the “batshit crazy” politics of one of the weirdest cults of all time, says Matthew Sweet, writer and BBC broadcaster, in Operation Chaos............. [read more at Deserters]

• THE POWER AND PERIL OF THE POKIES by DREW ROOKE:

Ever wondered if it possible to win against the pokies? Why not ask someone who should know, like a poker machine technician - ‘I make these machines in order to grab

your money. I would not be so stupid to play myself’, said one such techo when asked by freelance Sydney journalist, Drew Rooke. In his book, One Last Spin, Rooke expands on the

simple truth that pokies machines are rigged to make you lose........ [read more at The Pokies]

• DISSENT: The Student Press in 1960s Australia by SALLY WOOD:

Dissent didn’t obey strict decade-demarcation lines on Australian campuses in the radical 1960s, writes Dr Sally Wood (historian, Deakin University) in DISSENT: The Student Press in 1960s Australia. In 1961, for example, university students were still mostly from a privileged background and a largely conservative lot in their attire (“jacket-and-tie and short-back-and-sides” for the young men and “stiffly coiffured hair, twin-sets and skirts below the knee” for the women), in their music (classical and jazz rather than rock ‘n’ roll) and in their politics as they placidly read their rather anodyne student newspapers which mirrored rather than challenged the establishment press.

..... [read more at The student press]

• RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution by JOHN-PAUL O'NEILL:

Sir Alex Ferguson was deeply affronted by the Manchester United Football Club supporters who got stroppy about the proposed takeover of the club by the US corporate raider, Malcolm Glazer, in 2004 - ‘they carried on to the degree where they actually thought

they should have a say in the running of the football club’, exclaimed the outraged coach. Ferguson had, however, gotten to the core of things by starkly asking just whose club it is.

..... [read more at Red Rebels of MUFC]

• THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner: by DANIEL ELLSBERG:

One of the first reactions of Daniel Ellsberg to his revelatory acquaintance with US nuclear war planning in the 1960s was for the private sector consultant to the White House and

Department of Defence to decline to join the superannuation scheme of his company, the RAND corporation. Ellsberg had gloomily concluded that he would not last the distance to collect on any retirement pension because he believed that US atomic war strategy made nuclear Armageddon more likely, and frighteningly near. Ellsberg’s other response, however, was to redouble his vow to oppose nuclear weapons.

..... [read more at Daniel Ellsberg: Nuclear War Planner]

• GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB: Britain's Pacific H-Bomb Tests by NIC MACLELLAN:

Nobody better reflects the military and political elites’ cavalier attitude to nuclear weapons than the architect of Britain’s hydrogen bomb program, Sir William Penney, who, in meetings in 1961 between US Democrat President, John F. Kennedy, and UK Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, casually answered a question on how destructive the new weapons were by saying that ‘it would take twelve to destroy Australia, Britain five or six, say seven or eight, and I’ll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind’ (read more at Britain's Pacific H-bomb Tests)

• PLOTS AGAINST HITLER by DANNY ORBACH:

Nazi Germany is a test case in historical counterfactuals. If the assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play. The German military Resistance almost pulled it off but were dogged by continual bad luck, including faulty bomb technology, last-minute changes to Hitler’s schedule, and a mounting frustration which frayed the discipline necessary to the resistance network’s clandestinity. Nevertheless, they came agonisingly close to saving the lives of millions.

Yet, as Danny Orbach (University of Jerusalem historian) discusses in The Plots Against Hitler, the military resisters’ entitlement to moral approbation has been challenged by revisionist historians.........

[read more at Plots Against Hitler]

• THE BILLIONAIRES' CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of Football's Super-Rich Owners by JAMES MONTAGUE:

At this stage of the 2017 English Premier League (EPL) season, it looks like either of the two Manchester teams to win the championship - and with barely a Mancunian between them.

Both Man United and Man City have overseas owners, overseas managers and overseas-dominated player lists. The same foreign flavour emanates from most of the clubs in the elite competition – whilst only thirteen imports in the whole of the competition took to the field on day one of the season just 25 years ago, now 67% of players (and 69% of managers) are from overseas...... [read more at Soccer's Super-Rich Owners]

• THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero by JAMES COLMAN:

Pavlovian hostility to construction industry unions, and venom-flecked hatred of the environment movement, is far from a new development amongst conservative commentators, notes James Colman (Sydney architect, urban planner and university lecturer) in his book, The House That Jack Built, on Jack Mundey, the 1970s New South Wales State Secretary of the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) who originated the world’s first ‘green bans’ to save working class housing, historic buildings and urban bushland from the developers’ bulldozer.

