- This is a sad story, beautifully told. Two lonely people, one old Australian woman, one young Chinese man, are grappling with family and personal tragedies.
- Cheng constructs a rather simple narrative but she enriches it with reflections on motherhood, family, illness, anxiety, death, and most of all loneliness. Her characters are captured and wounded by loveless families. Andy, the young student from Hong Kong, ‘felt like an insect trapped in amber, imprisoned and alone’.
- The old lady, Meg, castigates herself for ‘talking without really saying anything’.
- Death is a real presence in the story, and lives are thwarted, not fully lived. Potential is not realised. ‘No family’s perfect. Every family is broken’.
- As the novel develops Cheng contrasts, respectfully and subtly, not just two different people but two distinct cultures, Chinese and Australian. Whether it be food, houses, animals, family life, law, education, ambition, recreation - illness and other constraints are dominant.
- This is a superb novel that will stay with you long after you've read it. You know these people and you feel for them.
- Set in the early sixties mostly in outback Australia, in an Aboriginal reserve and a couple of fictitious towns, this is an Indigenous story filled with a fair bit of drama and tension. But unfortunately the novel is seriously flawed and disappointing.
- While we can't help but sympathise with the awful predicament of the Indigenous people, the narrative too often descends into rank sentimentality and melodrama, the characters becoming caricatures.
- The focus is on the fraught relationship between the Aborigines and their white masters. They are yet to be constitutionally recognised as full citizens and are under the surveillance and 'protection' of the State. The racism is ugly.
- The police are disgraceful as you would expect - arrogant, petty and brutal. But sprinkled throughout the white community there are real humans, who are always coming to the rescue.
- There was room here for real tragedy and darkness but Birch never allows it. It's all too nice.
- This is a tiresome account of the same old dickheads. After 50 pages I asked myself should I continue? In Fire and Fury the chaos was new information and therefore revealing. Now, it’s all old news, and nothing surprises us.
- Steve Bannon features strongly again. He’s used as a chorus, brazenly and crudely commenting on everything and everyone.
- Trump is once again portrayed as a stupid, demented, certifiably insane, totally self-obsessed, cruel, ugly and miserable turd. He even dislikes his 13 year old son Barron, and his marriage to the mysterious Melania has presumably descended to a transactional, self-preservation agreement.
- Wolf’s problem is that, after the last two and a half years of Trump’s presidency, we know Trump is rubbish, and we know all the White House staffers, lawyers and other grossly incompetent has-beens who have come and gone through that chaotic period.
- That’s why this book is essentially boring. The most interesting chapters are ‘Kavanaugh’ and the Epilogue on the fizzer that was the Mueller Report.
- It will sell perhaps 10% of Fire and Fury’s huge numbers. And the great majority of buyers will only skip through it at best.
- This is a very clearly written and enlightening book. It's Energy 101. A compulsive read for anybody interested in Australia's never-ending electricity, energy and climate crisis debate. Warren is not a politician or environmental activist but a highly experienced player and regulator in our energy industry over many years.
- There are fascinating chapters on renewables and climate change; how electricity is generated and supplied through national mechanisms; why prices have aggressively increased over the last decade, our rooftop solar energy obsession; the future of our coal power stations; the rapidly growing wind and solar industries; and others.
- Warren thoroughly dissects Finkel and the NEG, and savagely condemns conservative politicians for mindlessly abandoning these effective options on the pretext that they privilege, or even legitimise, ‘renewables’. They've indulged in a ‘catastrophic policy fail’. ‘Renewables generation is now a mature technology...targets or commitments should be abolished...they [are] redundant’. The marketplace is the powerful enabler. Commercial realities are in play and must be allowed to play out by governments.
- ‘The need to ‘firm’ renewables is the big electricity policy challenge of the 21st century’. The baseload inflexibility of coal-fired power stations and nuclear reactors make them unsuitable as technologies to firm large-scale intermittent generation.
- He returns to difficult concepts a number of times as the book progresses, deepening our understanding. (But often the constant and needless repetitions means a decent editor went missing).
- He's pro gas, as it can provide flexible backup. ‘We need to stop demonising gas. Gas is a renewables enabler. We will need it to support the high-renewables grid we are building right now.‘ (He doesn’t mention the impact on agriculture or the environment unfortunately, but leaves us with the firm impression that political, anti-gas mining decisions, particularly by the Andrews government in Victoria, will need eventually to be reversed).
- Incredibly, there's no mention of Adani (or the Galilee Basin) throughout the book, not even in the index. Because Warren considers it irrelevant to the far bigger issues. He's a hard-headed realist, driven only by reason and common sense. ‘Electricity doesn’t work so well if it’s turned into a popularity contest’.
- The book could have been improved with some charts and tables, just to visually clarify a lot of the extremely valuable information provided. Nevertheless the arguments are clear and lucidly presented, and the author's talent for arresting similes makes even difficult concepts come vividly to life.
- And exceptionally good read.
- What an extraordinary novel this is. And an absolutely riveting read as well. I simply couldn't put it down.
- It's a truly inspirational story of four young Hungarian Jewish friends in Budapest in 1938, prior to the Nazi invasion, and the family of one of the friends who made her way to Australia years later. It's set in 1938 and 2007. The friends and the Australian grandson are all brilliant mathematicians.
- The narrative structure works perfectly. There are two voices - the author’s, and one of the friends who has written a journal. The journal, written in rather plain, unadorned prose, brings 1938 alive, while Sved herself, more colourfully, tells the contemporary Australian story.
