Books

Reviews

How Pilgrimage Changed the World

Review: Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World, Kathryn Hurlock, Profile Books The writer Samuel Johnson thought it showed a deficiency if people weren’t inspired by particular historical and religious sites, and it seems that there is a natural impulse in human beings to revere certain places and want to visit them, hoping to be […]

Nick Mattiske · 28 July 2025

Reviews

Beauty and Belonging

Review: Together Alone (33 1/3 Oceania series), Barnaby Smith, Bloomsbury Ask someone only mildly familiar with Crowded House to name their most prominent songs, and they would probably give you ‘Weather with You’ and ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’; it is unlikely they would offer anything from 1993’s Together Alone. Indeed, Barnaby Smith recalls a journey […]

Nick Mattiske · 18 July 2025

Reviews

The Value of Music

Review: Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Liz Pelly, Hodder & Stoughton All the world’s music for low cost seems great for listeners, but that availability comes at a cost to artists, and listeners are being manipulated to increase the already-considerable wealth of Spotify’s founders. Liz Pelly, who […]

Nick Mattiske · 2 July 2025

Reviews

Unpretentious Selflessness and Unconditional Love

Review: Australian Gospel: A Family Saga, Lech Blaine, Black Inc Australian Gospel, which recently won The Age Book of the Year competition, is the story of Lech Blaine’s foster siblings, his parents’ love for a family of foster children, and his siblings’ biological parents, Michael and Mary Shelley, who spent decades trying to reunite with […]

Nick Mattiske · 19 June 2025

Reviews

Re-evaluating Leonardo’s Legacy

Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life, Stephen J. Campbell, Princeton University Press It’s a rather strange way to begin a biography, and it seems like an undersell, to emphasise how much we don’t know about the subject in question, but Stephen Campbell’s argument in this book is that we don’t know Leonardo da Vinci well, […]

Nick Mattiske · 3 June 2025

Reviews

Aliens, Anxiety, and Us

After the Flying Saucers Came: Greg Eghigian, Oxford University Press Renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon lately is largely the result of the release of strange US defence videos and prominent whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork to testify to US government inquiries. But Greg Eghigian suggests that the history of UFO beliefs is less […]

Nick Mattiske · 13 May 2025

Leaving No Bedsheet Unturned

Review: Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane/Penguin In Christian bookshops there used to be – and I presume there still are – books celebrating sex within marriage, but in the history of Christianity this is something of an anomaly. For much of this history, there was a […]

Nick Mattiske · 1 May 2025

What Makes a “Good” Painting?

Review: Blue Poles, Tom McIlroy, Hachette In 1973 the Whitlam Government bought Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles for an at-the-time whopping $2 million, destined for the as-yet-unbuilt national gallery in Canberra. (For comparison, the median house price was less than $20,000.) The purchase was a major cultural step forward for Australia, but it was controversial, […]

Nick Mattiske · 22 April 2025