..... [read more at Green Bans - Jack Mundey]

• FAIR GAME: The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology in Australia by STEVE CANNANE:

L. Ron Hubbard, science fiction writer and founder of the ‘Church’ of Scientology, employed ‘body-routers’ to lure passer-bys (‘raw meat’, he called them) off the street and into the offices of his cult with the enticement of a free, and quite bogus, personality test and then relieve his victims of their money with ever more expensive courses, in much the same way (‘look, all I wanted was a personality test’) that, in Day at the Races, the race-track swindler, Chico, hooks a hapless Groucho (‘look, all I wanted was to place a bet on Sunup’) into buying Chico’s entire library of higher-level code books of hot race tips....... [read more at Scientology]

• THE RADIUM GIRLS by KATE MOORE:

Those smirking denigrators of the ‘nanny-state’ who gripe about ‘occupational health and safety gone mad’ would do well to read Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls about a time when a nasty industrial poison, unregulated by business-friendly governments, destroyed countless American women’s lives..... [read more at Radium Girls ]

• THE PANAMA PAPERS by AOBERMAYER & OBERMAIER:

Only the little people pay tax’ was the gloating boast of the American billionaire property tycoons, Harry and Leona Helmsley. Like this happy couple, write the Munich-based investigative journalists, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier in The Panama Papers, wealthy tax cheats have a particular liking for off-shore tax havens ..... [read more at Panama Papers]

• • UNNECCESSARY WARS by HENRY REYNOLDS:

Australia’s first war (the Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902), notes the historian, Henry Reynolds, in Unnecessary Wars, was intimately bound up with the uniting of the six Australian colonies into a single nation within the British empire. This conjunction of militarism, nationalism and imperialism was ominous and Australia has never broken the habit of being at the military beck and call of its imperial managers. War, says Reynolds, has become “the central and defining national experience” of Australian society. For 58 of the last 76 years, Australia has

been involved in war, whilst .......... [read more at Boer War]

• INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer by Sylvia Martin:

In 1939, a young Australian woman grabbed the international headlines when she threw red paint from a thermos flask onto the doorsteps of

10 Downing Street, whilst distributing leaflets hidden in copies of the Ladies Home Journal, to protest the blood that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had on his hands for selling out Spain and Czechoslovakia to European fascism..... [read more at Aileen Palmer]

• NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War by DAVID HENDERSON:

Australia’s then conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said that it would be “absurd to intern refugees and anti-fascists when they were on the Allies’ side” but, writes La Trobe University historian, David Henderson, in his case-study history, Nazis in our Midst, this is exactly what happened in Australia during World War 11 as German Jews and anti-Nazis were detained along with Nazis in Australia’s five internment camps. Most of the 1,500 German-Australian internees were the innocent victims of racial prejudice or espionage hysteria simply because they were German..... [read more at ]

• The Dirty Game: Scandal at FIFA by ANDREW JENNINGS:

In 2014, the unravelling of the empire of Sepp Blatter, the multi-millionaire president of world football, began. Blatter fretted as he presided over that

year’s Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) Congress in Brazil as the corrupt, money-flushed bribe-takers and expense fraudsters from the world’s national and regional football associations, flanked by mounted police, fought their way through protesters who were angrily chanting ‘we want schools and hospitals FIFA-style’. The next year, eight of Blatter’s thieving peers from the FIFA elite (its Executive Committee) were arrested by police, and Blatter, himself, was forced to announce his impending retirement ..... [read more at FIFA - the Dirty Game]

• PARTY ANIMALS: My Family and Other Communists by DAVID AARONOVITCH:

Party Animals, a memoir by David Aaronovitch, columnist with Britain’s establishment newspaper, The Times, seems, at first blush, to be a critical but sympathetic account of the lives of the socialists, including Aaronovitch and his parents, in the post-war Communist Party of Great Britain. In Part

Two of his book, however, Aaronovitch warms to the role of bitter ex-Communist and gives us the “real story” of what he sees as a monstrous, self-deluding ideology..... [read more at David Aaronovitch]

• DARK MONEY: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by JANE MAYER:

Like ‘dark matter’ (the vast amount of invisible mass which holds the cosmos together), “dark money” is the astronomical quantity of hidden corporate money which holds the conservative US political universe together. This is the conclusion to be drawn from the meticulously documented book by Jane Mayer, investigative journalist at The New Yorker, on how America’s richest capitalists buy Republican Party politicians and shape their policies ..... [read more at The Koch Bros.]

• SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS by ADAM HOCHSCHILD:

The Spanish people were too darn democratic for their own good in 1936. For not only did they elect a centrist-leftwing national government, they also experimented with revolutionary democracy, taking control of farms, factories and offices as well’..... [read more at Spain In Our Hearts]

• THE HIDDEN WEALTH OF NATIONS: The Scourge of Tax Havens by GABRIEL ZUCMAN:

Criminal heists don’t come any bigger than the global theft every year by the ultra-rich of around US$200 billion courtesy of

the off-shore tax-haven banking industry. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Gabriel Zucman, economics professor at the London School of Economics and

Political Science, estimates that a staggering US$7.6 trillion, or 8% of the world’s entire individual financial wealth, is held in the tax-shelter banks of

Switzerland and a handful of other countries..... [read more at Tax Havens]

• THE DIRECTOR IS THE COMMANDER by ANNA BROINOWSKI:

In Pyongyang in 2012, wedged in a car between her North Korean Workers Party minders on a sweaty, 40 degree, trip to meet the Stalinist north’s leading film directors, actors and composers, the Sydney film-maker, Anna Broinowski, takes a surreptitious spritz of perfume, to the delight of her foreign film crew who spy the label ‘Kim’ on the bottle of cologne - ‘you have a perfume named after the Dear Leader!’. If only they knew, writes Broinowski ... [read more at

• RED PROFESSOR: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose by PETER MONTEATH and VALERIE MUNT:

Australia’s secret police, ASIO, had codenames for those in the Commonwealth Public Service it suspected of spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One of them was ‘Professor’. Was it Fred Rose, ask the Flinders University academics, Peter Monteath and Valerie Munt, in their biography of the Australian communist and anthropologist..... [read more at Fred Rose ]

• ON STALIN'S TEAM: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics by SHEILA FITZPATRICK:

Joseph Stalin could not have been the brutally efficient tyrant he was without some help. He had at his service a team of loyal auxiliary dictators, as the University of Sydney history professor, Sheila Fitzpatrick, explores in On Stalin’s Team.... [ read more at On Stalin's Team]

• SLICK WATER: Fracking – and One Insider’s Stand Against the World’s Most Powerful Industry by ANDREW NIKIFORUK:

The fracturing of rocks to mine more fossil fuels was born with the oil business, writes the Canadian journalist, Andrew Nikiforuk, in Slick Water. During the world’s first oil boom in Pennsylvania in the 1850s, highly volatile nitro-glycerine and other explosives had been used, with lethal risk, on sluggish wells to turn them into gushers by creating new fractures to channel blocked oil to the surface’..... [read more at Coal Seam Gas]

• NEVER ENOUGH: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by MICHAEL D'ANTONIO

What will America and the world be getting from ‘President Donald Trump’ if such a frightful prospect comes to pass in 2016? Michael D’Antonio’s biography of the Republican Party’s front-running Presidential candidate gives us some clues - denial of global warming, vaccination, marriage equality and abortion; insults and worse for religious and ethnic minorities, and for women and the disabled; and a turbo-charged American imperial power.

The winner, on the other hand, would be big business, Trump’s true religion..... [ read more at Donald Trump]

• BORN TO RULE: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull by PADDY MANNING:

The Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, likes to downplay his image as a privileged, wealthy silver-tail by touting his time as a flat-dwelling young boy from a broken family (his mother abandoned the family when Turnbull was only nine) but his upbringing was not all that humble, writes the business journalist, Paddy Manning, in his biography of the former investment banker’..... [read more at Malcolm Turnbull]

• FACTION MAN: Bill Shorten's Path to Power by DAVID MARR:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today,

I wish that man would go away…….

This old and highly serviceable piece of doggerel seems almost custom-made for Australian Labor Party leader, Bill Shorten. Even the usually perceptive journalist, David Marr, in his latest political profile for Quarterly Essay, is defeated by the indistinct and bland Shorten who, in public opinion polls, trails behind ‘Someone Else’ as preferred leader of the Labor Opposition.... [ read more at Bill Shorten]

]

• INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH: The Life of Tom Keneally by STEPHANY STEGGALL:

In 1960, the trainee priest, Thomas Keneally, abandoned the seminary at Manly on Sydney’s North Shore without any qualifications other than a Bachelor of Theology and with no skills other than Medieval Latin. His escape from his crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church, says Dr. Stephany Steggall in her biography of the Australian novelist, was through writing, which was both Keneally’s attempt to understand, and keep at bay, the ‘madness and melancholia’ of the human lot, and his own course of personal therapy for exorcising the mental demons that haunted him from six years in an uncaring, dogmatic institution with its ‘anti-human moral code’..... [read more at Tom Keneally]

• ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE by TIM FLANNERY:

The Australian scientist, Tim Flannery, became fascinated with proposals to extract excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and oceans when the billionaire aeronautics carbon-polluter, Richard Branson, in response to Flannery’s first book on climate change (The Weather Makers), invited Flannery to be a judge on Branson’s £25 million Virgin Earth Challenge prize for methods of carbon withdrawal and storage.... [ read more at Atmosphere of Hope (Flannery)]

• DANGEROUS GAMES: Australia at the 1936 Nazi Olympics by LARRY WRITER:

There were none so brave in the Australian team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 as Werner Seelenbinder, a wrestler, was in Germany’s team, says Larry Writer in Dangerous Games, his history of the 1936 Australian Olympians. Seelenbinder was a communist, one who had miraculously slipped through the Nazi net, who planned to protest Nazism on the world stage, right in front of Hitler (the Games’ official patron), from the victory podium should he win a medal. He finished in fourth place, however, narrowly missing his chance. During the war, Seelenbinder joined an underground anti-Nazi resistance group which aimed to infiltrate and destroy the Nazi Party from within. He was discovered, tortured and beheaded. To the Australian athletes, however, the Olympics was their once-in-a-lifetime dream and they would not let reality interfere..... [read more at Dangerous Games 1936 Nazi Olympics]

• MAX HARRIS by Betty Snowden:

In combining commerce and literature, Max Harris acted on the advice of his Adelaide University economics professor to ‘become a businessman and write poetry on the side’, says the art historian, Betty Snowden, in her biography of Australia’s controversial modernist poet, columnist, bookseller and publisher. Before enlisting in the world of commerce, however, writes Harris, ‘I was in the communist business’ at Adelaide’s prestigious St. Peters’ College ..... [read more at Max Harris]

• LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON by Lyndsey Jenkins:

When Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton was arrested, and went on prison hunger-strike, in 1909, for demanding women’s right to vote, she was, to prevent an embarrassing political fuss, released early so as to avoid one of Britain’s best-connected aristocrats being subjected to the government’s policy of force-feeding hunger-striking suffragettes. When arrested again, but this time disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a poor, unglamorous nobody, Lytton was treated exactly as were the rest of the nameless, powerless, force-fed suffragette prisoners...... [read more at Constance Lytton]

• GOD'S BANKERS by Gerald Posner:

For an institution which proclaims that it is not possible to worship both God and Mammon, the Catholic Church has managed to do so just fine, according to the writer and attorney (and Catholic), Gerald Posner, in God’s Bankers. The comfortable pomp-filled lifestyle of the ecclesiastical elite was vastly enhanced from the sixth century with the sale of indulgences to the lay faithful, which promised freedom from punishment for sin. This monetising of salvation financed the building of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Cathedral..... [read more at God's Bankers]

• CLARKSON: The Gloves are Off by GWEN RUSSELL:

There are many more lowlights to the career of the car-obsessed television personality, Jeremy Clarkson, than his assault in March this year on the producer of his motoring show, Top Gear, in a row over the lack of a hot meal after a day’s filming, which put the BBC employee in hospital with a split lip.

Gwen Russell’s homage to Clarkson, although trying to show him as a “cultured and thoughtful” Renaissance Man, does concede that Clarkson, his brain stuck in reptilian gear, has offended women ..... [read more at Jeremy Clarkson]

When I leave, it will be like it never really happened’, bemoans a dejected student to Griffith University Associate Professor, Richard Hil, in Selling Students Short, his investigation into the “hollowing out” of the modern university education experience in Australia. Many of his student interviewees report a similar alienation, a lack of connection with other students, the atrophy of teacher-student interaction and an uninspiring, narrow pursuit of a vocational qualification that together make for the social and intellectual “blandscape” of today’s campuses.

..... [read more at Students]

Daniel Mannix, Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for half a century, could be a bit of a rebel. As Monash University’s Brenda Niall recounts in her biography, the Irish nationalist and opponent of conscription in Australia during the first world war would show his disdain for the British monarchy by sticking postage stamps, bearing the King’s image, on sideways. The one-time Labor Party-supporting champion of the working class, however, spent his last decades splitting the party and keeping it out of government, whilst white-anting the trade unions, by unleashing his literally secret weapon, the Italian grocer’s son from Brunswick, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, in a clandestine, anti-communist offensive.

