A tragic accident is told in harrowing, intimate detail. In 2012, five-year-old Palestinian boy Milad Salama was scheduled to go on a school trip. His family lived in the impoverished town of Anata on the West Bank, where infrastructure such as roads and housing were of a poor quality. The bus traveled along the Jaba road - a road notorious for its safety issues. Conditions were bad on the day of travel, with an approaching storm making visibility difficult. An oncoming truck collided with the bus and seven children died. Help was late to arrive, which if it had come earlier could perhaps have saved lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama describes the events of that awful day. Through a brief biographical sketch of Abed Salama, Milad’s father, the reader also gets a short history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how occupation directly affects the lives of Palestinians. The genius of Nathan Thrall’s book is how it shows personal lives caught up in larger historical forces. With its focus on people and their relationships to each other, the book reads very much like a novel. A humbling book that concentrates on the pain and suffering of many Palestinian lives. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, by Nathan Thrall. Published by Allen Lane. $36.99 Review by Chris Saliba Following on from Robyn Annear's Adrift in Melbourne, the historian brings more stories – both alarming and entertaining – of Melbourne's early years. In this new history of Melbourne by much loved writer Robyn Annear, the overarching theme is street corners. Before home entertainment – radio, television, the internet – people took to the streets to keep themselves amused. The streets were loud, noisy, crowded, exciting and dangerous. Drunks, chancers, larrikins, sex workers, snake oil merchants and pickpockets, among other unsavoury types, thronged the inner city. Life was lived very much in public in the 19th century, which could create problems such as marauding gangs (the larrikin phenomenon) and street congestion: people hung around street corners in large numbers and simply didn't move on. The sheer volume of people that would turn up for public meetings and flamboyant street performers could easily reach the thousands. Many street corners carried their own pet names and reputations. “Puppy-Dog corner”, as it was known during its heyday, on the corner of Swanston and Collins, was a hangout for foppish young men who liked to ogle passing young women. While Corners of Melbourne ostensibly sticks to street corners as its theme, the book ranges over subjects such as city sanitation (or lack thereof), rudimentary water systems and shoddy buildings, some simply collapsing under their own poor construction. The sections of the book dealing with toilet waste are stomach churning. Human waste (and all sorts of other garbage) was often simply dumped in what are now public parks. Men relieved themselves in alleyways (Melbourne didn't get its first public urinal until 1859) and the urine ran freely in the streets. In summer the smell was intolerable. Robyn Annear brings her usual wit and eye for a cracking good story to Corners. The book is full of characters and incidents gleaned from the newspapers of the day, including The Argus and The Herald. There's never a dull moment in this gritty yet humorous history which manages to truly bring the streets of early Melbourne alive. An interesting place to read about, but one which you may not want to visit! Corners of Melbourne, by Robyn Annear. Published by Text. $35 Review by Chris Saliba In a work of peerless research, David Marr shows how Australia was won by the rifle, the carbine and the sword. Not by peaceful settlement. In 2019, journalist David Marr was asked by his uncle about a mysterious person in their family. Marr's great grandmother, Maud, was still alive when he was in his twenties, but he'd lost contact with her since the age of eight. What had happened to her in the intervening years? What Marr's research found was that Maud's father Reg, and his brother Darcy, were part of Australia's Native Police. They essentially cleared the land of its Indigenous people so squatters could run their sheep. In Marr's portrait of early Australia, the country is little more than a brutal money factory. Official word from the English Crown and Parliament was that the native inhabitants were to be left alone. The English knew it was their country; they also knew it was being usurped. These fine words from the mother country, however, evaporated upon Australian shores. No vigorous laws protected Aboriginals or their right to Country. In the early years of the colony, Aboriginal people weren't even allowed to give testimony in court, ensuring the law worked to advance white interests. Public concern in protecting Aboriginals was lukewarm at best. The mood was one of turning a blind eye to atrocities committed, allowing the Native Police to do its unspeakable work. It was in everyone's best interests to secure as much land as possible. Killing for Country quotes extensively from the contemporary record of letters, journals, memoirs, newspapers and parliamentary record. (The book is a triumph of research.) It seems clear that everyone knew what was going on. Through the newspaper reports of the time, it was part of public discourse and couldn't be ignored. Terrible mass killings were taking place, but there was no one – no laws, moral authority or public outrage – that could stop it. Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies is that land use could have been negotiated and much bloodshed avoided. Early pastoral leases actually stipulated shared land use between settler and traditional owners – but none of this was ever observed. It was rather a brutal land grab. David Marr's book makes for ugly, confronting reading. Even those who have read much about Australia's Frontier Wars may still be shocked by how pervasive and widely known the killings were. How little was done to stop it. And ultimately, that this was the method by which the early colonies established themselves, paving the way for modern Australia. Killing for Country, by David Marr. Published by Back Inc. $39.99 Review by Chris Saliba What has happened to capitalism in the age of the internet? Yanis Varoufakis is an interesting mix of lived experience and academic theory. He was the Greek Minister for Finance when Greek government debt needed renegotiating with creditors during the country's 2015 fiscal crisis. Since then he has written several books on economics, the latest being Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is written as a letter to his father, who was active in left-wing politics. The book centres around a question his father had asked him during the early days of the internet: will this new technology kill capitalism? The answer to that question is complicated, as you'd imagine. In essence, Varoufakis says that the internet has created a group of mega rent seekers. For example, Google Play and the Apple Store use third party creators to create products to put on their platforms. Google and Apple merely hoover up the rents from these poor workers – proles, as Varoufakis calls them – for allowing them to use their digital shop front. Worse still is the situation for the “serfs”, everyday users like you and me who give our data free to the big tech companies to monetise. In short, we've all made a Faustian pact with the internet. We've garnered all these digital free goodies, but we've had to sell our souls in the process. Technofeudalism is the story of concentrated power on steroids. The big tech companies offer the notion of “choice” - but there is none, really. It's either use their products or go without life's basic necessities such as banking, shopping, government and health services etc. Many authors have now tackled this subject, most notably Jaron Lanier and Shoshana Zuboff. Varoufakis offers an idiosyncratic history of capitalism, using Greek myths to get his point across. The result is a highly original yet contentious treatise on the state of the world's finances (much time is devoted to American debt and Chinese surpluses), written from an almost radical left-wing point of view. Many will find much to argue and wrestle with here, but also a range of thought provoking ideas to consider, coming from an original and unorthodox thinker. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, by Yanis Varoufakis. Published by Jonathan Cape. $36.99. Review by Chris Saliba A new biography of Rupert Murdoch concentrates on his early years. Rupert Murdoch’s influence is ubiquitous, yet the man himself remains oddly opaque. Contradictions abound. During his university days, he toyed with left-wing politics, but soon moved to the right. He painted himself the outsider, but quickly became the establishment. As Murdoch once said candidly: “Monopoly is a terrible thing, until you have it.” Journalist Walter Marsh’s new biography of Murdoch concentrates on the mogul’s formative years in Adelaide at the helm of The News, especially its controversial coverage of the 1959 Stuart royal commission, which brought Rupert and his editor, Rohan Rivett, close to a jail term for seditious libel. The book also works as a dual biography of his father, Keith. Murdoch senior started as the editor of the Melbourne Herald and was soon engineering a series of ambitious business deals that sowed the seeds of the Murdoch empire, but left him overdrawn and overstretched. Rupert clearly inherited his father’s penchant for high stakes and risk taking. Young Rupert is a scrupulously well-researched history that examines the power of the press in the twentieth century, and its influence on politics. Rupert Murdoch remains largely elusive, yet new research shows glimpses of a man under pressure and unable to enjoy his success. Readers interested in Australian politics and publishing will find much to satisfy here. Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire, by Walter Marsh. Published by Scribe. $34.99 Release date 1st August. Review by Chris Saliba This review first published at Books + Publishing. How tiny germs made the world as we know it According to Jonathan Kennedy, a teacher in global health, pathogens have played a bigger role in historical events than we give credit for. History's narrative arc is usually described as one of great men and superior civilisations, the world mere putty awaiting the hands of god. But what if it was pathogens – smallpox and malaria for example – that have really given conquering armies their competitive edge? Jonathan Kennedy argues that this is very much the case. From the fate of Neanderthals to the American Civil War, pathogens have played a major role in aiding one side against the other. Societies with no immunity to introduced diseases didn't have a hope. The most famous historical example is the Spanish conquest of the Mexica and Inka Empires. The population was brutally swathed by smallpox, allowing the Spanish victory with only a few hundred soldiers. The mosquito-borne virus yellow fever allowed immune Haitian rebels to win independence from Napoleon's France. French soldiers didn't stand a chance against the virus. Pathogenesis provides example after example of killer diseases changing the course of history. Kennedy even argues the Medieval plague helped kick start the capitalist revolution. By drastically reducing the number of farmers, it gave them more bargaining power and the incentive to maximise profits. Written in lively and engaging prose, and weaving in amusing literary allusions from Genesis to Tolkein, this is a compelling history