- This remarkable novel will undoubtedly win the Miles Franklin in 2020. I say that with full confidence, and you heard it here first.
- As a great fan of Ellis's novels, particularly American Psycho which was an exquisite and damning critique of late 20th century decadence, I looked forward to reading this despite its widespread condemnation by critics.
- Unfortunately, it's rather tedious, self-indulgent and dated. There are good parts, but overwhelmingly it's bad.
- He revisits phases of his life and career as a novelist, film/TV critic, podcaster, screenwriter, tweeter. His views are often astute, always intelligent, revealing, and frequently savage. He holds nothing back. It's the sort of memoir that will undoubtedly lose him a lot of friends. He quotes James Joyce: ‘I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people’.
- His movie reviews are often a little banal, eg The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing, but at other times subtle and insightful. He loathed, for example, Barry Jenkins’ Oscar winner Moonlight. His critique of this absurdly lauded film is spot on: a product of ‘liberal Hollywood’s fake-woke corporate culture’.
- But dominating the book are his generally weak and immature political reflections. Certainly many of us would share his frustrations about ‘the threatening groupthink of ‘progressive ideology’, which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions..’. ‘Victimhood’ is Ellis’s principal obsession. He doesn't think much of Millennials, who he calls 'Generation Wuss', because they 'can’t abide criticism'.
- He sees everywhere ‘a new kind of liberalism', censoring, punishing, obstructing, blocking. ‘Everyone seemed vulnerable to micro-aggressions... survivor-victims afflicted by traumas that happened years ago...It’s actually an illness...a new kind of mania, a psychosis that the culture has been coddling’. (Interestingly there is no mention whatsoever of the #MeToo movement).
- Incredibly, he’s very politically naive, showing little awareness of the rise of right wing extremist populism around the world. He's oblivious to the ugliness of Republicans and their far right trajectory over the decades since Ronald Reagan, Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich. Being ‘strenuously independent’ is his identity, whatever that means. He retreats into the lukewarm sanctuary of being an ‘artist’. He didn’t even vote in the 2016 election, for god's sake.
- With Trump in power ‘it seemed to many of us...that the Left was morphing into...a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party... a rage machine...’ ‘In the summer of 2018 they had turned into haters, helped by an inordinate amount of encouragement from the mainstream media, and now came across as anti-common-sense, anti-rational and anti-American’. Absurdly, he's talking about the Democrats and their supporters, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other respected media outlets. He's swallowed hook, line and sinker the 'fake news' mantra of Donald Trump.
- And then he has the gall to admit that he ‘just wasn’t that interested in politics’! He thinks he has ‘the gift of neutrality’. So lame.
- He ends his book with an inane genuflection to the bombastic narcissist and ‘artist’ Kanye West and his aggressively pro-Trump views.
- Don't waste your time reading this book. I've done it for you. Read or re-read American Psycho instead, or see the movie (which Ellis liked).
- This is a very clearly written analysis of extremism in democracies around the world and how their leaders, even without majority support, come to power. It’s so good because it puts Trump in context. His populism is not new.
- In the US during the Depression demagogues had large followings: the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin; Louisiana governor Huey Long; Senator Joseph McCarthy; Alabama governor George Wallace; They were all exploiting ‘plain old American rage... the old and honorable American tradition of hate the powerful’ (journalist Arthur Hadley).
- But these earlier extremists never made it to the Presidency. The major parties had become the gatekeepers and the candidate selection process of the Primaries helped filter them out. Celebrities had always fallen short.
- But then came Trump. And two new elements: money and alternative media, especially Fox News and social media.
- Across the world authoritarian governments use so-called ‘reform’ measures to their constitution to effectively kill democracy and cement their encumbrance. Wars, terrorism and faux security ‘crises’ are often the pretence.
- There are two norms fundamental to a functioning democracy: mutual toleration and institutional forbearance.
- Newt Gingrich's arrival on the scene began to change that. He initiated the Republican party's ‘no compromise’ aggression in the 80’s and 90’s. Forbearance was rejected in pursuit of victory by ‘any means necessary’.
- The Tea Party emerged. Their aggression against Obama was relentless. Extremist rhetoric became the norm: ‘Nazi Germany’, ‘socialism’, ‘dictator’, ‘a Muslim’, ‘pretending to be an American’. The ‘birther enablers’ also emerged, including Trump.
- American democracy is now at a critical juncture: ‘..if Trump were to confront a war or terrorism attack, he would exploit this crisis fully...in our view this scenario represents the greatest danger facing American democracy today’.
- Unfortunately the conclusion to this excellent analysis is a little too lame: It urges the parties to 'seek alliances', as Germany did after WW2. ‘When we agree with our political rivals at least some of the time, we are less likely to view them as mortal enemies’. This is naive. It's the sort of thing that happens after a WAR. The German ‘coming together’ of centre-right elements is hardly a model for the US. Germany was a soundly defeated country in 1945 and the destruction of a hideous Nazi regime.
- The authors are on firmer, far more realistic ground, when they outline a far-reaching economic and social agenda the Democrats must adopt to ensure their recovery, victory and long term success. This makes much more sense.
- This final sentence I have to profoundly disagree with: ‘Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will be truly exceptional’.
- Pity the authors know nothing about Australia, New Zealand, Canada or even the UK. They are never mentioned. Remarkably, they are not even listed in the index.
