A compassionate and candid memoir about the South Sudanese refugee experience.

Akuch Kuol Anyieth spent a large part of her childhood in the Kakuma refugee camp, located in the North-western region of Kenya. In  her memoir, Unknown: A Refugee's Story, she details the poverty, violence, danger and desperation of living for almost a decade in Kakuma. (In South Sudanese culture, names are sometimes selected to reflect the circumstances surrounding a person's birth. "Akuch" means "unknown" or "I don't know", signifying the author's birth during a time of uncertainty and war.) There were times of the day you didn't walk out alone, for fear of being abducted and raped. Or worse, killed. Food was always scarce, sanitation poor and people's mental health precarious. The UN promised food and protection, but could never deliver these basic human rights. Life in the camp was one of constant struggle.

The second half of Unknown chronicles the family's experiences in Melbourne as migrants.  Akuch's mother, a formidable force despite many limitations,  moved heaven and earth to get her family to Australia. In 2005 they arrived – two brothers, Gai and Anyieth, and sister Atong. Language difficulties and cultural differences meant the family struggled to lay down stable roots in Australia. Anyieth's elder brother, nicknamed Dragon due to his volatile nature, took to drink, drugs and street fighting, causing immense suffering and heartache for the family. A younger brother, Gai, also found adjusting to Australia difficult and took to the streets. (Thankfully, both brothers eventually found stability in their lives and settled down.) Meanwhile, Akuch threw herself into study and work, determined to succeed academically and financially, but also to help members of her community overcome the trauma they had experienced.

Unknown is a remarkable memoir. Akuch Anyieth lays out the horrible reality of life in a refugee camp and the difficulties of settling into a new country. Australian bureaucracy can be complex and daunting to deal with, and ingrained racist attitudes make life difficult for South Sudenese refugees. The sections discussing race are informative, giving the reader first hand insights into how people with darker skin are treated.

Besides being a bracing memoir of an extraordinary life, Unknown is also deeply compassionate. It asks us to suspend our quick judgements on troubled South Sudenese youth until we know the complicated background story of war, displacement and trauma.  

Release date 3rd May

Unknown: A Refugee's Story, by Akuch Kuol Anyieth. Published by Text. 

Review by Chris Saliba

A persuasive case is made for the power of positive thinking.

David Robson is a British science writer. His first book, The Intelligence Trap, looked at how smart people can make poor decisions. In The Expectation Effect, Robson examines the science of how expectations can influence the way our bodies perform. In short, a healthy mind means a healthy body. And the science agrees.

The book lists many extraordinary findings on health, fitness, anxiety, illness, learning and intellectual performance. There's even a fascinating chapter on food and diet, with research showing that appetite can be moderated with mere suggestion. For example, study participants who were told a meal was hearty and filling ate less. Obversely, participants who were told the same meal was fat free and low in calories ate more. Priming with words has an effect on how we eat and appreciate food.

In other studies, research has shown that low expectations leads to poorer academic outcomes. Girls who internalise negative social cues about their abilities go on to trail behind boys who are naturally more confident. Studies have found that girls given positive messages can close the learning gap. Teachers who send subtle cues to their students that they lack confidence in their abilities unwittingly foster poorer performances. In education, a teacher simply looking for the best in their students can dramatically improve learning.

While positive thinking can boost our health and fitness, the opposite can be deadly. A bizarre 1970s case of Laotian male immigrants suddenly dying in their sleep highlights the powerful effects of negative thinking, or what is now called the nocebo effect (the opposite of placebo). It is believed the Laotian immigrants, living in the US and far away from their home, feared the evil demon 'dab tsog' that roamed at night. Usually these men would have approached a local shaman to provide a protective spell against the demon, but that was no longer possible. Terror killed the Laotian men in their sleep. There are many other documented cases of what is known as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS).

Highly readable popular science on the mind-body connection. It will convince you that maintaining an optimistic outlook is essential to well being.  

The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your Life, by David Robson. Published by Canongate Trade. $32.99

Review by Chris Saliba

The philosphical novelist Robert Musil's autobiographical first novel, published in 1906.

Torless (we are never given his first name) is an adolescent student at an Austrian boarding school. He and his classmates, Reiting and Beineberg, catch fellow student Basini stealing from one of them. Rather than report him to their teachers, they decide to take matters into their own hands. At first they bully and beat him, threatening all the while to turn him in. It's physical and psychological torture in equal measure. But then things take an even darker turn. Reiting and Beineberg start to sexually abuse him, taking him to a private den where these violations are performed in an almost ritualistic manner.

Torless knows in a vague manner what is going on. He is also attracted to Basini himself, whom he finds to be an androgynous beauty. Basini, sensing that Torless wants to abuse him like the other boys, strips off his clothes and offers himself. Torless is dazzled by Basini's flawless white skin. And so begins a strange, sadomasochistic relationship, with the passive Basini eventually confessing his love for Torless.