that will appeal to readers of Sapiens and Guns, Germs and Steel. Pathogenesis, Jonathan Kennedy. Published by Random House. $35 Review by Chris Saliba Anthropolgist David Graeber argues pirate culture laid the foundation stones of The Enlightenment. In this posthumous work, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, anthropologist and activist David Graeber (1961 - 2020) makes the case that when rogue English pirates in the late 17th and early 18th centuries sought refuge in northern Madagascar, it led to a cultural and political fusion with the Malagasy people that was a forerunner to the Enlightenment. There was much fascination with pirate lore at the time and in 1724 A General History of the Pyrates was published in London (its rumored author was Daniel Defoe). It included a description of an egalitarian Madagascan pirate state called Libertalia. Libertalia was pure fiction, but another Madagascan state, the Betsimisaraka confederation, established in 1712 by the son of a British pirate and Malagasy queen, maintained an egalitarian government for close to 40 years. The historical pirate record is thin on the ground, and Graeber uses the verbs “seems” and “appears” a lot when trying to flesh out his arguments. Even though Pirate Enlightenment is more wish fulfillment than anything else, Graeber’s intellectual energy and curiosity can never be in doubt. A fascinating thought experiment that will have readers scrambling to do additional research of their own. Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, by David Graeber. Published by Allen Lane. $35 Review by Chris Saliba Academic Sarah Churchwell demonstrates that the American Civil War never really ended. American academic Sarah Churchwell has taken the interesting route of trying to explain Donald Trump's dominance of US politics by examining the text of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind. UK based, Churchwell is a professor at the University of London, perhaps giving her enough distance to form a clearer view of American culture, history and racial issues. After being asked so many times why the American people had chosen Trump, she wrote The Wrath to Come in response. Her argument can be put in Shakespearean terms: the past is prologue. The American Civil War never really did solve issues of race, slavery and the South's financial dependence on cheap Black labour. In reviewing both the novel and the famous film adaptation, Churchwell finds a narrative of white victimhood and self-pity. Slavery was not that bad, the majority of whites believed, and it was only the Northern incursion into the South that brought problems. Everything was fine before then. Slaves were mostly satisfied with their lot, whites believed. Hence the utter shock when the enslaved were set free: their white oppressors couldn't believe they wanted to leave. What makes this denial even more extraordinary is the public nature of lynchings. Thousands turned up to watch these grotesque spectacles that involved mutilation and dismemberment before death, then the scrambling for body parts as souvenirs afterwards. How could whites not realise that Black people would be rightly terrified? And yet Southern white people continued to paint a picture of themselves as a civilised and gracious community. The Wrath to Come (the title is a quote from James Baldwin, a euphemism for white rage) interweaves history with literary criticism. Churchwell contrasts Gone With the Wind's' timeline against the actual historical record, throwing into relief the text's underlying racism and wilful ignorance. A difficult and disturbing read that does make sense of today's American white supremacism. It also provides a template of white denialism that could be transplanted to many countries around the world, Australia included. The Wrath to Come, by Sarah Churchwell. Published by Apollo. $39.99 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 Historian Anna Clark examines how the writing of Australian history has changed over time. Inspired by undated rock art paintings above the Dyarubbin-Hawkesbury River, Anna Clark has endeavoured to write a history of Australia that is a mixture of the non-linear and the traditionally chronological. Each chapter covers a theme, “Gender”, “Country”, “Convicts” etc., and uses as a point of departure a particular text. These texts need not be a written work. For example, the chapter “Emotion” uses the ABC Radio National debate from Philip Adams' Late Night Live program, while the chapter “Time” references ancient fish traps (Ngunnhu). Technically speaking, Making Australian History is a history of how we as a nation have seen ourselves. A history of our history. Our European beginnings have meant we have seen the country through a white, male lens. First Peoples didn't really exist, and if they did, they were on the way out. Natural selection would take care of that. Some of the texts that Clark cites are blunt on this point. Before Europeans came, so the thinking went, nothing had existed: no culture, no history, no people. As the nation matured, First Nations voices were permitted. Besides the publication of breakthrough texts, theirs was an oral history, requiring imagination and empathy on the part of non-Indigenous people. All of which brings us up to the present day, where Anna Clark teases out what the future possibilities of Australian history could be. Making Australian History is often meandering and ponderous. Some readers may find the book long-winded and overly wordy. Despite this, the book works well to evoke the shifting perspectives and attitudes to Australia's story. An interesting road less travelled by a thoughtful writer. Making Australian History, by Anna Clark. Published by Vintage. $34.99 Review by Chris Saliba |
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