We get
down to the business end of our
'best of' series this week with Readings staff selecting their
standout non-fiction titles for 2011. From the art of translation
to a gritty rock 'n roll memoir and the story of the city of
Melbourne itself, these books are all about uncovering the unknowns
in the world we live in.
Australian Non-Fiction
Melbourne
Sophie Cunningham
What makes Melbourne different – and completely engrossing – is its patchwork of public and private. It’s the difference between riding an official tour bus around a city and having a resident take you on a personal journey, stopping by their favourite haunts while telling you stories that reflect the broader history of a city. The former is about getting an overview of agreed-upon significant icons and events; the latter is a deeper, if necessarily narrower, experience. It’s about sampling the soul of a city, which is what Cunningham does brilliantly. - Jo Case, Readings Monthly Editor
Sideshow
Lindsay Tanner
Lindsay Tanner draws on a long career in public life to place in sharp perspective the view that politics and governance have been degraded by the collusion of politicians and the media that has trivialised the serious business of maintaining democracy in Australia... Just as Vance Packard in his classic 1950’s book The Hidden Persuaders warned us of the issues associated with manipulative advertising, so now Lindsay Tanner is issuing a similar warning on the degradation of our democratic system of government by the increasing tendency of the media and politicians to manipulate the discussion of substantive issues in ways that entertain rather than inform... I strongly recommend its reading. - Peter Gordon.
1835
James Boyce
Arguably one of our most interesting historians, Boyce turns his eye to the settlement of the grasslands of South Eastern Australia and the ultimate dispossession of the original inhabitants... The prevailing myth is that it was entrepreneurial farmers who occupied and opened up the native grasslands, in spite of colonial authorities and the disapproval of London. Boyce, controversially, argues that the authorities used this argument to mask their real intentions, which were to open up the fertile plains to the squatters from the sheep industry. This book is an important contribution to the understanding of our history and has relevance to contemporary Australia. - Mark Rubbo, Readings Managing Director
The Biggest Estate on Earth
Bill Gammage
For over a decade, Bill Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape, uncovering an extraordinarily complex system of land management used by Aboriginal people through fire and the life cycles of native plants. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it - what we think of as virgin bush is in fact nothing of the kind. With details of strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today.
Kinglake-350
Adrian Hyland
Kinglake-350 is a masterpiece of writing about family, community, country life and what happens when a day of ultimate terror arrives. Adrian Hyland takes a dramatic and compelling sequence of events on that day and weaves them into a picture of universal significance and deep fascination. Black Saturday was a many-headed monster in whose wake stories of grief, heroism and desolation erupted all over the state of Victoria. This is a book about the monster - and the heroism of those who confronted it.
Her Father’s Daughter
Alice Pung
This book should come with a warning label: don’t get too comfortable in the first half, with its funny family anecdotes and stories of hard-won domestic freedoms - because the second half is a punch in the guts. Pung describes in uncompromising detail the horrors her family experienced, horrors that her father has ever since shut away as ‘dismemories’... Chapters alternate between the point-of-view of father and daughter, with the entire book told in third person. It’s an unusual approach, but Pung carries it off with warmth, wit and compassion. - Marion Rankine, Readings Carlton
Women’s
Stuff
Kaz Cooke
Women’s Stuff is brilliant. Kaz Cooke has spent years researching this book and surveyed 7000 women. She presents a wide range of views on everything a woman needs to know – from health, sex and relationships to work and finances. With quotes from thousands of women, and Kaz’s humour, this entertaining guidebook is a must for all women. - Edwina Kay, Readings Carlton.
Quarterly Essay
41: The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern
World
David Malouf
In this Quarterly Essay, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life? With grace and profundity, he discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self, returning to the 'highest wisdom' of the classics and how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson, happiness became a 'right'. In a world becoming ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.
1001 Australian Nights
Dave Graney
Forget Steve Jobs and Julian Assange: Dave Graney is the iconoclast whose life story should be stuffing stockings this Christmas. Penned with all the wit, poetry and panache fans would expect, this towers nattily-hatted head and leather-clad shoulders above most dopey rock ’n’ roll memoirs. Like Patti Smith’s Just Kids from last year, it’s a ‘must-read’. - Gerard Elson, Readings St Kilda.
International Non-Fiction
Franklin &
Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage
Hazel Rowley
Hazel Rowley’s compelling biography reveals a remarkably progressive partnership in what is considered to be one of the greatest political marriages of modern times. Rowley vividly portrays the 40-year Roosevelt marriage as a partnership that, while considered unconventional for the time, was built on friendship, respect and independence. A thoroughly researched and simply fascinating read ... what a couple! - Danielle Mirabella, Readings Hawthorne.
