Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope

 

- This is a debut novel from a young Black American gay writer. It's about the challenges the narrator and his friends constantly face just trying to survive in New York. They are well educated but have rather meaningless jobs in the corporate sphere, and spend most of their nights in the many bars and clubs that really define their lives. Drugs of course are commonplace.    

- It's a real challenge to read though, mainly because of Franklin's prose. Although very stylish and slick it's frequently pretentious. He's addicted to uncommon words. Here's an example:

...in college, they'd only come into occasional contact and, even in New York, seemed to pertain to variant slivers of the same milieu. That first postgrad summer in the city, Smith had zealously architected their distance: dinner with Carolyn and the friends with whom she'd grown up...then drinks with...the sleek, swart set to which they belonged...He'd watch their polite conversations from afar with a sense of mute anxiety, fearful that theirs would be a combustible union.

One day that first autumn, Smith awoke to rain, its soft patter percussive against all the city's cars.

- But, to be fair, sometimes the prose is just gorgeous: 

The day grew fat in its middle, then burned off in crimson wisps - the surprise of sunset arriving through a far window and engulfing every ordinary thing in gold. 

- Deep into the novel various storylines emerge that are very satisfying. And the friends and their families become very likeable. The narrator, David Smith Jr, gets charged with cocaine possession and is forced to undergo counselling, his flatmate Elle is found dead on the banks of a river, his friend Carolyn gets so sucked into the New York party scene she becomes alcohol and drug addicted and disappears. They are young, rich, party animals, ‘upwardly mobile urbanites’. 'Nothing good happens after midnight'. 

- In one section we're taken back to the South in 1942 and his parents' challenges. They are 'negroes'. Crack is becoming popular and Black kids getting longer jail sentences. It's ‘…a lifetime of dissonance, of alternately stunted and impossible expectations…’ 

- Franklin has written a love letter to New York:

...the mink-hatted older ladies walking their terriers on the Upper East Side; and down, down, in Midtown, where suits emerged from their gray-slat towers like tidal waves of minnows, their manic lunch-break motion some brief reprieve.

- Surprisingly, he makes no mention at all of key events of the time - 9/11, Obama, the Black Lives Matter movement, or even the experience of racism, subtle or overt. It's about the depth and meaning of personal friendships, and the comfort of welcoming social locales. 

- And it turns out to be a very satisfying read in the end.   

Philip Coggan, The Economic Consequences of Mr Trump

 

 - This short book by former Economist and Financial Times journalist, Philip Coggan, is a masterful demolition of Trump's obsession with tariffs.

- It's an extremely enlightening work, placing everything about tariffs and free trade in an historical and global context. And it's very clearly written. He provides loads of data and statistics, and it's totally up to date. The book has obviously been rushed into print over the last month. References to the ups and downs of what happened as late as the end of June are included. 

- It's very clear to everybody with half a brain that Trump's tariffs would not generate a mass return of manufacturing jobs to the US. The great bulk of the burden of the tariffs would fall on US businesses and consumers. Polls have shown that nearly 90% of Americans agree with that. Prices will increase full stop. And overall, the tariffs represent the largest tax increase on US citizens since 1993, costing the average household US$1,183 in 2025 alone. 

- The decline in manufacturing jobs in the US is part of a long-term trend that has emerged across the developed world, and is caused more by automation than by trade competition. 

- Obviously Trump does not like the multinational order that emerged after the Second World War. The trading system after 1945 was developed by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and then by the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The guiding principal was to create a climate where, as much as possible, nations treated each other equally. The result, over the decades, was a substantial decline in tariffs and an enormous expansion in global trade.   

- Coggan ends his book with a quote from Monty Python's Life of Brian where Reg, played by John Cleese, forcefully dismisses the benefits of Roman rule: 'Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?'.

One could sum up the message of this book, in the style of Month Python, by saying 'Apart from the failed businesses, lost jobs, goods shortages, hits to consumer and business confidence, weakening of the relationship with key allies and decline of the US's international reputation, Trump has a brilliant plan'. 

Sam Guthrie, The Peak -Political thriller.

 

- This Australian novel is an absolutely absorbing read. It's a political drama set in Canberra, Hong Kong and Beijing. A little congested at times with easily forgotten detail, but it's totally worth hanging in to the very satisfying and shocking conclusion.

