- 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'.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
