Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve Early colonial Australia featured a conglomeration of immigrants seeking a new life. One significant settler was Pendragon, the pen name of George Isaacs. With a genial personality and an enthusiasm for life, he never seemed to lose his optimistic outlook, although he faced continuing hardship in both Adelaide and Melbourne. Adverse
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Leo A. Notenboom is a commentator on issues relating to information technology, computers, and the internet. With the latter in mind he wrote that believing and spreading lies and misleading implications is akin to spreading manure. He instances confirmation bias as the tendency we all have to believe things that confirm what
Reviewed by Rod McLary In 2013, the Federal Government announced the establishment of its Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The Commission released its final report in November 2017 after many case studies into specific institutions and numerous interviews with victims/survivors of child sexual abuse and their families. For the first time
Reviewed by Rod McLary The golden age for pilgrimages from what we now call Britain to Rome was the thirteenth century. The reasons for persons undertaking a long and onerous – and sometimes unsafe – journey to Rome were multi-fold ranging from the personal to the public. The most common reason was to do penance
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve Jane Harper’s fourth mystery/thriller is shaped by life in a small coastal town in Tasmania, Evelyn Bay. Ten years prior, tragedy rocked the community and today, in its barely contained calm, it confronts more awkward questions when a body is found on the beach. In all her novels, Jane Harper is
Reviewed by Ian Lipke It was a simple road. A winding, twisting road through high country, an engineering marvel in parts. But the road was to pass through West Papua. It was to stir a war between the West Papuan Independence Movement on the one hand, who saw West Papua as part of Papua New
Reviewed by Gerard Healy A family-friendly cookbook from Helen Tzouganatos containing over 100 recipes for busy cooks. Each recipe is accompanied by a mouth-watering colour photograph taken by Jeremy Simons, which adds greatly to the appeal. Since I enter any kitchen with a large L plate on my back, I was attracted to the ‘Easy’
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve From one of the world’s leading thinkers, The Lonely Century is a wide-ranging and detailed examination of how this rapidly changing world has become the loneliest time in our history. Noreena Hertz does this by looking at social, political and personal lives in a manner that is bold and confronting in
Reviewed by Norrie Sanders You can’t help but admire someone setting off on a journey like this. Any long distance walk in back country requires mental and physical doggedness, and the 660km Australian Alps Walking Track is right up there. Having walked bits of the same route, I looked forward to this book taking me
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Puccini would have had no idea what Ellie Marney planned to do with his great aria from Turandot Nessun Dorma (or None Shall Sleep). Opera lovers across the world would be cringing at her audacity if the book were just not so good. One bump continues to bother (and that will
Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve The rollicking sequel to Jinxed! Cora Bell’s Untold Magic is a roller coaster of colourful adventures, humour and, of course, magical antics. It is bound to please the ever-increasing number of readers who are lovers of fantasy. The background to Cora’s acquiring her magic skills and becoming a ‘syphon’ is explained
Reviewed by Ian Lipke A huge book of 800+ pages, The Evening and the Morning appears to be a useful source of information relating to the pre-1000 CE period. Having read general knowledge books in the history of this era as well as some specialist tomes, I am comfortable in asserting that the author’s research
Reviewed by Ian Lipke While I have never heard of Catrine Clay, whose ‘ground-breaking research’ produced The Good Germans, the fault is not hers. It is my responsibility to keep up. I note that Ms Clay has written at least one other book, King Kaiser Tsar, and on its merits has been described as an
Reviewed by Rod McLary Bluebird is a sprawling novel set in the fictitious small town of Bluebird located just across the bay from Ocean City. It could be anywhere but the descriptions of the town’s characters place it squarely in Australia. Most readers would recognise – and perhaps some may even know – many of
Reviewed by Ian Lipke Almost seven hundred pages face the reader of Professor Grace Karskens’s latest book People of the River. This is a masterpiece of historical writing that deals with the lost worlds of early Australia (as she calls them). Karskens bases her text on the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers areas, where she identifies