..... [read more at Mannix]

• THE UGLY GAME: The qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup by HEIDI BLAKE & JONATHAN CALVERT:

The only surprising thing about the currently unfolding FIFA corruption scandal is that anyone should be surprised, given the long history of credible allegations of bribery in world football’s governing body. As Blake and Calvert, investigative journalists at Britain’s The Sunday Times, reveal in their exposé of Qatar’s corrupt winning in 2010 of the hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup, the technical merits of the competing bids “were not worth the glossy paper they were printed on”. What mattered was money. The winner was the world’s richest (GDP per capita) country, the sweltering desert monarchy of the football minnow, Qatar, as it bought the most votes amongst the 24-member FIFA Executive Committee, the “elite cabal” who run world football .... [read more at FIFA Corruption]

• 17 CARNATIONS: The Winsors, The Nazis and the Cover-Up by ANDREW MORTON:

The 1936 abdication had it all for Royal soap opera addicts. The King of England, Edward VIII, gave up the crown so he could marry Wallis Simpson, who, as an American, a divorcée and not being “PLU - People Like Us”, had three strikes against her being allowed to become Queen, as Andrew Morton explores in 17 Carnations. The real story, however, lay elsewhere, well-concealed, in Edward’s untimely ardour for Hitler when Nazism shifted from being a valued defence against the Red Menace to posing a threat to the British empire. Edward was a “miserable prince”, depressed by, as the party-boy complained, having to ‘hit up with a lot of old-fashioned and boring people and conventions’. Sure, the privileges of royalty were nice - Edward would rise “not much before eleven”, before an afternoon of golf ..... [read more at Edward & Mrs Simpson]

• THE RISE AND FALL OF GUNNS by QUENTIN BERESFORD:

It was a sweet day when the placards – No Pulp Mill! – won an epic seven year battle against elite corporate and political power in Tasmania after Gunns Ltd., the largest timber corporation in Australia, went bust in 2013 with debts of $3 billion. Public outrage over its proposed woodchip pulp mill had sunk the state’s largest, and most powerful, corporation. Quentin Beresford, politics professor at Edith Cowan University, situates Gunns’ spectacular implosion in ‘crony capitalism’ – the close and profoundly undemocratic bond between business and state - that had ruled Tasmania’s economy and politics for decades and had arrogantly ignored or bullied its people..... [read more atGunns]

• IN THE COMPANY OF COWARDS by Michael Mori and MURDER AT CAMP DELTA by Joseph Hickman:

Major Michael Mori was a Republican-leaning, US military lawyer who “embraced the values I had been taught in scouts, sports, high school, college, law school and the Marines”, above all the ideal of fair play. In 2003, Mori was assigned as defense counsel for David Hicks, an Australian citizen captured by Afghan warlords during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the Al Qaeda terrorist attack in New York in 2001, and then detained in the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mori, however, was confused about what, if any, crimes Hicks was alleged to have committed. So, too, were the prosecutors (JAFRC) ....... [read more at Guantanamo]

The mouth-foaming Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy, who chaired the House Committee on Un-America Activities in the 1950s, added extreme vigour to the perpetual war by the American state against dissent, says Professor Phillip Deery of Melbourne’s Victoria University in Red Apple. Deery explores this particularly “virulent strain of persecution of leftists” through vivid case studies of selected New York radicals who were active in the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC)

.... [read more at Red Apple]

• THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN by JILL LEPORE:

Wonder Woman can’t marry, according to Amazon law, but she doesn’t want to, either, especially if it would mean that she, the comic book superhero, disguised as a secretary, would be stuck in the kitchen cooking dinner for her would-be domesticator, Captain Steve Trevor, the US pilot she fell in love with after rescuing him from his plane crash on her woman-only, feminist island utopia. As the Harvard history professor, Jill Lepore, writes, Wonder Woman, who became the most popular superhero in the 1940s after only Superman and Batman, had her origins in the struggle for women’s equality....

[read more at Wonder Woman ]

• THE MAN WHO LOVED DOGS by LEONARDO PADURA:

Leon Trotsky refused to let paranoia about his all-but-inevitable assassination cramp his political life in his Mexican refuge, even receiving Jacques Mornard, the suspicious Belgian businessman and partner of a trusted New York Trotskyist bearing his poorly-written political article in one hand and a mountaineer’s ice-pick concealed beneath his coat in the other. In The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Cuban novelist, Leonardo Padura, artistically reconstructs Trotsky’s assassination by the Spanish Communist, Ramón Mercader ....

.... [read more at Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs]

• SOPHIA, Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary by ANITA ANAND:

Sophia Singh boycotted the 1911 Census in Britain, writing on her form, in protest at the denial of the vote for women, that ‘as women do not count, they refuse to be counted’. She also risked fines and imprisonment through refusal to pay taxes to a government she had no voice in. This was no way for an Indian Princess in Britain to behave, swapping her VIP seats in the spectators’ gallery in the House of Lords for anti-government street protest with militant suffragettes ...

