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Thames & Hudson 60th Anniversary Sale & Special Editions

2009-07-04T00:00:00Z

This July Thames & Hudson celebrates 60 years of proud independent publishing. Coincidently, it is their 40-year anniversary in Australia!

To celebrate, Thames has chosen 20 of its most influential titles from across the years and has published them as special limited edition collector’s items. These are limited to 1000 sets worldwide.

And for July only, the top 40 bestsellers from the iconic World of Art Series will be reduced to just $12.95! For almost 50 years, these high quality red-and-black books have been the essential reference for visual arts and cultural history.

Bugs in a Blanket: Beatrice Alemagna

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kathy Kozlowski, Readings Carlton

A story told in wool embroidery and collage, this is the rather endearing tale of Fat Little Bug’s party. The bugs have always lived in the same old blanket at the bottom of the garden, each in their own hole, never seeing each other till the party brings them together. They find how different each looks from the other quite unexpected and are initially judgemental of each other.

But they soon begin to discover they are different, well ... just because they are. Which doesn’t matter. So let’s party. Quirky, homespun, crafty; this is a delightful picture story with a contemporary look and an ageless message.

Peek-a-Poo: What's In Your Nappy: Guido van Genechten

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kathy Kozlowski, Readings Carlton

Yes, this is all about animals and their poo, and as one who has a slight aversion to the plethora of bum and fart books around, I sighed inwardly when I first saw it. Aaah, but this is a poo book with a purpose. Mouse, who is full of curiosity, wants to know what all his animal friends have in their nappies. Lift the flap and see – horse’s three round droppings, doggie’s poo with a pointy end, rabbit’s seven pellets etc. But when they all want to see what is in mouse’s nappy, they are in for a big surprise. It’s empty. Because mouse uses the potty for his little pellets. Now everyone wants to sit on the potty. It’s fun, silly and eminently useful!

Wildflower: Mark Seal

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Michael Awasoga-Samuel, Readings Carlton

Wildflower is the story of Joan Root, one half of a great wildlife film-making partnership, with her husband Allan. They produced some of our best-loved documentary films and changed the way we view nature – especially the wildlife inhabitants of Africa.

But this is Joan’s story. She was born in Nairobi to a British father and South African mother and lived much of her life in Lake Naivasha, on a beautiful 80-acre property. She was brought up to be self-reliant and was an only child. Her idyllic life and film-making partnership changed after 20 years, when Allan met Jennie Hammond, whom he would later marry. Joan had to find her own voice – which she did thorough conservation work, especially the safe guarding of Lake Naivasha’s fish habitats.

Mark Seal captures the essence of a shy and introverted girl, for a time obscured by her flamboyant husband, who remains a strong and resolute woman, until her untimely death. This book is enriched by a cast of real life wildlife personalities, such as David Attenborough, Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Joy and George Adamson. This engaging read truly illuminates your sense of wonderment at wildlife – and at this determined woman.

Armageddon in Retrospect: Kurt Vonnegut

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Mark Azzopardi, Readings Hawthorn

There are those of us for whom the name Kurt Vonnegut will always evoke a sense of magic. Vonnegut was one of those timeless writers, a man who spoke both for the times in which he lived, and beyond, into the future.

Since Vonnegut's passing, in April 2007, a few new books have appeared. This handsome volume, a collection of previously unpublished short stories and speeches, is a must for all fans of Vonnegut and great writing. Exploring the twin themes of war and peace, these pieces sparkle with Vonnegut's typical wit, wisdom, and humanity, and they also reveal the growth of Vonnegut, as both a writer and as a human being.

Opening with a loving introduction from Vonnegut's son Mark, the book also contains a letter sent by Vonnegut to his parents when the author was a prisoner of war. Illustrated throughout with Vonnegut's own art, this book is as beautiful as it is valuable.

Perfection: Julie Metz

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jason Cotter, Readings Carlton

Metz and her writer husband, renowned for his extravagant dinner parties and charismatic charm, live with their young daughter in picket-fence splendour an hour outside New York City. She runs a successful design business and enjoys a coterie of friends, and Henry has just begun work on a food book about umami, the Japanese idea of perfection. When he suddenly drops dead from an embolism, Metz’s life is thrown into chaos. She is stricken with grief, then humiliation, bewilderment and rage, when she discovers Henry had been engaged in multiple affairs, one for three years with a presumed friend, who at the time of discovery is babysitting her daughter.