In the Garden of Beasts
Erik Larson
In the Garden of Beasts surveys 1930s Berlin from the perspective of two American naïfs: Roosevelt's ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, an academic historian and Jeffersonian liberal who hoped Nazism would de-fang itself, and Dodd's daughter Martha, a sexual free spirit who loved Nazism's vigor and ebullience. At first dazzled by the glamorous world of the Nazi ruling elite, they soon started noticing signs of its true nature: the beatings meted out to Americans who failed to salute passing storm troopers; the oppressive surveillance; the incessant propaganda; the intimidation and persecution of friends; the fanaticism lurking beneath the surface charm of its officialdom. A vivid, atmospheric panorama of the Third Reich and its leaders.
The Psychopath Test
Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson, who penned the popular The Men Who Stare at Goats, covers similar terrain in his new book The Psychopath Test. However, rather than investigating madness at the heart of the US military's programs, he searches for madness in the form of psychopathic personality disorder as located in various maximum-security psychiatric hospitals and private homes throughout the UK and US. Armed with the diagnostic criteria devised by renowned criminal psychologist Dr Robert Hare, Ronson sets out to ascertain whether certain notorious individuals are likely to be psychopaths. - Luisa Childs, Readings Carlton.
A Train in Winter
Caroline Moorhead
On January 24 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers’ wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. In this vitally important book, Caroline Moorehead tells the whole story of the 230 women on the train, for the first time. Based on interviews with the few remaining survivors, together with extensive research in French and Polish archives, A Train in Winter is an essential historical document told with the clarity and impact of a great novel.
Is That a Fish in Your Ear
David Bellos
Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech, and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? The biggest question is how do we ever really know that we've grasped what anybody else says - in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about us, and how we understand each other.
Good Living Street
Tim Bonyhady
Tim Bonyhady's great-grandparents were leading patrons of the arts in fin de siecle Vienna: Gustav Klimt painted his great-grandmother's portrait, and the family knew many of Vienna's leading cultural figures. In Good Living Street he follows the lives of three generations of women in his family who enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury and privilege-until everything changed for families of Jewish origin like his. An enthralling story in a century of upheaval.
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
Walter Isaacson
Unlike the products Jobs created, Issacson’s portrait is far from simple and glossy. Compiled over two years and with unprecedented access to Jobs himself, Isaacson provides an exhaustive look at a man who was as psychotic as he was brilliant. Luckily, such a compelling character makes for compelling reading. – Tom Hoskins, Readings Carlton.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson
If, like me, you have been reading Jeanette Winterson’s novels since the 80s then this, her first autobiographical book, is for you. Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? is Winterson’s search for identity, love, and contentment when, quite frankly, given her childhood she should still be in psychoanalysis. This book is a gift for both fans and for anyone who has taken the road less travelled. - Chris Gordon, Readings Events Co-ordinator.
Boomerang
Michael Lewis
Of the many books published this year to analyse the GFC and its fallout, Boomerang is one of the latest and also most readable. Michael Lewis entertains with his usual humour as he heads around the world to Greece, Iceland, Ireland and Germany, before returning to the US. I particularly liked his focus on the role of human nature – of individuals and entire nations taking what they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. - Kara Nicholson, Readings Carlton.
The Hare With Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal
This wonderful book is memorable to me for its fascinating combination of art and history – a personal viewpoint that eloquently evokes place and time. Multi-layered, it is also a moving reminder of the evils of war and anti-semitism, through the history of the author’s family. - Margaret Snowdon, Readings Carlton.
Bossypants
Tina Fey
Tina Fey’s first foray into publishing is a true highlight of the year. It’s one-part the Tina Fey of 30 Rock (self-deprecating, comedian extraordinaire), one-part the Tina Fey of Mean Girls (world-wise feminist) and thankfully no-parts the Tina Fey of Baby Mama (no stars). A book that says to every other entertainer and/or comedian writing a memoir: this is how. - Andrew McDonald, Readings Online Manager.
Other 'best of 2011' lists:
- the best art and design of 2011
- the best graphic novels of 2011
- the best books of 2011 as chosen by Australian authors
- the best fashion and craft books of 2011
- the best albums of 2011
- the best food and cooking books of 2011
- the best kids' books of 2011
- the best young adult fiction of 2011
- the best crime fiction of 2011
- the best foreign/translated fiction of 2011
- the best classical music of 2011
- the best short story collections of 2011
- the best overlooked books of 2011
- the best titles of 2011
- the best covers of 2011
- the best DVDs of 2011