[read more at Sophia Singh ]

• BLOOD & GUTS: Inside the Whale Wars by SAM VINCENT:

Industrial-scale whaling, writes Sam Vincent in Blood & Guts, had picked clean the world’s oceans until only the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary remained, protected by the icy remoteness of Antarctica and a worldwide ban on commercial whaling. A convenient loophole allowing lethal whaling for ‘scientific research’, however, was exploited by Japan, resulting in many thousands of gory whale deaths – until the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society began physically disrupting, on the high seas, Japan’s annual hunt.

.... [read more at Blood & Guts]

The defiant red and black flags, the proud trade union banners, the clenched fists, the full-throated slogans (No Pasaran! No Pasaran!), the spine-quivering singing of The Internationale – these drove the waves of emotion in Spain amongst the 2,500 British volunteers who came to the military defence of the Spanish Republic against General Franco’s fascists in the late 1930s, writes the London School of Economics’ Richard Baxell in Unlikely Warriors. The Britons, although they and democratic Spain were to lose the Spanish Civil War, would never lose the memory of this electrifying solidarity.

latter .... [read more at Unlikely Heroes]

• THE SPY WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: Klaus Fuchs and the Secrets of the Nuclear Bomb (by Mike Rositer) and A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (by Ben Macintyre):

Klaus Fuchs has had a very bad press because the refugee German physicist who was at the heart of the war-time British and American nuclear bomb projects also passed on all their secrets to Stalin’s Soviet Union. There is, however, more to Fuchs than his depiction by conservative Cold Warriors as a reprehensible traitor, as can be gleaned from Mike Rossiter’s biography. Fuchs came of political age during the rise of Nazism when he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) as the only effective resistance force to Hitler. A fearless activist, Fuchs was once attacked by Hitler’s street thugs .....

[read more at Klaus Fuchs & Kim Philby]

• NO PLACE TO HIDE: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by GLENN GREENWALD:

Glenn Greenwald’s No Place To Hide is not just a thrilling account of the journalist’s “cloak-and-dagger” encounter with National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, but a clinical and impassioned analysis of the danger posed by America’s vast surveillance state. Greenwald, no tech-head, nearly blew his opportunity for the dramatic scoop because of his dilatoriness in installing a computer encryption program for communication with Snowden until guided mouse-click by mouse-click by the latter .... [read more at German Scientists]

• WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COLD WAR, DADDY? Personal Stories From a Troubled Time ed by ANN CURTHOYS & JOY DAMOUSI:

The Cold War (1946 - 1991) affected everything, so how did the conflict between the capitalist West and the Soviet East play out at the personal level, ask Ann Curthoys and Joy Damousi (History professors at Sydney and Melbourne universities) in What Did You Do In The Cold War, Daddy? The book’s contributors try to recreate how their families experienced the Cold War in Australia. Patrick Stalin Brislan (fortunately, this classical musician’s middle initial now stands for Sean) was the wartime son of a father who was, not surprisingly, a Communist Party of Australia (CPA) organiser .....

[read more at The Cold War]

• SERVING THE REICH: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by PHILIP BALL:

Nuclear physicists in Nazi Germany did not build an atomic bomb but, as the science writer, Philip Ball, shows in Serving the Reich, this was more by good fortune than by clever (mis)management by the likes of one of the regime’s favourite scientists, Werner Heisenberg, whose reputation-salvaging claim to have deliberately ‘falsified the mathematics’ to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear war option has been roundly discredited. Such self-exoneration, says Ball, was common to almost an entire cohort of non-Jewish German physicists .....[read more at German Scientists]

• HELL-BENT: Australia's Leap into the Great War by DOUGLAS NEWTON:

Behind all the froth, then and now, about the noble cause of the first world war (defence of freedom by Britain and its allies against German aggression) lay a far less exalted reality, writes Douglas Newton, retired University of Western Sydney historian. The war’s “grand plan” for Britain, called, candidly enough, ‘The Spoils’, by the British Colonial Secretary, was to divvy the world up amongst the victors.

