Sunday, March 10, 2024

Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World

 


- This is a stunningly good book and highly enlightening on the serious environmental and sustainability problems the world faces today. Dr Hannah Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at Oxford University. She clearly outlines all the problems we face yet she remains positive and hopeful. We can, if we work together and with determination, solve them. This is the challenge of our times. 

- What I very much enjoyed about the book is Ritchie's clarity of thinking and writing. She clearly navigates so many difficult terrains in plain, non-academic English, providing not just loads of valuable information and data, but insight and sense. And the book has a very personal flavour. She's describing her own journey. 

- I can do no better than the back cover blurb to describe the book in detail:

Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems - and how we can solve them.

We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of over-population, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations. 

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality. 


Sunday, February 25, 2024

Peter R. Neumann, The New World Disorder.


- I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's absolutely brilliant on every level, as well as being superbly written in crystal clear prose. It has been translated from the original German by journalist David Shaw, and it's rare that translations are this good. Neumann is currently Professor of Security Studies at King's College London and is an internationally sought-after expert on terrorism and geopolitics. 

- The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago...but now the West is under pressure, and it has only itself to blame. Over the last thirty years, through a mixture of naïveté and arrogance, it has lost its global advantage. Today's challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarisation of society. (back cover blurb)

- As a reader I'm an obsessive underliner. Sentences that encapsulate fundamental insights and meanings demand to be remembered. While reading this book I virtually underlined every paragraph. 

- Neumann's chapters on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are magnificent. He condemns the profound ignorance and naiveté of the US and its conservative commentators. The 9/11 attacks showed that the West was vulnerable; the wars in the Middle East exposed the limits of its military power, and the collapse of the financial markets revealed the contradictions inherent in its economic model. 

- He also obliterates Putin and puts his war on Ukraine into perspective. Putin's a posturing Eurasianist with the power fantasies of a populist imperialist.  

- He's also excellent on the creation of the EU and the disaster of Brexit. And quite pessimistic on the world's dismal failure to address the challenges of climate change. 

- In summary, this is a book that deserves to be widely read. I hope it becomes an international bestseller. 





Thursday, February 8, 2024

Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect


- There's no doubt Benjamin Stevenson is a brilliant comic writer. His gift shines through on virtually every page. 

- Ernest Cunningham, the fictional author of the best-selling Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, is writing his follow-up Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect. Ernest continually breaks the fourth wall, telling us all what he's doing and why, which makes it so charming. 

- The train is the Ghan, running from Darwin to Adelaide, and the luxury carriage is hosting 'The Australian Mystery Writers' Festival' featuring six internationally successful authors. (Note to ed: there should be no comma after Writers). A couple of murders take place. 

- The book has a serious problem however. It's hard-going. The story is clotted, the narrator fussy, and he drowns the reader in so much detail the experience is like drowning in mud.  

- It gets really tedious and alienating towards the end, as the incestuous, mind-boggling connections between all the characters are revealed. Our omniscient, first-person narrator somehow knows everything, indulging in his own cleverness. 

- But he does satirise the mystery thriller genre exceptionally well, particularly the ‘butler-dunnit’ model. 

- And I must say he portrays the regular modus operandi of the publishing industry and its many players very accurately. The Oxford Comma also plays a part!

- But, all in all....meh!



Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Yumna Kassab, Politica


- This new novel from Yumna Kassab is a challenging read. I was really enthralled by her two previous novels Australiana and The Lovers, but in Politica she adopts a more nebulous style, exploring the world of her many characters in a suggestive, less realistic, way. 

- She takes us to the Middle East and to an unidentified country, spanning decades of time from the late twentieth century. Some of her characters live throughout that entire period, but most don't. The book has numerous chapters of only two or so pages. 

- Yet Kassab combines poetry and prose in her portrayal of the lives of the citizens of the country through its periods of war and peace. There are families of children, parents and grandparents, and they are rarely safe. Death surrounds them. War takes its victims. They have hopes and dreams, and they find real comfort in each other in their homes and communities. Some believe in the need for revolution and others in the need for negotiation and peace. ‘They mean to erase us from the face of the earth. This is one continuous tale of dispossession and displacement’.

- Of course we think of today's wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the ugliness of both, but Kassab is careful not to tread on that ground. She generalises and focuses on the individuals caught up in mundane, day to day routines, and their hopes and dreams. But her insights are often profound, and her prose engrossing. 

- One section of the book is titled 1973, where we explore the life of the delightful Salma. She's full of anxieties but she does stuff. She learns to fish, drives to the countryside for a day, travels overseas with Zahra and bores her friends telling them about it later, her nephew Dawood is a bragger, she dreams of the dead, she regrets not emigrating overseas - free education, free hospitals, etc, she can’t afford to buy groceries, the war has stopped but is there peace although there are elections, she resists engaging in politics now, is she a sellout, Ahmed proposed but she declined. ‘There was a war. It broke over them. They never found their way back and they did not find whatever it was they each privately wished for…Her life has momentum but no direction…’ 

- There are many short stories of seemingly unrelated events, but the prime focus is always the people and how they deal with them. Although the war may be relegated to history now, its effects are still felt. 

- Kassab has the gift of forcing you to confront these seemingly simple but profoundly meaningful lives with their rhythms and memories. 

