Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness

- This is a beautifully designed little book (154 pages) published by Columbia University under their scholarly imprint Columbia Global Reports.

- I’m a great fan of Tim Wu (Columbia Law School), having gobbled up his two previous books, The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants. Wu’s focus is the power of media and telecommunication corporations and their urge to close down free and open technologies, information sharing and net neutrality.  

- The Curse of Bigness is a fascinating history of antitrust law in the US and Europe, and its critical importance in sustaining real competition in markets to ensure mega corporates and monopolies don’t undermine democratic ideals and realities. 'We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago - the first Gilded Age - and remain in grave danger of repeating more of the signature errors of the twentieth century'.

- He tells the story of the monopolies US Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T and others - built by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Guggenheims and Carnegies. 

- I vividly remember the furore over Nixon’s determination to break up AT&T (the Bell companies) in 1974. AT&T was ‘the jealous god of telecommunications, brooking no rivals, accepting no sharing, and swallowing any children with even the most remote chance of unseating Kronos.’

- And the enormous effort the Justice Department (DOJ) put into bringing down the Microsoft monopoly and its attempt, among other things, to kneecap Netscape’s browser - which Microsoft succeeded in doing. 

- And the case it brought against IBM, which was forced to stop its practice of bundling software with hardware. As a result the DOJ kickstarted the birth of an independent software industry, and the IBM PC was forced to go with an extremely open design allowing other companies like Intel, Microsoft and Apple into the PC market. 

- But during the George W Bush presidency and the increasing leverage of conservative laissez faire economists ('leave it to the market') industry concentration powered on: in telecommunications, airlines, cable, pharmaceuticals, tickets, seeds and pesticides, beer, tech.

- A deplorable example was Facebook’s purchase of Instagram: a dominant firm buying its nascent challenger - the romantic ‘disruption narrative’ of the 90’s/2000’s was rudely interrupted. 

- A UK report concluded that FB and Instagram were not competitors. Wu was aghast - ‘It takes many years of training to reach conclusions this absurd ...any teenager could have told you they were..'

- In the 2010's tech industry acquisitions have been aggressive : Facebook is up to 67 so far, Amazon 91, Google 214. ‘Cloning’, Microsoft’s major tactic (otherwise known as stealing), was also used aggressively, eg Google and Yelp, Facebook and Snapchat.

- Wu's plea is for Congress to again fire up Antitrust law and break up these monopoly corporations. '...reintroducing competition into the social media space, perhaps even quality competition, measured by matters like greater protection of privacy, could mean a lot to the public'.

William Boyd, Any Human Heart

- This novel was first published in 2002. I started it then but it didn't work for me. After reading Boyd's latest, Love Is Blind, which is magnificent, I wanted to give it another go. I'm so glad I did.

- Any Human Heart is an intricate portrait of a life fully lived in the 20th century, told through journal entries over Logan Mountstuart's long, rich and satisfying life. 

- What comes through from the word go is the wit. It’s a lovely, discursive, eloquent book. Boyd’s prose is simple, pleasurable and without ornament. So easily read. 

- Mountstuart meets and befriends so many famous names from the 20th century, mainly authors and painters: Ernest Hemingway, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Virginia Wolff; Pablo Picasso; Ian Fleming; H.G.Wells; Cyril Connelly; D.H. Lawrence; Aldous Huxley; Jackson Pollock, and others. There are parties and arguments and enormous amounts of alcohol consumed. 

- Boyd loves Paris. His characters are passionate about it. And they constantly travel - to Spain, Greece, America. 'I have to recognise that I'm simply not equipped, temperamentally, to stay at home and live a circumscribed, rural, English life. I absolutely need variety and surprise; I have to have the city in my life - I'm essentially urban by nature - and also the prospect and reality of travel. Otherwise I'll desiccate and die.'

- The two years spent in Switzerland in solitary confinement in a prison during the war are heartfelt and immensely sad. It’s the best part of the novel. The previous months spent in the Caribbean as a naval commander with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are also interesting, although they end badly. 

- The book sags in the middle, as LMS succumbs to alcohol and drugs. His successive marriages don’t work out, and his sexual life descends to seediness. His years in New York managing a branch of an art dealership are rather boring. 

- He gets older, drunker and fatter. He doesn’t write any more, as his interest in contemporary New York artists increases (but he, wrongly, hates Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionist school).