So begins her dig beneath the deceptive surface of her life. In a deeply honest, intelligent and unputdownable memoir, Metz trawls through Henry’s emails, notes, books, psychoanalysis and her own life, and confronts the five women he was involved with. Seeing Metz deal with such loss and betrayal is painful yet somehow captivating, as is the way she dismantles her lost husband without vengeance, while seeking to understand him. A top read.

Raising My Voice: Malalai Joya

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Pip Newling, Readings Port Melbourne

We often hear about Afghan women. We don’t often hear from them. Here, Malalai Joya, who at 25 years old was the youngest woman ever elected to the Afghan parliament, passionately reveals the complexity of contemporary Afghan politics through her own extraordinary experience.

In her first address to the parliament, she denounced many of her fellow parliamentarians for crimes against humanity committed throughout the jihadi and Taliban eras. Many perpetrators of atrocities (from rape to torture to mutilation and massacres) now sit in parliament. Joya believes that without justice for these war crimes, the country will always be unsafe and corrupt. She was suspended from parliament, has received many death threats and travels with bodyguards, but she continues to speak of her hope that the trauma Afghans live with will be acknowledged, and that the men who authorised and committed these crimes will meet justice.

Her bravery is breathtaking and inspirational. She is proud of her country and her history, but she is unafraid to highlight its black spots of despair and violence. Joya has raised her voice: the least we can do is listen.

Pip Newling volunteers for Mahboba's Promise, an Australian-Afghan organisation that assists destitute widows and orphans in Afghanistan. Find out more at www.mahbobaspromise.org.

Cooking with Baz: Sean Dooley

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kath Lockett, freelance reviewer

Sean Dooley’s father Baz is your typical Aussie larrikin who loves his pub, his mates, his meat and, when he finally returns home many hours later to a cold meal, his family. Part autobiography, part memoir, this book is an amusing look back at Australian suburban life in the seventies and eighties with an artistic mother married to a loud-mouthed bookmaker from the wrong side of the tracks. Sean works with his father as a bookie to pay his way through university but chooses bird-watching and literature over interminable drinking and yarn sessions at the bar.

Among the smiles this memoir evokes is the unconditional love shown by Baz towards Di when she is dying from her second bout of cancer. Emaciated, bedridden, in pain and having no appetite, Baz goes to extraordinary lengths to tempt her palate with an array of his deliciously home-cooked meals. It is during these heart-wrenching times that Baz and Sean reconnect and discover the glories in the common ground they thought they’d lost.

Sean Dooley was a Readings Glenfern Fellow.

In The Sanctuary of Outcasts: Neil White

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Annie Condon, freelance reviewer

In the Sanctuary of Outcasts is a most unusual story. Neil White was a magazine editor who’d been focussed on success and its trappings his whole life. Rather than let his investors know the true financial state of his magazine, he began ‘kiting’ – illegally depositing and drawing cheques between two accounts at separate banks. When he was discovered, he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment at Carville, Louisiana. Carville turns out to be the USA’s national leprosarium.

White is horrified to find the facility still contains 130 sufferers of the disease, in addition to 500 prison inmates. At first he is reluctant to even draw breath in proximity to the victims of the disease, afraid he will catch it. But over time, his work duties in the cafeteria bring him into contact with these enigmatic people who have overcome adversity and enjoy Carville as their home. White is then able to look beyond their disfigurement, which in turns forces him to question the values and beliefs that have led to this point in his life and separated him from his beloved family.

Shelley's Heart: Charles McCarry

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate O'Mara, Readings Carlton

First published in 1995, McCarry’s gargantuan political thriller finally gets an Australian release. Franklin Mallory, former conservative US president, has just been defeated at the polls – but has proof of vote-tampering, and believes himself the rightful winner. He’s also heard rumours that President ‘Frosty’ Lockwood, a laconic liberal about to enter his second term, ordered the assassination of an Arabic terrorist. What follows is a dazzling array of life or death power plays and uneasy strategic alliances that propel this believable book to its nerve-wracking conclusion.

Black Ice: Leah Giarratano

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Dani Solomon, Readings Carlton

Giarratano’s third novel sees Detective Jill Jackson working undercover in one of Sydney’s less desirable suburbs, dealing with her high-class addict sister and equally high-class dealer/lawyer boyfriend who, incidentally, has a recently paroled mother-of-one after him, hell-bent on revenge. It’s a lot to take in, but there’s never a dull moment!

There are so many twists and turns, you’ll find yourself wondering how the author will tie it all up – but she does, and the reader is rewarded with one of the most satisfying conclusions of any book I’ve read.