- The central characters are Sebastian (the Senator and Assistant Minister of Defence and Foreign Affairs), Charlie (his Chief of Staff), Zheng (the Chinese corporate high flyer), and Chloe (Zheng's daughter). 

- Also featured is ASIO and its Director-General, McCubbin. He's a ruthless and nasty piece of work who also happens to be Sebastian's father-in-law. 

- The drama starts early in the novel. Sebastian shockingly commits suicide after receiving a message from Zheng which says 'It's done.' 

- We're taken back to the 1980's and 90's. The student Sebastian and the Chinese girl Chloe had fallen deeply in love, but Chloe's father, Zheng, is outraged that her daughter is 'mixing with foreigners'. The long relationship between the couple is central to the novel but they had to keep it secret. 

- The Tiananmen Square massacre and the student protests about China's clamping down on democracy in Hong Kong are key elements in the story. Zheng hated his daughter's involvement in the protests. He was a determined and ambitious ideologue committed in every way to the Chinese Communist regime. 

- As the story develops over the decades it becomes more intricate and absorbing. We're sucked into the current challenge Australia and the US face by the power of China and the possible threat it poses to Taiwan. McCubbin has no doubt China will invade Taiwan, and attack the US military bases in the region, including those in Australia. The US would be pressured into responding with force. ‘The rallying fury of 9/11’ will likely erupt in the US and it will be forced into a full scale war which will inevitably go nuclear. 

- McCubbin would be ‘delighted by the actualisation of a long held hypothesis’. 

- But is he right? 

Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con

- Careful, I thought…is this going to be like those old anti-internet books of the 1990's? Thankfully, it's absolutely not! It calls out the bullshit that's everywhere in the AI universe. 

- Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. She's an expert on how large language models work and why the illusion they produce is so compelling. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a former senior research scientist on Google's Ethical AI team. 

- Their basic premise is that 'synthetic text extruding machines can’t fill holes in the social fabric. We need people, political will, and resources...Artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you're being sold to line someone else's pocket...it's 'mathy maths', a racist pile of linear algebra, or 'Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (aka SALAMI)'.    

- '...for corporations and venture capitalists, the appeal of AI is not that it is sentient or technologically revolutionary, but that it promises to make the jobs of huge swaths of labor redundant and unnecessary.' 

- The chapter 'AI Hype in Art, Journalism, and Science' is excellent. 'Today's synthetic media extruding machines are all based on data theft and labor exploitation, and enable some of the worst, most perverse incentives of each of these attendant fields. The use of these systems does further damage socially: displacing working artists and journalists, warping the practice of science, and polluting the information ecosystem. And their existence undermines the position and value of craft across these endeavors'. 

- What we're seeing is the 'normalisation of data theft and exploitation...the derivative works from these models are largely copying their works and also significantly impinging on existing markets...In the case of the New York Times, users of ChatGPT and its different variants are able to produce, nearly verbatim, text from the newspaper, when they provide specific prompts....The argument that these tools are sufficiently "transformative" [permitted under the US Copyright Act] seems to ring hollow if they extrude words and images that are nearly identical to the data they are trained on, and do so on demand when prompted to produce something that matches the work of a specific artist or news outlet'. 

- 'For AI boosters, the threat of these lawsuits is existential. And frankly we welcome that. Venture capital firm Adreesssen Horowitz warned that all of their investments in AI would be worth a lot less if they had to abide by copyright law. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development". That is, if they actually had to pay artists illustrators, and writers what their content is worth, rather than simply stealing that content from the web, their business model would fall apart'.

- This well informed, clearly written book will bring you a whole new perspective on what's actually happening in the world of AI. Highly recommend.

Mark Brandi, Eden

 

- Well-known and highly regarded literary thriller author Mark Brandi has written a seemingly simple but deep and penetrating story about crimes, their origins, and their long term repercussions.

- The back cover blurb summarises the story well:

Cities are tough when you’ve grown up as a country kid. They’re even tougher after nine years inside. Tom Blackburn is fresh out of jail and not sure where his future lies. He knows what he wants but he’s pretty sure she doesn’t want him.

Tom‘s left his old life and his old name behind but his options aren’t great. He knows sleeping on the streets is the quickest way back to a cell. And then his luck turns around. A chance encounter leads to a job and somewhere to stay. A place in the dead centre of Melbourne. Eden, his new boss calls it.