- An extraordinary life and an ordinary life - rich then poor (reduced to eating tinned dog food and hawking far left ‘newspapers’ on the street); many friends then few; known then unknown; celebrated then rejected; best selling books then all out of print; healthy then unwell; ‘... all my sporadic highs and appalling lows, my brief triumphs and terrible losses..’ 

- Many of his loved ones and close friends, including his children, die tragically, in war and through illness. Very sad.

- He spends his final days in France in the lovely village of Sainte-Sabine to which he escapes after Thatcher is elected. It's a peaceful life in a friendly and supportive community. Although there’s a dark side to the village: ‘the dark and shameful secret’ from the German occupation of France during WW2.

- Many thanks Mark Rubbo, owner of Readings. You pressured me over and over to complete this book. I'm so glad you did.

Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads

- This is a stunningly good and enlightening book about the decline of the West and the growing strength of the East. 

- The huge increases in trade and infrastructure agreements between the resource rich countries of Central Asia, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India and China (from the Pacific to the Mediterranean coasts) are being overlooked in the West as we are distracted by ludicrous White House shenanigans, Brexit, the rise of European populist delusions and general isolationism. 

- China, India, Russia, Turkey and Iran are attuned to the fact that the world is changing. The West is retreating, losing power and influence, and the US under Trump is quickly becoming untrustworthy. Alliances are desperately being sought elsewhere.

- Frankopan describes in great detail China's huge One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. It is a vast investment project unlike anything that's come before. Chinese loans are building the continent of Africa, as they are in the Caribbean and Central and South America. 

- He also outlines the critical importance of the South China Sea to China and why it has become such a hot button issue.

- Trump's absurd cancellation of the Iran nuclear deal, and its dreadful repercussions, of course enables China to emerge as the winner. ‘China jumps into every vacuum that opens’.

- As for Europe: ‘Compared with the Silk Roads and Asia, Europe is not so much moving at a different speed as in a different direction. Where the story in Asia is about increasing connections, improving collaboration and deepening cooperation, in Europe the story is about separation, the re-erection of barriers and ‘taking back control’. 

- These overarching, strategic visions are matched by an enormous amount of detail. Frankopan is a master at fleshing out a gripping narrative. He also writes clearly and cleanly. It's a pleasure to read.


(Unfortunately there are many editorial and proofreading errors in the text, which are very annoying. They're virtually on every page. Bloomsbury, the publisher, ought to do a lot better than this pretty amateurish effort. Look at this for example: ...'corporations that compete in global morliets for global customers’!! One positive I suppose is that the pub date of late November 2018 is welcome when so much detail in the book concerns things that happened as recently as September 2018. So it’s been a rushed job, but that’s no excuse. Proofreading can be done in days). 

Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu

- I’m late to this multi award-winning book, first published in 2014, and now in a new edition in 2018. 

- It is a magnificent work, and an exceptionally well researched and written story of the complexity and sophistication of the civilisation, economy and social cohesion of Australia’s Aboriginal people for at least 80,000 years.

- Extensively quoting from the diaries and journals of the early colonial explorers, surveyors and pastoralists, Pascoe demolishes the myth of the spear carrying ‘hunter-gatherer’ and details the extensive agricultural and aquaculture practices of our first peoples, their housing, food, storage and preservation, their expert management of the land and use of fire, and, critically, their ability to construct societies that were democratic and peaceful.

- There are so many quotable lines in this beautiful book. I underlined paras on virtually every page. Here’s an example: 

‘If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers, and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate, and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, it is likely that we will admire and love our land all the more.’

- This book should be compulsory reading on every school curriculum. It is that good and that important. 

Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk

- I’m an avid reader of anything Michael Lewis writes. This shorter than average book is rather narrow in focus but riveting reading.

- Lewis’ style is to isolate particular individuals central to his argument and tell the story from their perspective. They are usually skilled and senior operatives and they are honest, exceptionally clever, highly intelligent and articulate. 

- As usual he skews his targets with pinpoint accuracy, this time at the Trump administration’s utter incompetence during the transition period in particular, then the appointments or lack thereof to management positions subsequently. 

- This book made me squirm. It tracks the corruption of the civil service under Trump. The pig-ignorant, anti-science clowns Trump sent in to manage the massive government departments and agencies that spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.

