45 articles
Review: Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke, Fourth Estate Natalie is a tradwife influencer living on a farm called ‘Yesteryear’. She has millions of Instagram followers who watch her feed chickens, raise a brood of children and bake bread in her old-style kitchen filled with glass jars and carefully curated clutter. What the followers don’t see are […]
Review: A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks, Scott Meslow, Faber Scott Meslow’s book whets the appetite for Twin Peaks nostalgia, even if, like me, forced to return to the original episodes, you don’t remember all the twists and turns and don’t always care. He is enthusiastic for the […]
Review: The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni, Black Inc In Moreno Giovannoni’s prize-winning novel, the narrator (a thinly veiled version of the author) is at one point perusing a book on Mitrefo (a thinly veiled version of Myrtleford in Victoria, a hotspot for Italian postwar immigration). He says that there is little mention of the Italian migrants […]
Review: One Mississippi, Eric Bibb We are under pressure to ‘stay informed’ about world events, and there is some good in understanding where justice is required in the world and acting on that. But things can seem overwhelming. Focussing on the good in life can seem like a cop-out, but there is some courage in […]
Review: William Tyndale and the English Language, David Crystal, Bodleian Library Publishing Even David Crystal, the linguistics expert and author of numerous books about the history of the English language, was surprised, he says, when he looked into the extent of William Tyndale’s influence on English. In this book, in a typically intricate detective exercise, […]
Review: The Season for Flying Saucers, Brendan Colley, Transit Lounge and Capture, Amanda Lohrey, Text Tasmania has a history of UFO sightings. Brendan Colley uses these events as inspiration for his offbeat but warm second novel, in the deadpan absurdist suburban vein of the fiction of fellow Australian authors Wayne Macauley or Shaun Prescott, while […]
Review: Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapses, Luke Kemp, Penguin In his book of collapsology, Luke Kemp turns much received wisdom about barbarism and civilisation on its head. It’s the product of an enormous amount of research and contemplation, and it’s a goliath of a book, partly because he tends to repeat […]
Review: Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Lamorna Ash, Bloomsbury We hear much about simultaneous decline and revival in Western Christianity but there isn’t another book on contemporary Christianity quite like Lamorna Ash’s. The writer of a previous book on the Cornish fishing industry, in this new book she likewise takes a very personal approach, immersing […]
Reviews: This is for Everyone, Tim Berners-Lee, Macmillan | The AI Con, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, Bodley Head It may be hyperbolic to compare Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, to God, but I’m not the first to do so, and hear me out: Berners-Lee created a whole world that was […]
Review: Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide, Samir Chopra, Princeton University Press Just like how each generation, as they mature, thinks the youth of today have no respect, it seems that every generation thinks it is a particularly anxious one, though there may be good reason to think that in the current age anxiety is on the […]
Review: The Age of Choice, Sophia Rosenfeld, Princeton Five hundred years ago most people didn’t get to choose their education, church, work, where they lived, who they were ruled by, and how many children they had. Choices in food were limited (usually by the seasons), as was the information about the rest of the world. […]
Review: Mixtapes and MTV: Triumphs and Tragedies of 1980s Music, Tony Wellington, Monash University Press In his book about music in the 1970s, Tony Wellington wrote about how the music we listen to in our youth becomes the comparison point for all subsequent music we hear. So, this book on the 1980s is primarily for […]
| j | Next article |
| k | Previous article |
| / | Focus search |
| Esc | Close overlay |
| ? | Show this help |