[read more at Australia's entry]

• AN OFFICER AND A SPY by ROBERT HARRIS:

What do you do when you are a national security official with access to secret intelligence and find that the shonky information and tenuous evidence in it has been corruptly used to convict an innocent man of treason? Join in the suppression of the case? Or expose the injustice? Major Georges Picquart, commander of France’s secret police in 1895, faced exactly this dilemma in the Dreyfus Affair and, at great risk of his own victimisation, chose to expose the frame-up of the French Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus. Robert Harris’ historical novel dramatically reconstructs the transformation of Picquart from loyal military officer to crusading whistle-blower..... [read more at Dreyfus - Picquart]

• CORAL BATTLEGROUND by JUDITH WRIGHT:

From the days when Captain Cook’s Endeavour tangled with the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland, humans had learnt to fear the Reef with its “treacherous waters and weather” but now the Reef “should fear us more”, writes Judith Wright in The Coral Battleground, a reprint of her 1977 account of the campaign to save the largest and most spectacular marine coral ecosystem in the world from oil drilling. “We were opposing wealthy interests, entrenched government policies, and political forces that seemed immovable”, she writes, yet the environmentalists won.

[read more at Great Barrier Reef]

• COMMAND AND CONTROL (Eric Schlosser); A SHORT HISTORY OF NUCLEAR FOLLY (Rudolph Herzog); ATMOIC COMICS (Ferenc Szasz):

Atomic bombs have only ever been used twice but they have nearly been detonated, through accident or mistake, many more times, writes Eric Schlosser in his book on nuclear weapons mishaps. With one modern thermo-nuclear bomb packing three times the force of all the bombs used in World war 11, an unintended catastrophic detonation or scattering of deadly plutonium has been too close, too often, for any complacency.....

[read more at Nuclear accidents]

• POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of Climate Politics Under Rudd and Gillard by PHILIP CHUBB:

In 2007 in Australia, “climate policy was a reform full of promise and excitement”, writes Monash University journalism academic, Philip Chubb, in Power Failure. Six years later, however, an “exhausted and confused” electorate had installed a climate-change-denying government that was dismantling the previous Labor government’s few fossil fuel carbon emission programs. Chubb dissects, with much sorrow, the climate change “policy fiasco” of Labor.....

[read more at Power Failure]

When Richard Ablin, then a young immunologist and now a University of Arizona pathology professor, discovered, in 1970, an enzyme specific to the prostate gland (prostate-specific antigen or PSA) whose elevated levels in blood indicate an abnormality in the gland, he had no idea how a simple blood test would go on to become the foundation of a “profit-driven public health disaster” through prostate cancer screening.

[read more at Prostate cancer]

• THE BURGLARY: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by BETTY MEDSGER:

As far as burglaries go, this one was pretty audacious. On 8 March, 1971, nine anti-Vietnam-war activists in Pennsylvania burgled the FBI, stealing the secret files in the regional FBI office in the small town of Media. With careful planning, a little luck and plenty of pluck, the amateur burglars exposed, for the first time, the FBI’s political spying and suppression of democratic dissent....

[read more at The FBI burglary]

• DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER by BOB CARR:

Too often, Bob Carr’s diary sounds like an episode of Grumpy Old Ministers. An eighteen-month Foreign Affairs Minister in the doomed Rudd-Gillard-Rudd federal Labor government, the globe-trotting Carr gripes about the dead prose of his departmental talking points, the lifeless food and draining jetlag of plane travel, the awfulness of hotels, Canberra (“the City of the Dead”) and contracting viruses from shaking hands all day on the campaign trail “without a hand sanitiser in the car – damn!”.

[read more at Bob Carr]

• DIRTY SECRETS: Our ASIO Files by MEREDITH BURMANN (ed):

The only thing worse, notes Meredith Burgmann in Dirty Secrets, than discovering that your personal file held by Australia’s domestic political police, ASIO, is disappointingly thin is to find out that your official subversion rating hasn’t warranted a file at all. Flippancy aside, two dozen of ASIO’s many thousands of targets (from High Court judges to gardening identities) take a serious look at their watcher which has doggedly spied on, and imperilled the jobs and personal relationships of generations of left wing and progressive activists engaged in traditional, and entirely legal, political dissent.

[read more at Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files]

• ANZAC's LONG SHADOW by JAMES BROWN:

A former army officer criticising the Anzac cult – this attack from an unexpected quarter, not from the usual Marxist and Quaker suspects but from James Brown, a military insider and analyst from the conservative think-tank, the Lowy Institute, has grabbed much attention in the lead up to Anzac Day 2015, the centenary of the disastrous Allied invasion of Turkey ....

