Readings.com.au: Best Non-Fiction of 2009

The Storm Of War

On 2 August 1944, in the wake of the complete destruction of the German Army Group Centre in Belorussia, Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. 'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,' Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.'

Why did the Axis lose the Second World War? Andrew Roberts's previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; the central theme of The Storm of War is how Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on every front, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won. Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once they could criticism him with impunity?

In researching this uniquely vivid history, Roberts has walked many of the key battlefield and wartime sites of Russia, France, Italy, Germany and the Far East. The book also employs a number of important yet hitherto unpublished documents, such as the letter from Hitler's director of military operations explaining what the Führer was hoping for when he gave the order to halt the Panzers outside Dunkirk. It is full of illuminating sidelights on the principal actors on both sides that bring their characters and the ways in which they reached decisions into fresh focus, and it presents the tales of many little-known individuals whose experiences make up the panoply of extraordinary courage, self-sacrifice but also terrible depravity and cruelty that was the Second World War.

That war lasted for 2,174 days, cost $1.5 trillion and claimed the lives of over 50 million people. Why did it take the course that it did? The Storm of War gives a succinct but dramatic account of the struggle that engulfed the world between 1939 and 1945 and, at the last, a convincing answer to that question.

The March Of Patriots: The Struggle For Modern Australia

The March of Patriots looks at the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of Paul Keating and John Howard.

Keating and Howard were the first two Australian prime ministers of the globalised age. They were raised together, fashioned by the same forces with careers that paralleled each other. They sought to create a new set of faiths for their parties, Labor and Liberal, in an age where the old beliefs were obsolete. In this sense they were prophets for their tribes offering a fresh interpretation of Labor and Liberal ideology for a new century.

Keating and Howard are best understood as change agents, adapting their parties and their nation to a new course. This is the story of two experiments in prime ministerial power and of two leaders divided by temperament, cultural outlook and perceptions of national identity, yet united in much of their economic and social policy. It describes their efforts to devise a fresh policy framework for Australia and to invest their decaying parties with new faiths.

Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large of The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of The Australian (1991–1996). He is the author of The Unmaking of Gough (1976), later titled The Dismissal (1982), The Hawke Ascendancy (1984), The End of Certainty (1992), November 1975 (1995) and Paradise Divided (2000).

Killing: Misadventures in Violence

How hard it it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abbatoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?

Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning ANZAC.

The macabre discovery sets Jeff Sparrow on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How do ordinary people-whether in today's wars or in 1915-learn to take a human life? How do they live with the aftermath?

These questions lead Sparrow through history and across Australia and the USA, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and writers about one of the last remaining taboos.

Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, meditating on what violence means, not just for perpetrators but for all of us.

Jeff Sparrow is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the author of Communism: A Love Story, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award. He is the editor of the Australian literary journal Overland and writes regularly for Crikey. He lives in Melbourne.

Read Jo Case's interview with Jeff Sparrow about Killing.

Affection: A Memoir Of Love Sex And Intimacy

Krissy Kneen was raised by a very protective, quite eccentric family who avoided any mention of sexuality: perhaps it was no coincidence that she became obsessed by the very idea of sex. After leaving home she plunged into a world of voracious exploration, revelling in any variation of sex play she could find. But despite the fun, despite the essentially innocent pursuit of pleasure without harm, she found that many of her lovers were not so generous.

Affection is the story of a life shaped by overwhelming appetite, and of a woman coming to know how it works: the interplay of sexual desire, and intimacy, and the kind of love that sustains someone for a lifetime.

The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island

The story of a death, a policeman, an island and a country

'The country's finest work of literature so far this century. A haunting moral maze, described with such intimate observation and exquisite restraint that I kept pausing to take a breath and silently cheer the author. in her tale of the fatal collision between two 36-year-old males, black Cameron Doomadgee and white Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, Hooper . . . has produced an Australian classic.' ROBERT DREWE, THE AGE

'Hooper followed the case and its main characters for two and a half years, and she does their complexity a remarkable justice . . . Extraordinary.' ALISON McCULLOCH, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

'A gripping, heart-stopping piece of true-crime reportage . . . Deserves the widest possible audience.' BRIAN SCHOFIELD, SUNDAY TIMES (UK)

'The book is everything it should be: a sad, beautiful, frightening account of one man's death, interwoven with the brutal history of Palm Island and a golden thread of Aboriginal mythology . . . It is The Tall Man's triumph that Hooper finds the common humanity in the accused and the accuser, the police officer and the street drinker, theliving and the dead.' MARK DAPIN, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'The north has chosen to reveal itself to Chloe Hooper.' PAUL TOOHEY, WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN

For more information visit thetallman.com.au

Down To The Crossroads: On The Trail Of The 2008 US Presidential Election

The surprise hit of last December was The Battle for Bennelong, Margot Saville’s on-the-road, campaign trail account of the nail-biting 2007 federal election. This year, Crikey correspondent Guy Rundle gives us the play-by-play scoop on America’s historic 2008 election. Read it and revel in Obama’s ousting of George W. Bush’s Republican party, as represented by John McCain and the ever-amusing (if horrifying) Sarah Palin. It’s the election that Aaron Sorkin couldn’t have scripted better, as observed by one of Australia’s savviest political tragics.

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood

A devastating portrait of the American drugs war, from the creators of the award-winning series The Wire.

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known—and cautiously avoided—by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner’s 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.

Through the eyes of one broken family—two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough—Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the country and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. This extraordinary book is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned.

Praise for The Corner:

‘A dense, mind-blowing 600-page doorstop…less a book, more a way of life…The characters in this story are real without trying…you’ll find yourself struck by the sheer poetry of the prose’
— The Times

'Brave, unblinkered, and heartbreaking.'
— New York Times Book Review

'A towering achievement. By narrowing their focus to a single American inner-city neighbourhood, Simon and Burns end up telling something broader in scope, even epic. These singular stories of tragedy and triumph, love and despair tell us more about what's plaguing big cities than a thousand studies. The Corner should be required reading for every public official in America—and beyond. The rest of us will simply read The Corner because it is more touching, mesmerising, maddening, heartbreaking and, ultimately, profound than anything we're likely to encounter in fiction.'
— Linwood Barclay, author of NO TIME FOR GOODBYE

‘The Corner matters, the way its predecessor, Homicide: Life on the Killing Streets mattered…They matter because they’re both examples of the kind of in-depth social reportage that is, in both Britain and the States, crawling into its death-bed…David Simon and Ed Burns are ideal chroniclers: humane, passionate, wise…Read The Corner, if for no other reason than to find out the heartbreaking human dramas we are missing.'
— Scotsman

The Water Dreamers: How Water and Silence Shaped Australia

The long-awaited history that will change the way Australians think about their country.

The Water Dreamers is the story of the settlement of Australia: of the scarcity of water and the need to fill an imagined silence with the sounds of civilisation. From the moment the First Fleeters stepped ashore, water determined progress. The Tank Stream that flowed through what is now the Sydney CBD provided fresh water until settlers and their livestock fouled it. Then water from a nearby swamp was piped into the growing settlement. When it ran dry sights were set further afield.

The Water Dreamers is an illuminating account of the ways people have imagined and interpreted Australia while struggling to understand this continent and striving to conquer its obstacles. It’s an environmental history and a cultural history with an unmistakable sense of how, today, we are part of that continuing story.

Michael Cathcart was born in Melbourne in 1956 – the year that television came to Australia. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar, the University of Melbourne, ANU and a tyre factory in Port Melbourne. He has worked as a schoolteacher, university lecturer and theatre director. Cathcart has presented several Radio National programs, including ‘Arts Today’ and the ‘Radio National Quiz’, and for ABC TV he has presented the history magazine show ‘Rewind’ and the documentary series ‘Rogue Nation’. Cathcart is the author of Defending the National Tuckshop (1988), an expose of a secret militia called the White Army formed in Victoria in 1931, and he has published an abridgement of Manning Clark’s epic A History of Australia and an anthology of Australian speeches. Michael Cathcart’s latest book is The Water Dreamers.

Melbourne: The Making of a Drinking and Eating Capital

Melbourne’s bustling laneways and tree-lined streets are renowned for their incredible choice of places to eat and drink – from stylish sidewalk cafes and dark, hidden-away bars to elegant award-winning restaurants and cheap and cheerful eateries. But it has not always been this way. As little as fifty years ago the six o’clock swill held the pubs in its crazed binge-drinking grip and as little as twenty years ago you could break the law trying to get a drink with your meal. Now the city has blossomed into a cosmopolitan food-lover’s paradise, which is all thanks to the changes to Victoria’s liquor licensing legislation in 1988. Regarded as a hero in restaurant and bar circles, Professor John Nieuwenhuysen was the driving force behind these changes with his visionary and controversial report on the existing liquor legislation. The recommendations within the Nieuwenhuysen Report changed Victoria’s licensing laws from the most conservative in the country to the most liberal and saw an explosion of creativity and innovation in bars, cafes, wine bars, bottleshops, wineries and restaurants around the state.