- It emphasises how critically important government programs, big and small, are to the community and economy generally, and how this underlying fabric of civil order is so taken for granted. Very few people know about them. They’re under the radar. 

- The ‘seeming commitment to scientific ignorance’ started very quickly to permeate the senior levels of huge government departments like energy, agriculture, commerce. Troves of data collected over decades and ripe for mining were deleted, suppressed or made unavailable for public access. ‘Under each act of data suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive: a gun lobbyist, a coal company, a poultry company...It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money’.

- Sections of the book seem rather tedious and pointless at first - portraits of NASA’s first female astronaut; the first ‘Chief Data Scientist’ - but these people are academically brilliant and motivated public servants who are brutally sidelined by the Trump administration. The perverse and disgraceful undermining of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to favour the private weather forecasting industry, particularly one player just because he’s well-connected and a Republican donor, is just one of many examples.

- It’s a war against knowledge, expertise, science, skills and basic competence. Utterly shameful and stupid beyond belief. But there you go - welcome to Trump's real America.

Jock Serong, Preservation

- This is a magnificent and beautifully written novel. Jock Serong’s best. 

- It is a fascinating, engrossing tale, full of fleshed out characters and relationships, and a highly credible story line based on an actual historical event in the early days of the colony of NSW. 

- At its core is the contrast between the cruel, miserable, ignorant but entitled English plunderers and the Indigenous communities who reach out to them and try to make them welcome.

- The brown skinned Bengali ‘lascars’, or sailors, are also treated by the white masters like slaves. 

- The Indigenous leaders such as Pemulwuy, and the young domestic servant Boorigul, are painted sympathetically, in contrast to the ugly, opportunistic and thuggish white colonials. ‘Pemulwuy, out there in the darkness somewhere, was the fire that threatened them from without. But ultimately he would flicker and die. The greater danger was the malignancies within: Macarthur and the Corps.’ A young Aboriginal girl, for example, is brutally raped by two out of the four white survivors of the shipwreck of the Sydney Cove.

- The common trope of a thin crust of civilisation in danger from the unknown dark forces underneath is reversed here. 

- There is a brief but devastating portrait of the 'legendary' John Donald Macarthur: ‘The man was a tyrant in the making: a grasper made powerful by influential friends’.

- In the end the malignancy within is never defeated. It continues.

John Purcell, The Girl on the Page

- This book is deeply flawed by the author's male obsession with cheap sex. It's really two different novels shoved together - one focussing on the marriage and careers of two highly respected writers; the other a vulgar, pornographic tale of a young woman's sexual exploits.

- Amy Winston is a young book editor. She’s bright, irreverent, talented and ‘exceptionally beautiful’ according to virtually everyone. As the novel progresses however it becomes quite clear she’s just a cheap male fantasy. A sex object. 

- The $2 million advance to the ageing literary novelist Helen Owen is absurdly unrealistic. It’s comic. But it highlights the theme of the book - artistic integrity under commercial pressure. 

- The constant descent to outright pornography becomes extremely annoying. It is so cheap.  Presumably Purcell is caricaturing popular taste in contrast to quality literature. Or satirising modern commercial publishing. Whatever, it fails dismally.

- Amy is a literary ignoramus. She’s aware of popular fiction and thriller writers and that’s it. She’s also a borderline alcoholic, continually drunk, hanging around bars for sex.

- Thankfully, however, Purcell can write. There are wonderful lines: ‘No one bothers to talk about the second time Lazarus died’; ‘He thought of the book now as some sort of disease, like syphilis - a disease you catch while doing something pleasurable’. Both Helen and Malcolm are insightful and wise. And as they age they question their fading relationship. It’s heartwarming as it progresses to a tragic ending.

- Halfway through I was convinced that this book was simply trash. Easily the worst novel I'd read all year. It cloaked itself in literary righteousness but was really just a low rent pornographic indulgence. It was name dropping countless books and authors, literary and popular, as this was a novel about novels and their authors, but it continually subverted its main narrative by the sexual vulgarity. The real and substantial story never got off the ground.

- That story, the Helen and Malcolm one, is beautifully told and comes into its own in the final 70 or so pages. The potentially good novel, on the brink of ruin, re-emerges. 

- Under Helen and Malcolm’s influence, Amy, estranged from her own parents, finally begins to mature as an adult. When the sex stops the real and satisfying story is immensely enjoyable. 

