Of course one should read books by one’s heroes, both as homage and for inspiration. James Hansen is that rare scientist, brilliantly geeky yet driven by conscience to enter the fields of politics and persuasion. In spite of his own preference to stay in the lab, he was one of the first scientists to leap [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
Intelligible yet accurate beginners’ guides to complex subjects are rare: If you’re an Australian concerned about the complexities of choosing and cooking food in a world where much of food production is environmentally degrading or downright evil, The Conscious Cook: Sustainable Cooking and Living is the book for you. Author Giselle Wilkinson, a passionate advocate [...]
Very little light reading on the go at the moment: The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a companion read to Jonathan Safran Foer’s masterpiece Eating Food I’ve been hanging out for Michael Lewis’s latest, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Unlike many, I didn’t grow besotted with Yann Martel’s [...]
A couple of books sourced in strange ways and all the more enjoyable as a result: I can recommend the first three books in a quartet by a South African author, John van de Ruit, in the vein of the Adrian Mole diaries: Spud; Spud – The Madness Continues; and Spud – Learning to Fly. [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
Nonfiction oddments: I’m a sucker for motivational How-To books, even though what I invariably get from these ubiquitous sermons is at most a single insight or two. I’m certainly in favour of the rather obvious premise of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything but, I’m afraid to report, this one’s a dud. Despite [...]
Strong writers’ voices make all the difference: The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an [...]
Hugely disparate in impact and quality: Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!), so I’m privileged to report the second such in the month of April. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton, is a tour de force of compression and [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
High-quality nonfiction tackling diverse topics: Jonathan Safran Foer, a scintillating novelist, has turned to nonfiction, a comprehensive work of journalistic investigation and polemics. Eating Animals tackles modern factory farming which dominates American meat production. We all know the factories in which pigs, chickens, turkeys and (less so) cows are grotesquely bred, abused and slaughtered. No [...]
The Pulitzer Prize has been announced (check it out at the source). The winners in the categories I’m interested in are: The Fiction prize has gone to a book from a publisher I’ve never come across, Bellevue Literary Press, a book I’d never heard of (mortification!): Tinkers by Paul Harding. A glance at Amazon puts [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
How Would a Patriot Act?: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok arrived unbidden in the mail. My only guess as to why is that it was sent by author Glenn Greenwald because of a review, perhaps of Standard Operating Procedure. I don’t need to read any more about ex-President Bush’s abuses of power [...]