The Ignorance of Blood: Robert Wilson

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate O'Mara, Readings Carlton

Wilson has been turning out wonderful novels for years, and won the CWA Gold Dagger in 1999 for A Small Death in Lisbon. Yet, for whatever reason, he’s always flown just under the radar in Australia. Hopefully this sprawling, yet tightly plotted thriller – the last in his excellent Javier Falcon quartet – will finally be the breakthrough.

Starting with a freak car accident on a Seville Highway involving a turncoat Russian mafia heavy and a suitcase full of Euros, this book has it all – terrorism, kidnapping, drug dealing, prostitution, human trafficking and explosive violence. It’s a fitting finale to Falcon, and if you enjoy this you really must explore the others – all top notch indeed.

Fear The Worst; Linwood Barclay

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Dani Solomon, Readings Carlton

What do you do when you go to pick your teenage daughter up from her summer job only to find that, not only is she missing, but no one there will admit to even seeing her? Then, after you've reported her missing, the police seem more intent on pinning her murder on you than actually looking for her? You look yourself. You fall for scams, fly through three states on the premise of a blurry photo, uncover some interesting ‘facts’ about your daughter’s new step-family, and risk the life of yourself and anyone around you to desperately make sure she doesn't become a statistic. I didn’t have one dull train ride to work while I was reading this.

The Dark Vineyard: Martin Walker

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate O'Mara, Readings Carlton

A few months ago, when Walker’s crime debut Bruno, Chief of Police was reviewed, I hoped the formerly sleepy St Denis would become a hotbed of death and intrigue so we could hear more from the charming Bruno. Well, the food-loving hamlet now finds itself in the sights of a multinational wine conglomerate wanting to buy up residents’ land for a shiny, modern vineyard.

The mayor thinks it will bring more jobs and tourism, but Bruno smells a rat – and following a vicious arson attack, unwanted attention from a radical environmental group and the tragic and mysterious deaths of two much-loved local residents, he sadly realises he may be right.

Dark Mirror: Barry Maitland

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Kate O'Mara, Readings Carlton

Despite its contemporary setting, the premise of Maitland’s latest sounds thoroughly Victorian – a beautiful, learned young woman succumbs painfully to arsenic in the London Library, leaving behind several friends, relatives and acquaintances, all with something to possibly gain from her death. The victim led a complicated, secretive life, and DI Kolla and DCI Brock find themselves chasing up all manner of strange leads. Not the least of them is the question of how one procures a fatal quantity of arsenic in twenty-first-century London.

A complex and satisfying tale with enough scarlet herrings and intriguing bit players to keep the pages turning well into the night.

Art Update

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

I’m looking forward to Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire, at the NGV. I had a friend in High School who was a huge fan, and who took me to films of Dali & Gala (Dali’s great love & muse) leaping out of giant eggs on the Catalan coast and caused me to read his hugely entertaining books (e.g. Diary of a Genius which is out of print but check your library). I preferred the paintings of Magritte & De Chirico, but I loved reading about Dali’s life and milieu.

Flicking through the April Issue of Frieze Magazine, I found this quote by US artist Carol Bove (in Frieze Magazine’s ongoing series ‘Ideal syllabus’ in which an artist, curator or writer lists the books that have influenced them) for one of her most influential books - Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute by Anna Balakian,

“I have the growing urge to consider the persistent and largely unacknowledged influence of surrealism since the 1920s and I find it in all sorts of unlikely places. It is the shadow of modernism.”

I found myself agreeing with her. Books like Vitamin D, The Upset, and Limited Edition are full of artists with a surrealist ancestry, and Leonora Carrington’s works sprang to mind looking at Mark Ryden’s work, and others of his ilk.

Just arrived are some long awaited titles from Phaidon Press. Especially two new titles in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series: Chinese artists Ai Weiwei & Zhang Huan. Underlying the current babble of the news media, on topics of car salesmen and the lives and demise of pop culture personalities, were the haunting words of eyewitnesses to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (20 years ago, 5/6/09). What is china to us, today? A massively complex & fascinating culture - words that easily fit with these two artists, as well as quite brilliant and awe inspiring.

Jeff Sparrow

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Jeff Sparrow, interviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Your inquiry into the subject of killing obviously began as a personal curiosity, spawned by the grisly discovery of a souvenired soldier’s head from Gallipoli and the questions that sparked about the nature of violence. When did you realise it would become a book?

Originally, I wanted to do a whole project about the mummified skull from Gallipoli. It was such a shocking artefact – not simply because it was a bullet-ridden body part, taken from the trenches, but because it had been stored in a velvet lined display cabinet, like a precious collectable.