- Malcolm’s reflections on commercial and literary fiction at the Sydney Writers Festival are just brilliant. 

Paul Daley, On Patriotism

- Beautifully and fluidly written, even poetic at times. A personal journey for the author as well as an essay on what it means to really be an Australian. 

- Persuasive in its central argument that Australian patriotism must be rooted in our ancient, indigenous past.

- The centrality of the First Fleet arrival in 1788 and Anzac Day to our national identity is bullshit. As is our pathetic unwillingness as a nation to not see January 26 as Invasion Day, and not see the Uluru Statement as an essential way forward.

- Read this in conjunction with Mark McKenna's brilliant and illuminating Quarterly Essay Moment of Truth.

William Boyd, Love is Blind

- How good is this book - it’s remarkable. So satisfying in every way - the story, the characters, the setting, the period.

- It’s the late 19th century transitioning to the first decade of the new 20th century. Horses and buggies are giving way to automobiles. Electricity and sewerage are transforming ordinary domestic life and society. Boyd brings it all to life.

- This is a story of music, love, family tensions, hate and passion. Boyd is a master at this sort of social and domestic drama. Notwithstanding the historical timeframe, all the issues dealt with are significant, contemporary, and powerful, all propelled by rich and invigorating dialogue. 

- I particularly loved the Paris setting. We walk and travel with the characters; we share their hotels and residences; we travel in their carriages and trains. And they stay for long periods in other French and European cities, including Russian. 

- The food, the restaurants, the cafes, the dinner parties, the clothes, the shops, the factories - all are magnificently brought to life. As are the often difficult personal and work relationships. 

- And the illicit, highly sexual, and as it turns out, dangerous love affair between the two characters at the dramatic core of the book is superbly handled by Boyd. Their stories are absorbing.

- This is a book you simply can’t wait to get back to. It sucks you in. Just right for reading during the forthcoming holiday period. Put it on your list.

David Speers, On Mutiny

- Speers clarifies what actually happened in the week that ended Turnbull - and, thankfully, Dutton. 

- He also blows out of the water the absurd myth that Morrison engineered it weeks beforehand, and was never a last minute ‘accidental’ leadership candidate. He was. 

- And Julie Bishop was soundly defeated in the first voting round not because she was a woman or considered insubstantial (which she is), but because her supportive colleagues judged her highly unlikely to beat Dutton in the final runoff. She was too ‘moderate’. 

- Poor Mathias Cormann.  A real robot after all. 

- As for Mitch Fifield, possibly the worst minister for communications and the arts we’ve ever had - and that’s saying something - he went from ‘backing Turnbull, to Dutton, to Morrison’ in two days! 

- This is a clearly written record of an extraordinary week in Australian political history. Speers is fair and no political bias is evident. 

- It was a week that made the Coalition even more beatable in the next election than it was. Extraordinary tin ears, all of them. 

- It only takes a little more than hour to read, so buy it, read it, and save it for your kids or grandkids when they’re studying Australian history, politics or comedy in a decade’s time. 

Lou Berney, November Road

- Disappointing really. I was expecting a far more powerful novel given all the hype that surrounded it - fawning reviews from other major crime writers like Don Winslow and Adrian McKinty.

- It’s a standard chase story, a genre that has little power in the end - ‘this happened, then that happened; they went here, then there’, etc.

- The conclusion is lame in the extreme, and very emotionally unsatisfying. The hero gives up and allows himself to be ended, virtually committing suicide. And the deaths of all the key and interesting characters along the way comfortably removes the necessity for any dramatic and imaginative resolutions.

- A major structural problem is that Carlos Marcello, the Mafia crime boss considered by many historians to have organised Kennedy’s assassination, and who chased down and eliminated all his associates to protect himself, is a real figure who died thirty years later. That seriously restricts the novel’s fictional options. It becomes a hybrid of fact/fiction, constricted both ways. 

- Also, that the core narrative of the love story peters out with little drama is a real and irritating weakness. 

Anna Burns, Milkman

- This Man Booker winner is an exceptionally good and satisfying read. 

- The setting is the Troubles in Belfast in the 1970’s - Catholics and Protestants are in a violent civil war. The IRA paramilitaries and the occupying British forces are murdering and bombing each other, and civilians (informants and ‘renouncers’ included) are always suspects and casualties. It’s an ugly place. 