Respected food veterans Mietta O’Donnell, Donlevy Fitzpatrick and Stephanie Alexander were among many who seized the opportunity to throw off the shackles of an antiquated, restricting licensing regime and use the new freedoms to provide a truly civilised wining and dining culture. Much-loved institutions such as Jimmy Watson’s, Pellegrini’s and Grossi Florentino followed suit while the new laws also saw the first wave of groundbreaking drinking establishments led by Meyer’s Place bar, the first of the now prolific ‘Melbourne-style’ laneway bars.

With a deft and humorous touch Michael Harden charts the movers and shakers behind Melbourne’s transformation into the thriving, intriguing city it is today. Colourfully captured in photographs old and new, Melbourne shows why this city is truly deserving of its reputation as a world-renowned drinking and eating destination.

MoVida Rustica: Spanish Traditions and Recipes

Following the multi-award winning title MoVida, chef and restaurateur Frank Camorra returns to his native Spain in this companion book. In MoVida Rustica, Frank delivers many traditional as well as innovative recipes that are inspired by his travels but perfected for the home cook. From the nation's bustling capital Madrid and Basque seaside towns to rustic Andalucia with its Sherry Triangle, MoVida Rustica highlights the pillars of Spanish cooking, and the culture in which the food is grown, prepared and eaten.

Four Days In November: The Assassination Of John F. Kennedy

Four Days in November is an extraordinarily exciting, precise, and definitive narrative of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald. It is drawn from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a huge and historic account of the event and all the conspiracy theories it spawned, by Vincent Bugliosi, famed prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of Helter Skelter. For general readers, the carefully documented account presented in Four Days is utterly persuasive: Oswald did it and he acted alone.

The Ghost At The Wedding: A True Story Of Heroism And Homecoming

In the year of 1914, in the canefields of northern New South Wales, the young men couldn't wait to set off for the adventure of war. The women coped as best they could, raised the children, lived in fear of being next to receive an official telegram. They grieved their dead, and came to learn that for returned men there are worse things than death in combat. They bore more children to replace those lost in the First World War, and the sons were just the right age to go off to the second.

The Ghost at the Wedding is like no other account of war, chronicling events from both sides – the horror of the battlefields and the women who were left at home. Shirley Walker's depictions of those battles – Gallipoli, the Western Front, the Kokoda Track – are grittily accurate, their reverberations haunting.

Written with the emotional power of a novel, here is a true story whose sorrow is redeemed by astonishing beauty and strength of spirit.

'An unqualified masterpiece. The most moving account of love and war I've ever read.' ALEX MILLER

'In describing the extraordinary horrors along with the tenderness of life, this story is almost painful as well as compelling. In language that is always beautiful, it captures a lost lifestyle and makes it alive.' DEBRA ADELAIDE

Piano Lessons

'Marvellous. Enlightenment and joy on every page' - Helen Garner

'I loved this book. Anna Goldsworthy's memoir left me awed, inspired and humbled.' - Alice Pung

In this remarkable memoir, Anna Goldsworthy recalls her first steps towards a life in music, from childhood piano lessons with a local jazz muso to international success as a concert pianist. As she discovers passion and ambition, and confronts doubt and disappointment, she learns about much more than tone and technique. This is a story of the getting of wisdom, tender and bittersweet.

With wit and affection, Goldsworthy captures the hopes and uncertainties of youth, the fear and exhilaration of performing, and the complex bonds between teacher and student. An unforgettable cast of characters joins her: her family; her friends and rivals; and her teacher, Mrs Sivan, who inspires and challenges her in equal measure, and who transforms what seems an impossible dream into something real and sustaining.

This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered On A Significant Occasion About Living A Compassionate Life

How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.

Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death. At the centre of this hurricane of crime is the city's homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

Bottersnikes And Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children’s Books

Lazy Bottersnikes in outback rubbish tips, Sir Pronoun's dilemma about standing in Miss Noun's place and the story of how Jack built a house, a hut or a shack are all to be found in this treasury of Australian children's illustrated books.

Exploring everything from schooldays to fantasy worlds, from its nineteenth century beginnings to the twenty-first century, this compilation is remarkable for its breadth of coverage, encouraging new ways of seeing the Australian child's literary history.

Bottersnikes and Other Lost Things: A Celebration of Australian Illustrated Children's Books is beautifully illustrated and includes works from some of Australia's best known and loved writers and illustrators: Mem Fox and Patricia Mullins, Bob Graham, Libby Hathorn and Gregory Rogers, Gary Crew and Shaun Tan, Pamela Allen and old favourites such as May Gibbs and Ida Rentoul Outhwaite.