I thought I could try to find out what had happened and use that story to discuss the Great War, a topic that’s long fascinated me. That particular idea collapsed because there simply weren’t enough clues – at least not that I could find – as to how the Turkish soldier’s head arrived in Australia. So for a while, I abandoned the whole thing. I only took it up again after reading a news article about how US soldiers in Iraq were collecting photos of corpses. It struck me that this was probably the same phenomenon that led to the souveniring of a head from the battlefield of Gallipoli, all those years ago. So I started wondering what war in general – and killing in particular – did to soldiers and to society. And then I spent a long time thinking about the different ways you might investigate such a topic.

The book is written in such a way that the reader accompanies you on your search for answers, rather than being presented with your findings. I thought this made the book particularly engaging, and encouraged the reader to draw their own conclusions and interrogate their own beliefs. Why did you decide to write it in this way? Was it a conscious choice?

It was partly forced upon me, in that very early it became apparent that getting access to people and material would be difficult. So I wanted to foreground the process I took and the difficulties that I faced, to talk about the information I couldn’t get as much as that which I found. But it also seemed appropriate in that most of the time I was genuinely conflicted about the material. In the (slim) literature about killing, you can find people describing combat as the worst moment of their lives – then a minute later, discussing how nothing they’ve done since has been as exhilarating as the few minutes they were in battle. I kept meeting different people who argued different things, and I wanted the reader to share that experience of the perspective shifting. Moreover, it’s an area in which it’s difficult not to become emotional. I spent some time with a former executioner in Virginia, a guy called Jerry, and he was one of the loveliest people I met when I was in the USA. That was quite a confusing experience that took me well out of my comfort zone, and hopefully the book conveys that.

The industrialisation of killing (‘McDonaldised killing’) is a running theme in the book – a separation of the act of killing into a series of tasks, or a collective act, whether in the abattoir, on death row or in the army. This enables those involved in killing to concentrate on the task, rather than on the bigger picture of what they’re doing. What effect does this have on the people involved?

In the short term, it makes a distasteful or horrible task easier. On death row, the tie-down teams rehearse again and again the particular role they will play in an execution. One guard might simply be responsible for strapping the prisoner’s leg onto the electric chair. If he concentrates on doing that, he can lose all context for what’s really happening – he’s not killing someone, he can tell himself, he’s just strapping a leg. In the longer term, however, there seems some evidence that it can have the opposite effect. Because the killing takes place without any emotional affect, it’s difficult for the perpetrator to come to terms with what’s happened. Some executioners then feel devastated precisely because they don’t feel anything.

There’s some analogies with what takes place in a modern abattoir (basically, a factory for killing animals) and, perhaps more controversially, in the way soldiers are trained for combat.

One of the things I really like about this book is the way that you interrogate your own beliefs on the subject and the fact that you share your doubts and changes of position with the reader. What were the most confronting moments for you in researching this book, in terms of challenging your beliefs?

When I was young I was a vegetarian, but I haven’t been for years. I really don’t know any more what I think about the industrial killing of animals. Certainly, it’s hard to visit an abattoir and not think you’re watching something very wrong taking place.

I also found it confronting how nice and now normal most of the people I interviewed were. That sounds fatuous (of course they were normal!) but it’s much easier to think about killers as monsters than to realise that they’re ordinary human beings. So, it was a challenging experience hearing a former US sniper talk about the men he’d shot, even as you’re thinking that he seemed just like any kid you’d meet in Carlton.

One of your findings was that once the process of killing becomes familiar, ‘the participants worried more about efficiency than anything else’. That was also your own experience while helping out the Queensland roo shooter you interviewed. Did that finding surprise you? What do you think it says about human nature and violence?

Humans are social animals and so I suppose it shouldn’t seem strange that social approval matters so much. But, yes, it did surprise me how much I wanted the approval of the guy who took me roo shooting, even though it’s not something I’ve ever done before and I can’t imagine ever doing it again. In the book, I quote Siegfried Sassoon, discussing some particularly awful event in World War I and mentioning that, more than anything else, he was worried about making a fool of himself. It does seem to be a common experience.

Execution expert Fred Leuchter observed of the workers who administer the death penalty: ‘Society has dirty jobs that have to be done.’ What do you think of this comment? Does it also pertain to the abattoir workers and military? Do you think we need to be more assiduous about measuring the cost of these ‘dirty jobs’ against their gain?

Ultimately, in all the different forms of violence, the responsibility lies much more with those who make the dirty jobs necessary rather than those who carry them out. The book is not supposed to be an attack on soldiers, abattoir workers or prison guards. As I said, most of the people I interviewed were actually very pleasant.