- Nothing is named however. Not the city, not the country. Even England is simply ‘that place over the water’. Likewise, the characters are not named. The narrator is ‘middle-sister’. 

- This works so well in universalising the themes - the suffocating, gossiping, provincial political/social ghettos corrosive of good and loving relationships; the religious, conservative, family small-mindedness; the all-pervasive surveillance state; the emerging and soon to be powerful feminist movement (women who have ‘issues’) naming the imprisoning, oppressive and poisoning patriarchy - dominant themes in an 18 year old woman's painful experience of coping in a rotten society.

- She has been accused of the crime of ‘reading while walking’ because she devours literary classics as she walks the neighbourhood, and ‘in our type of environment it presents you as a stubborn, perverse character’.

- This a hard read and barely 10% of readers will get beyond the first 70 or so pages I’d hazard a guess. Great slabs of page after page prose, long paragraphs, no section breaks, 50 page chapters, densely typeset. It's formidable.

- However it sucked me in. It’s frequently tedious, strange, and frustrating, but it’s also mesmerising and an intellectually powerful critique of a savage, totalitarian, all controlling patriarchy. 

- It’s also often humorous, which is engaging, and the dialogue is always rich, intelligent and verbose in that stereotypical Irish, Joycean way. And all the characters, educated or not, speak in the same style and tone. The girl’s ‘ma’ and ‘da’ are opinionated, loquacious and delightful. As is ‘maybe-boyfriend’, his friend ‘chef’, middle-sister’s ‘longest friend’, and the ‘real’ milkman (his trade not surname) who is later revealed as ma’s ‘ex-boyfriend’ and possibly new one.

- The narrative constantly introduces characters and events that initially seem to make little sense, like ‘tablets girl’, a poisoner, and her half-blind sister, but gradually what meaning is being suggested starts to become clear. 

- The predatory ‘Milkman’ (his surname not trade) may be an insignificant individual but he symbolises a class of men and the social realities they have constructed - stalking, sleazy, powerful, dangerous, not to be associated with (echoes of Harvey Weinstein). The title of this book is Milkman (the surname not the trade). That is significant. 

- Slowly but surely a detailed picture of meaningful human relationships in a society under immense pressure emerges. A tapestry is being woven that gets richer and richer as the book progresses. The victory goes to those few with integrity and the courage to fight for their rightful place. Middle-sister is one of them.

- Anna Burns has written a stunningly good, profound and utterly original novel. Highly recommended.  

Chloe Hooper, The Arsonist.

WARNING: DO NOT GOOGLE ‘BLACK SATURDAY’ BUSHFIRES UNTIL YOU’VE READ THIS BOOK. (You need to not know or remember how it ends).

- This was a must-read for me as I’m a great fan of Chloe Hooper’s work, particularly her fiction. 

- This is her first non-fiction book after the superb The Tall Man. From the get-go it is powerful stuff. Its description of the ferocity of the bush fire is compelling.

- The alleged arsonist, Brendon Sokaluk, is identified by the police arson squad early and easily, without drama (someone dobs him in). He’s an intellectually disabled local identity. In terms of story power it seems limp, but that’s before Hooper’s talent for painting the full picture becomes evident. 

- The townspeople are angry and cruel. There are many death threats. It’s ugly. Brendon has always been regarded as  a ‘vegie', a 'retard’, a ‘spastic’. A lot of people feel intimidated, even threatened, by ‘strange’ people’. He is later diagnosed as autistic.

- Hooper describes the towns and the La Trobe Valley coal region very sympathetically. The privatisations, the huge job losses - ‘The Valley became a human sink, a place people ended up...They lived beyond the sight of those with influence, amidst the symbols of the unloved past’. 

- Is Brendon now a scapegoat? His defence lawyers and teams are thorough in questioning the police case. 

- Part three of the narrative is the court proceedings. It reminded me of Helen Garner, but without Helen as a character. Hooper brings the drama alive with detail, subtlety and fairness. It builds to a conclusion without any hint as to how the jury will decide. Both the police prosecutors and the defence team are portrayed as highly professional. 

- Very intense indeed. 

Sebastian Faulks, Paris Echo

- It doesn’t take long to get really sucked in by this story. The characters are delightful and the Paris setting enchanting. But there is a terrible darkness underneath it all. 