As Torless finds himself drawn into these events, he experiences confusion about his rational and irrational self. He performs immoral acts, but questions his culpability. He feels that he is there, but also not there, merely watching events unfold and trying to figure out what they mean. The text often has an expressionistic, Freudian feel, sinking deep into the perverse subconscious. Robert Musil describes the id, Torless's shameful desires, wrestling with the super-ego, the rational part of the mind. Some of these passages are mind bending, occupying the liminal space between being and nothingness. It is Torless's dark night of the soul, and the reader must wade through the murk, hoping to see him come out the other end.

Despite its sordid subject matter, this is a philosophical novel that wrestles with questions of right and wrong. It's a book that some might find uncomfortable in light of contemporary sexual abuse scandals, but is worth a look at for its high literary value and morally complex subject matter. 

The Confusions of Young Torless, by Robert Musil. Published by Riverrun. $22.99

Review by Chris Saliba​

The stand up comic shows herself to be a formidable writer.

Hannah Gadsby's fame now stretches the world over, but her unpropitious beginnings were in the north Tasmanian town of Smithton. As described in Ten Steps to Nanette, the northern half of Tasmania was rampant with homophobia before the gay law reforms of the early nineties. It was then unremarkable for major public figures to stoke fear and violence against gay people. Gadsby chronicles this terrible time in considerable detail. 

While Nanette presents as a memoir, it's a multi-faceted, left-of-field one. Gadsby depicts the struggle of growing up queer in a hostile environment and the trauma that ensues. She also examines the art and psychology of comedy, how tension is built and released in an audience. At one point Gadsby confesses to being able to play her audience like an instrument. Finally, Nanette works as a confessional, delving deeply into Gadsby's troubled psyche and then resurfacing victorious, having subdued many personal demons. There's a good deal of therapy and working through problems in these pages.

Fans of Hannah Gadsby won't be disappointed with this intelligent, perceptive and often very funny memoir. A substantial work of autobiography with not a word wasted.

Ten Steps to Nanette, by Hannah Gadsby. Published by Allen & Unwin. $49.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A brilliantly sharp and entertaining short history of the Soviet Union.

The past is prologue, wrote Shakespeare. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, anxious observers look towards history to try and explain, if not the future, at least what may have led to current events. Australian historian and Russia expert Sheila Fitzpatrick's The Shortest History of the Soviet Union seems to have come at the perfect moment.

The story begins with the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the monarchy and installation of a socialist government, based on Marxist principles. Vladimir Lenin's far-left group, the Bolsheviks, more or less muddled through into power. Under enormous pressure, Lenin succumbed to poor health and died relatively young, in his mid-fifties. He was immediately deified, his body embalmed and placed in Red Square mausoleum. His wife and friends were horrified. The public clamoured for it.

Joseph Stalin was an unlikely successor. He was largely seen as a mediocre bureaucrat. Vastly underestimated, he turned out to be a consummate politician. His political skills involved the use of terror on his own population. The so-called Great Purge saw the execution of 700,000 people between 1934 – 1939. Over a million were also imprisoned. The strange and self-defeating thing about the Great Purge was that Stalin executed, for no seemingly logical reason, his military and industrial leadership, all in the lead up to a war that he knew was coming with Germany. A conflict that he greatly feared, no less.

Two leaders followed Stalin's death in short succession (Georgy Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin) until Nikita Khrushchev's reign from 1953 – 1961. Khrushchev could be a hothead and he seriously miscalculated when he stationed nuclear missiles in Cuba, unwittingly launching the Cuban Missile Crisis. Russia had to backtrack and remove the warheads. The Kremlin stripped him of power in 1964 and installed Leonid Brezhnev.

The final leader of the Soviet Union was Mikhail Gorbachev. His main policy of glasnost (“openneness”) would see the Soviet state suddenly crumble. This wasn't Gorbachev's intention. He simply wanted reasonable reform. Bizarrely, it seemed seventy years of Soviet government had been built on nothing more than sand. It only took someone to sneeze and the whole edifice came down.

The unstable Boris Yeltsin succeeded, but as poor health plagued him he installed Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent raised to take pride in notions of Russian empire. The crumbling of Soviet satellite states, moving culturally and politically to a Western European model, only caused anxiety.

Sheila Fitzpatrick has written a pithy and witty short history of the Soviet union. She employs a dry humour when explaining the political and ideological contortions of Soviet philosophy. This was a topsy-turvy world where black was white and yes meant no; a nightmare Alice in Wonderland like environment where the leader would irrationally demand “off with your head”; a strange place built on ideology with little basis in reality. The history of the Soviet Union reads like politics for politics sake.

The Shortest History of the Soviet Union, by Sheila Fitzpatrick. Published by Black Inc. $24.99

Review by Chris Saliba