But somebody sends the kids to war; somebody sentences an inmate to death; somebody wants a cattle truck processed – and it’s that somebody we need to think about. The breakdown of killing into isolated acts affects those personally involved in the act, but it also helps further separate those end of the chain of command from the process they set running. At the most obvious level, you can, for example, launch an invasion of Iraq and never see the human consequences of that decision. The soldiers don’t have the same luxury.

Were there any particular books or authors who influenced you in writing this book? If so, what (or who) were they?

I found Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory a fantastic resource. It’s one of those books that completely changes the way you think about a subject. Basically, he shows how the war structured a whole range of things that we now just take for granted. I also became completely obsessed with Sassoon: less as a war writer, actually, than as a chronicler of the world destroyed by 1914. Books like Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and The Old Century have a tremendous power because, even though they’re set in the pre-war era, they’re so obviously haunted by what comes next.

The Corner: David Simon and Ed Burns

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

Before The Wire, there was The Corner. David Simon and Ed Burns’ cult hit HBO series is lauded by many critics as the best television show ever made. In fact, one literary critic has infamously asked why The Wire is so much better than most contemporary novels. It’s Dickens does twentieth century Baltimore, dissecting a failed city – one of America’s notorious crime capitals – layer by layer, from the perspectives of police, the drug denizens, ordinary citizens, the political system, the media and the school system.

Underpinning the show – and explaining the intricate accuracy of its portraits and the knifepoint savviness of its social analysis – are two monumental works of reportage that display all the brilliant characterisation of The Wire. The first was Homicide, Simons’ impressive first book (lauded by Norman Mailer), based on his year embedded in Baltimore’s homicide unit. There, he met Burns, a homicide detective and former schoolteacher who first teamed with him for this follow-up, which explores the other side of the equation – life in the heart of the ghetto, on the drug corners, viewed from the inside over the course of a year, focusing on one block and a handful of families. Gripping, heartbreaking, unmissable.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets: David Simon

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Reviewed by Jo Case, editor of Readings Monthly

First published in 1991, this true crime classic has just been released in Australia for the first time. It’s significant for a number of reasons – but most of all, because it launched the career of David Simon, creator of the much-praised (now defunct) HBO series The Wire. Simon, a police reporter on the Baltimore Sun, took a year’s leave to hang out in the Baltimore homicide department as a ‘police intern’, writing down everything he saw and heard. The result is a masterful work of reportage. It’s no coincidence that one of the many notables who’ve raved about Homicide is Norman Mailer: Simon’s writing is part of the novelistic tradition of journalism-as-storytelling that Mailer helped to pioneer.

Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide department. However, despite the wealth of information he gathered in his year as an embedded journalist, it’s the telling observational details and shrewd interpretations of what he’s seen that make this book special. A hardened homicide detective covers the exposed chest and shoulder of an overdosed addict as her husband approaches. In a cramped rowhouse whose inhabitants piss into communal buckets and pile plates in layers that chart the week’s meals, a ten-year-old boy politely asks police if he can retrieve his spelling homework. Again and again, despair and disgust marry with a deep compassion for the beleaguered citizens of Baltimore (one of America’s top ten crime capitals). The camaraderie and tensions between the detectives lies at the heart of the book: the opening pages plunge the reader into the “diseased” humour of two detectives trading banter at a murder scene.

Underpinning the book is a sophisticated understanding of the social, political and historical context informing contemporary Baltimore (and America). Race is always an issue, whether it’s about a jury verdict or negotiating a career. And the resources poured into specific cases depend on media attention and political pressure as much as the particulars of the cases themselves.

Ironically for a book that launched a television career, Homicide makes a point of bemoaning the deleterious effect of television on crime investigation. (The too-perfect cases in shows like CSI make it increasingly hard to convince a jury to convict on much messier real-life evidence.) Fortunately, there is nothing neat or perfect about Homicide. Like life in the city it depicts, it is a sprawling, intriguing, surprising and endlessly fascinating read, with no easy answers, but plenty of open-ended questions to explore.

This review was originally published in The Big Issue.

I Can't Stop Reading.....

2009-07-02T00:00:00Z

Pretty Little Liars By Sara Shepard. While it's not your most literary young adult read, it is great fun and hard to put down. Bit like Gossip Girl, but set in Pennsylvania with a killer, stalker and your average mean girls, Pretty Little Liars is nothing short of a bit of wonderful fluff that every teen (and adult!) needs at times in their life.