[read more at ANZAC's Long Shadow]

• TAKING GOD TO SCHOOL by MARION MADDOX:

To the traditional ‘three Rs’, Australia has added a fourth – religion – as religious private schools, religious instruction in public schools, and religious counsellors have found generously-funded favour with successive federal and state governments, writes Macquarie University politics professor, Marion Maddox, in Taking God to School. The taxpayer-funded rise of private, religious schools, many of them extremely wealthy, is a massive retreat

[read more at Religion]

• A SPY IN THE ARCHIVES by SHEILA FITZPATRICK:

• OIL AND HONEY by BILL McKIBBEN:

When the American environmental writer, Bill McKibben, became a climate change activist, he discovered the delights of Internet abuse (‘Asshole! Shitstain! Harvard Grad! … Harvard Nazi scumbag moron climatebecile!’ was one of the more baroque emails) and the public meeting crazies including followers of Lyndon LaRouche, the leader of a “marginal and bizarre but tenacious political cult”, as he entertainingly describes in Oil and Honey.

[read more at Oil & Honey - McKibben]

George Blake was smart, resourceful and committed. A teenage courier with the Dutch anti-Nazi Resistance during the war and a British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) spy after it, Blake then picked, says Roger Hermiston in The Greatest Traitor, the wrong cause, converting to Marxism and becoming a Soviet mole in the SIS.

[read more at George Blake]

The police had, writes David Marr in his Quarterly Essay on paedophile priests in the Catholic Church in Australia, “vigorously, for a very long time, protected the church”, leaving the clergy’s sex crimes to be looked after in-house. This entirely suited the clerical child abusers until the international tide of Catholic sexual abuse revelations engulfed Australian shores and sparked police of conscience into action.

[read more at Religion]

• MADLANDS by ANNA ROSE:

Anna Rose, a climate change youth activist and leader, was warned by her many colleagues in the environment movement of the risks of agreeing to do a television documentary, screened earlier this year by the ABC, pitting her against the former Liberal Party senator, science minister and climate change denialist, Nick Minchin. The “whole show will play into the denialists’ strategy of framing the science as disputed when it actually isn’t”, she was told, and it would serve merely to give the infinitesimally tiny bunch of cranks and denialists prime time exposure to market their shonky product, ‘doubt’. [read more at Madlands]

• BIG COAL by GUY PEARSE et al:

You don’t have to look far to see why Australians are locked in an absurd and vicious circle of climate change, burning more coal to, for example, run more air-conditioners to cope with the more severe heatwaves from the global warming resulting from burning more coal. The reason why Australia is hooked onto such coal-mad absurdities, say Pearse, McKnight and Burton in Big Coal, is because the economic and political power of Australia’s coal industry has pushed a more than willing political elite to support the mining and export of coal in a country which is the world’s 4^thlargest producer, and 2^nd biggest exporter, of the largest single source of global greenhouse gases – coal. [read more at Big Coal]

• • RYSZARD KAPUSINSKI by ARTUR DOMOSLAWSKI:

When the Solidarity protest movement kicked off in the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk in 1979 against the neo-Stalinist Polish government, Ryszard Kapusinski faced a difficult choice – would the “world’s most famous Polish reporter”, writes Artur Domoslawski, “side with the mutinous people or his pals on the Central Committee”. [read more at Ryszard Kapusinski ]

• • MOSCOW 1937 (by Karl Schlogel), GENERAL ZHUKOV (by Geoffrey Roberts), AGENT DIMITRI (by Emil Draitser):

Stalin’s Great Terror spared no sphere, writes Karl Schlogel in Moscow 1937. In the usually sedate world of architecture, for example, one leading Soviet architect rounded on what he detected as ‘enemies of the people, diversionists, wreckers, agents of fascism, spies, murderers and blood-sucking gangs of Trotskyist and Bukharinist degenerates and traitors who are stretching out their filthy paws into architectural planning work’. [read more at The Great Terror, General Zhukov, Agent Dimitri ]

• SEVEN DEADLY SINS: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong by DAVID WALSH:

“Just how much blood is on the hands that could soon grasp nuclear weapons”, asks human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, of Iran’s rulers. Quite a bit, he shows in Mullahs Without Mercy, with the logical inference that “it is surely obvious that a state which mass-murders its own people is more likely to misuse a weapon that can mass-murder its enemies”. [read more at Lance Armstrong]

• • GREENING THE MEDIA by RICHARD MAXWELL and TOBY MILLER:

There is a reason why the typical electronic product warranty lasts only 12 months, say Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller in Greening the Media. Most digital devices are designed to “break or become uncool”after just a year, requiring regular product replacements or upgrades. The profits of the big electronic brand names (Apple, Nintendo, Sony, Amazon, Microsoft, e-Bay, Motorola, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba, etc.) depend on this business model of “rapid and planned cycles of innovation and obsolescence” [read more atElectronic Technolgy]