Honest physical work. A bit of gardening, bit of gravedigging, bit of whatever he’s told to do. Fresh air, currawongs, a bed and some peace and quiet. It’s the perfect place to save some money and make some plans. A place to keep his head down and stay out of trouble.

But trouble finds him. Serious trouble. He’s missed the signs, again. Going back to jail might be the safest option. Unless he can figure some way out of the danger he’s in.

- We can't help but sympathise with Tom, and the work relationships he has to make in the cemetery in order to earn some money, get some accomodation, and move on with his life. But that proves to be very difficult. There are secrets there, and it's worth of lot of money to keep quiet about them. 

- A very satisfying read.

 

Linda Jaivin, Bombard the Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China.

- Any book written by Linda Jaivin on China is essential reading. Her previous one, The Shortest History of China, 2021, which I reviewed here, was superb.

- Bombard the Headquarters is a smaller book (117 pages), and focuses solely on Mao Zedong and his ugly, abusive, murderous regime. But it is also essential reading. Mao was ruthless, and millions were murdered because he would not tolerate any compromise to his revolutionary communist agenda on any level whatsoever. 

- In the mid-1960's the Red Guards were formed and the Cultural Revolution got underway. 'Academics estimate that between 500,000 and 2 million excess deaths took place in the Chinese countryside over next four years'. It was a killing machine on every level. Over 10 million homes were ransacked as the red terrorists sought evidence of disloyalty to Mao. He was adored like a god. Some enthusiasts even sought to mandate that traffic lights be changed to allow the red light to mean 'go'. 

- After Mao's regime ended most Cultural Revolution radicals paid little or no price for their actions, despite the people generally not tolerating any return to radicalism. Mao had brought ‘domestic turmoil and catastrophe to the Party, the state and the whole people’. 'They struggled to deal with the loss of ten years of their lives to what now seemed a shameful, collective mania, as well as feelings of victimhood, betrayal and guilt...If one thing united many of these diverse thinkers, creators and activists in the immediate post-Mao era it was the spirit of humanism.' 

- The Cultural Revolution 'turned Chinese people against themselves, saw the army preside over mass murder, turned cities into battlefields and villages into killing grounds...After the decade-long upheaval, at least 4.2 million people were detained and investigated and 1.7 million were killed, according to official statistics released in 1984.' 

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Graeme Turner, Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good

- Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland Graeme Turner's last book was The Shrinking Nation which I enthused over in this review:

- This just published short book written for In the National Interest series, published by Monash University Publishing, is another powerful condemnation of Australia's public sphere. His focus in on the deplorable state of our university system. He doesn't hold back. It's persuasive, comprehensive, credible, insightful and detailed, and Turner is very angry indeed. 

- On every level he damns Australian governments of both major parties over the last fifty years for the destruction they're wrought on our higher education system. Their neoliberal, pro-market, privatisation reforms have been utterly disastrous.  

-  ‘…students are dropping out, academics are burning out, and governments have been tuning out for decades’. It's a tragic story in so many ways. The shameless behaviour of governments, both Labor and the Coalition, have demonstrated their profound ignorance of what a university really should be. 

- The sector's federal government funding has gone from 80% in the 1980's to 40% now. The 'creeping cancer of excessive casualisation' has meant that 'more than 50% of the teaching in our universities is now delivered by casual staff on short-term contracts', and it's close to 75% in some institutions.

- 'longstanding collegial systems of governance were gradually replaced by management practices drawn from the corporate world that increased the role of the central executive'. In the desperate search for adequate funding, universities aggressively entered the market for international students. Earnings from these students accounted for 50% of Sydney University's total income in 2024.

- Governments have pressed universities 'to think of themselves as businesses rather than as publicly funded institutions....The consequences for the academic culture of the university community, however, have been corrosive'. 'The demands of the vocations or professions have become decisive drivers'. The broader fields of knowledge are deemed unimportant. ‘The myth of the useless arts degree turns up all over the place’. 

- 'Battered, broken and distorted by years of poor policy, disinvestment and piecemeal strategic initiatives, this is a system that requires a major renovation...There is an urgent need for an independent coordinating body to manage how our university system serves our national interests in both teaching and research.' 

- When I was a student at Sydney University in the early 70's, things were wonderful. I would hate going there today.