- The history of France and particularly Paris features strongly in the story - the Nazi occupation in WW2 and the brutal Algerian independence conflict afterwards. France as both occupied and occupier. Although occupied, a majority of French people (at least initially) cooperated with the Germans in their rule, and in their rounding up of the Jews for transportation to Poland for extermination. ‘That the people who herded them in and locked them up, then put them on buses were not Germans with guns and dogs but the gendarmes they saw every day on the street’.

- The Resistance gained strength only in the last two years. 

- It helps to read this book with a detailed map of Paris at your fingertips. So many streets and metro stations are named and they are integral to the story. Absolutely brings the city alive. The stark contrast between the low socioeconomic and the middle/upper class suburbs, and the French born and immigrant communities, are at the heart of the narrative. If you love Paris as much as I do then do yourself a favour and read this book.

- Hannah is an American academic who is researching how French women coped with the Nazi occupation from 1940-44, and what they thought of the Germans. The personal stories she uncovers are fascinating, as they’re focussed on domestic and family relationships as well as the tense political situation, not to mention their sometimes painful personal/sexual issues. In the years after the war ‘...so much was never said’. 

- Tariq’s struggle as a young, uneducated, poor African migrant is very well told. His ancestry as Berber, Bedouin, Muslim, African, made him feel he ‘was part of something larger, more invigorating’. His discussions with the old man ‘Victor Hugo’ whom he meets on the Metro are stimulating. ‘According to [Victor] it was the historic duty of his country to be a light and an example, the guardian of freedom for the world. In his version of events it was the French not the Jews who were God’s chosen people.’

- Fundamentally this beautiful, empathetic novel is a love story, and an exceptionally good one. 

Sarah Hanson-Young, En Garde.

- Details a shameful episode in Australian political history, when Senator David Leyonhjem slut-shamed Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young by yelling to her across the chamber: 'you should stop shagging men Sarah'.

- Although Hanson-Young never details her private life in this small book, the essential question is: what on earth does anyone's private life have to do with anything? 

- It’s plainly written, without flourish or style, yet paints a brutal picture of the constant and ugly attacks on women by men in all walks of life. 

- Hanson-Young rightly attacks the right wing Murdoch media and Fairfax shock jocks. This is how these tiny dicks get off. 

- She recounts an ugly episode when a drunken Cory Bernadi hounded her and sidled up to her while she was speaking in the Senate and whispered foul things to her. What an utter sleazebag that supposed Christian is. 

- Her defence of Labor politician Emma Husar is passionate and angry. Good to see. A woman whose political career was destroyed by slut-shaming.

- And an excellent appreciation of Julia Gillard and the awful misogynistic treatment she constantly received as PM. 

- Not a terribly insightful book but worth reading.

Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys

- Ford’s prose sparkles as usual. She’s a superb writer. And her frequent anger is electrifying. She’s often very funny as well. 

- She’s remarkably honest about her own circumstances in relation to the birth and parenting of her baby boy, including the stresses and strains on her relationship with her partner. 

- Things most of us take for granted - as ‘normal’ - are forensically critiqued, eg pink for girls, blue for boys.

- Fabulous names for men: ‘overgrown oafs’; ‘unweaned sulks’; ‘smarmy gits’;  ‘paranoid man-babies’; ‘an army of bloated, charmless cockjangles’; ‘poxy, arrogant, entitled fuckbags’; 

- Very rich in data to support key arguments. 

- Love the frequent ‘oh, I dunno...’ and ‘fucking’ (as in ‘creators are just really fucking antsy’; ‘well, fuck me sideways’) that enliven the passionate arguments.

- There’s a whole chapter on Milo Yiannopoulos. Why? The man is a waste of space and supremely unimportant, and has now faded into history anyway (unless you're one of the handful of ball scratchers who watch the Bolt Report). There’s also a whole chapter on Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) and other anti-feminist hate groups and their violence and rants. Devoting so many pages to these fringe lunatics is disappointing (even if Ford’s critiques are solid and forensic) when her much more enlightening interrogations of ‘normal’ and commonly accepted male behaviour patterns are where Ford is at her best. (Pity this book wasn’t written after the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. Ford would have eviscerated him, and it would have been electric! She’s done it however in a recent Fairfax column).