There are many bodies buried in this ground.
   Some of the dead are only bones.
   Others are more recent. Their burial was hurried, done in 
the dark, ground covered so it did not appear disturbed.
   I have watched for many years.
   When the world is troubled, there are more secrets to put
to sleep in the earth, in the night-time when they believe no
eyes can see.
   I watch. There are others - humans - who believe this park
can shelter their terror and their dreams.
  There is always the watcher, one of lightness on the right,
the scribe of darkness on the left, and then the Great One who
not even the smallest detail escapes.
  The world may not see. There may be no witness in the
living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is
layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious 
is humanity.


- When reading this novel you may be tempted to bail at times, but stay with it. It's well worth it. 



Friday, January 26, 2024

John Gray, The New Leviathans


 

-This new book by celebrated British political philosopher John Gray is highly provocative and challenging. It's a critique of contemporary liberalism in the West, and also of Russia's and China's global ambitions. 

- He bases his analysis on philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise Leviathan which was published in 1651. It was condemned and attacked then as a defence of atheism and heresy. Copies were publicly burnt by Oxford University and calls for Hobbes's execution for blasphemy were made. Today Leviathan is universally regarded as a classic work that continues to inspire and explain much of today's decaying world.    

- One thing I liked about Gray's book is that, although he frequently references other scholars and thinkers in an academic style, he never shies away from confidently expressing his own opinions: Western elites are renouncing tolerance in much the same way pagan elites abandoned their old gods. If the process continues, liberal freedoms will soon be forgotten, along with the world in which they were practised.

- He explores in detail the contrasts between Russia and China and the West, their history and ambitions, and his opinions are often confronting: 

The European Union is not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself. Once the American security guarantee is withdrawn, the EU will be seen for what it is: a geo-strategic vacuum.  

The resurgence of geopolitics has been accompanied by the return of the planet as a deciding force in human events. Climate change and pandemic diseases destroyed [former empires]...wiped out by overpopulation, drought and resource wars. The belief that humans can escape dependency on the natural world is a modern conceit. 

Conceivably, global warming may occur at a rate that makes adaptation impossible...the Anthropocene is coming to an end. Humankind is ceasing to be central in the life of the planet, so that life itself may go on.  

- His stance on wokeness is controversial. He diagnoses it as hyper-liberalism, which rejects the necessary compromises. It is not enough for avowed enemies to be defeated. Hidden heretics must be hunted out, tormented and destroyed. The opportunity for persecution is one of the attractions of hyper-liberalism....The inquisitions staged on Western campuses are a mark of advancing barbarism...If it does not blunder into a global war to restore its lost hegemony, the US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.

- Gray's book is certainly worth reading. It offers a wider scope on current disruptions and wars that we're immersed in on a daily basis, and challenges us deeply.  


Monday, January 22, 2024

Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter


- Angela O'Keeffe has written an intriguing short novel that is both subtle and rich in meaning. Her prose is fluid and immensely readable, and I therefore read it twice. It was so good. 

- The fundamental premise is at first strange and slightly off-putting, but it doesn't take long to figure it out and hence get absorbed by the unfolding story. Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the famous French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who painted his wife's portrait  twenty-nine times, is talking to us about the author of a novel centred on Hortense herself. She refers to her as 'the writer'. She's in the same room as this writer, sitting next to her, and voicing her thoughts. 

- We're in Covid lockdown times in Sydney, Brisbane and Paris. Hortense is intrigued as she remembers the Spanish Flu in Europe a hundred or so years ago. 

- The writer has a daughter, Rebecca, and they are often in contact, personally and by email and phone. They have a lovely relationship. Although there are secrets. The writer adopts the pseudonym of 'Georgia O'Keeffe' to record the truths about her life and marriage, and Hortense's as well. Both women were effected by patriarchal values, amounting to abject sexism and abuse.  

- As Hortense admits at one point: Through it all my husband painted, and I kept house. Because of financial restraints we didn't always have paid help; I did the cooking, the cleaning and the washing of his workspace, his clothes, his paintbrushes; I wrote letters to his dealer to organise the sale of paintings; I was his assistant, his housekeeper, his secretary, his lover, his model and...his muse. We were not equals. He had the power to throw me out on my ear, the power to never give me another franc; at a certain point he changed his will and disinherited me, though by the end of his life he'd made sure that I would receive something. And yet. 

- Georgia had a baby as a young high school girl. She had sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of a car, and was sent by her Irish-Catholic parents to an institution run by nuns. The newborn was forcibly removed from her. Later in life she refused to have children with her husband. She chose divorce instead. ‘I want the baby I had.’ 

- Death is also a focus, including of children. And marriages. Our lives are filled with emblems of loss, and they continue to reverberate in us, and sometimes, after years, they can bring us undone. 

- O'Keeffe has written a beautiful and meaningful novel which I know I will read again.

 

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Anne Michaels, Held



- In brilliant and poetic prose, this new and relatively short novel from celebrated Canadian author Anne Michaels offers us a quite challenging meditation on what it means to be human. There's a deep, underlying mysteriousness to all of our journeys and the connections we have to nature and to each other, the ‘…ideas of the visible and invisible, and the rules of space and time’. 

- The novel is a paean to love in many ways, particularly family love, and the homes, careers, belongings and memories that bind us together. Interestingly, all the couples featured over four generations are deeply in love. There are no divorces or separations, and friendships are lasting. 

- Quite surprisingly, however, a major theme in the novel is war. I've not read a more powerful description of the ugliness of war than this: 

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. Snipers, barrel bombs. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body....A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb, a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre. 

- Michaels' characters often reflect deeply on other contentious issues that characterised the 20th century and still do today - refugees, oppressive authoritarian regimes, and the struggle for women's equality.  

- This superb review of the novel by Leah Kaminsky in The Age is worth reading.