Juliet O'Conor is responsible for the State Library of Victoria's Children's Literature Collection of more than 100 000 Australian and overseas children's books. This collection has been the inspiration for her to pursue further research via postgraduate study in children's literature. Completion of a State Library fellowship in 2004 led to commencement of her doctorate at Deakin University in the field of Indigenous Australian traditional stories. O'Conor shares her expertise through public talks, publications and advice on research strategies in the field of children's literature.

A Lucky Child

Thomas Buergenthal is unique. He is a judge at the International Court in The Hague who was rescued from the death camps of Auschwitz at the age of eleven. In this, A Lucky Child, his funny and heartfelt memoirs, he tells the story of his extraordinary journey - from the horrors of Nazism to an investigation of modern day genocide.

At the age of seven Thomas Buergenthal was imprisoned in Nazi ghettos and camps, being rescued by Soviet and Polish troops when he was eleven. Separated from his parents in Auschwitz and surviving the 'Death March' of 1945 he was miraculously reunited with his mother a year and a half later. The rest of his family and almost all of his friends were killed.

After experiencing the turmoil of Europe's post-war years - from the Battle of Berlin, to a Jewish orphanage in Poland - Buergenthal went to America in the 1950s at the age of seventeen. He eventually became one of the world's leading experts on international law and human rights. His story of survival and his determination to use law and justice to prevent further genocide is an epic journey through 20th century history.

Buergenthal gives his perspective - as a child - on life in the camps. And, uniquely, he shows how his past has informed his understanding of the modern day war-crimes he sees as a judge. His book is both a special historical document and a great literary achievement, comparable only to Primo Levi's masterpieces.

Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion: Dig, Plant, Water, Grow, Harvest, Chop, Cook

If you have ever dreamed of picking fresh salad leaves for the evening meal, gathering vine-ripened tomatoes or pulling up your own sweet carrots, this is the book for you. Follow in the footsteps of one of Australia's best-loved cooks and food writers as she reveals the secrets of rewarding kitchen gardening.

Be encouraged by detailed gardening notes that explain how adults and children alike can plant, grow and harvest 73 different vegetables, herbs and fruit, and try some of the 250 recipes that will transform your fresh produce into delicious meals. Whether you have a large plot in a suburban backyard or a few pots on a balcony, you will find everything you need to get started in this inspiring and eminently useful garden-to-table guide.

The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love

After her mother's death in 2005, Anne Summers inherits a portrait of her mother as a child. Mesmerised by this image, she finds herself drawn into the story of how the portrait was painted and eventually found its way into her family. She soon learns the artist painted another portrait of her mother; this time as the Madonna.

In a gripping narrative that is part art history, part detective story and part meditation on the relations between mothers and daughters, Anne's search for the Madonna painting and the mysterious Russian émigré collector who bought both paintings takes her down unexpected paths. Her search soon turns into a parallel quest to rescue Constance Stokes, the artist, from obscurity, and to learn why the collector suddenly abandoned the paintings. Along the way Anne finds she must face the truth of the relationship she had with her mother.

In turn hypnotic and moving, The Lost Mother is a powerful exploration of art, loss and love.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Rooted in the student movement of the 1960s, the story of the Baader-Meinhof group - or the Red Army Faction (RAF), as they called themselves - began in May 1970 with the freeing of Andreas Baader, imprisoned for setting fire to department stores in protest against the Vietnam War. After thirty years of violent confrontation with the German state - costing the lives of 34 politicians and industrialists, chauffeurs and policemen - it ended on 20 April 1998 with a declaration sent to the Reuters news agency: 'Almost 28 years ago, on 17 May 1970, the RAF arose in a campaign of liberation. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla in the shape of the RAF is now history.' The 'war of 6 against 60 million' (Heinrich Boll) led to the mass mobilisation of police and security services, culminating in the 'German Autumn' of 1977 when RAF violence reached its peak with the kidnapping and murder of the industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet by Palestinian terrorists to secure the release of the key members of the group, then serving life sentences.When they heard news that the jet had been freed by German special forces in Mogadischu, the founder members Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin committed suicide; Ulrike Meinhof had hanged herself the previous year while on trial. This fascinating book tells the story of how a small group of young middle-class people, out of moral indignation about the Vietnam War and the injustices of capitalist society, turned to bombings, kidnappings and murder - thus resorting to flagrant immorality themselves. And for once the strapline is true: their story reads like a thriller.

Patrick White Letters

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