- Excellent on custody and child support issues; misogyny in our politics and the media; so-called comedy about rape; men’s oversensitivity to criticism; 

- Excellent on rape culture, particularly by the rugby players in Ireland and the outrageous and cruel punishment of the victim. Many other stories are revealing and depressing. Ford quotes a commentator: ‘I see a pattern emerging in rape culture that suggests women have a past, while men have potential’.

- One thing that sets Ford apart: she explores issues in depth and never lets up. It’s why she’s so persuasive. 

- Beautiful Epilogue - a letter to her son. A lovely way to end a powerful book. 


(PS: I would love to see Australian publishers adopt two rules and stick to them:

1. Always show a pic of the author.
2. Always include an index in a non-fiction book.

It’s a complete disservice to the reader not to do these things as a matter of course).

Bob Woodward, Fear

- I’ve always found the Bob Woodward books I’ve read rather tedious and hard-going. His prose is anything but fluent. But this one is a riveting read because it’s mainly conversations between the players in a madhouse (via subsequent interviews recorded with permission). And they hold nothing back. It’s war. 

- ‘Fear’ is not a good title. ‘Mayhem’, ‘Madhouse’, ‘Dysfunction’, ‘Chaos’, would have been far better. They mean a lot more, and are far more accurate and powerful descriptions of the essence of Trump and the cause of the constant frustrations of his staff. 

- The book is a collection of fascinating and detailed snippets and conversations about all sorts of things that went on in Trump’s White House after the election. McMaster’s job interview with Trump and Bannon is a classic! (86ff)

- Chapter 14 on Lebanon/Hezbollah/Iran v Israel/Saudi Arabia is enlightening and frightening at the same time.

- Chapter 17 on trade is about profound ignorance versus facts and expertise. Guess which side Trump is on.

- What surprises me is that there were a number of reasonably competent, intelligent and cool-headed members of Trump’s White House staff amidst the caravan of fools and toadies. National Security and Trade officials in particular were always trying to contain Trump’s worst impulses, eg, Gary Cohn, H.R.McMaster, James Mattis, Rob Porter. Even Steve Bannon, for God’s sake, sometimes comes across as one of the wiser heads. (Even though Bannon’s shtick is seeing ‘enemies’ everywhere, China in particular).

- Trump’s tweets infuriate every one of them. He’s uncontrollable. But they’re his ‘megaphone to his base’ as Hope Hicks described it. He needs Twitter, unfiltered. 

- ‘It’s all bullshit’ is a favourite Trump phrase. That's how he constantly describes the rules-based international democratic order that has brought stability, security and prosperity for decades. ‘Trade deficits are growing the US economy’ Cohn asserted. ‘I don’t want to hear that’ Trump said. ‘It’s all bullshit!’

- ‘He’s a fucking moron’, Tillerson said after one particularly crazy meeting. ‘He’s an idiot’ said Kelly. ‘You’re a fucking liar’ thought John Dowd, Trump’s lawyer for the Mueller investigation.

- But sometimes Trump gets it right - On Afghanistan, Trump told Porter, ‘It’s a disaster there. It’s never going to be a functioning democracy. We ought to just exit completely’.

- The major reason this book works as a riveting story is that Woodward brings all the main players alive. They are characters in a novel. You feel all their frustrations.

- It is impossible to imagine Trump having another four year term in office. Madness would no doubt descend to  utter calamity. 

Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth

- This is a very angry little book, clearly written with a ferocious intelligence. It is superb, and deserves to be very widely read in these noxious, unravelling times.

- It's and excellent examination of the destruction of mature, fact-based political debate in modern Western countries, particularly in the US. Trump is a symptom not a cause.

- The details provided on Russian interference in US politics, not just in the 2016 election, are shocking.

- Explores the roots of our current malaise going back to the 60’s. The chapter headings tell it all: The Decline and Fall of Reason; The New Culture Wars; 'Moi' and the Rise of Subjectivity; The Vanishing of Reality; The Co-opting of Language; Filters, Silos and Tribes; Attention Deficit; 'The Firehose of Falsehood': Propaganda and Fake News; The Schadenfreude of the Trolls'. 

- As you would expect from the brilliant former NYT books editor, the essay is dotted with literary allusions. Reflecting on Trump’s White House she quotes a character from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘...a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all round assholery.’

- The Epilogue takes us back to the US Constitution and to Jefferson and Washington and their speeches articulating warnings for future generations. Truths more relevant than ever.