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

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.
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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

A cautionary tale about power unchecked.

From 1968 to 1995, Colin Manock was South Australia's chief forensic pathologist. During that time, he was there at every crime scene where an autopsy was required. His evidence helped secure some 400 criminal convictions. There was only one problem. A lot of his work as a pathologist was considered substandard. He was also lacking in qualifications, having no training in histopathology – the practice of taking tissue samples from various organs to discern more complex signs of disease or injury.

In 1968, Manock had seen an advertisement for the director of pathology at South Australia's institute of Medical and Veterinary Science. The institute was eager to fill the position, and with no other promising candidates, Manock was accepted, with the hope that he would undertake further training. He didn't. Manock's English accent (he emigrated from the UK), self-possession and refusal to concede mistakes meant his evidence was often accepted without demur. But as his work has come to be reviewed over the years, deficiencies have become obvious. In the handful of cases author Drew Rooke examines in A Witness of Fact, many have spent decades in prison due in large part to questionable forensic work. Some have had their convictions entirely overturned.

Drew Rooke has written a fascinating, easy-to-read biography of a strange, disturbing character. The middle sections concentrate on a number of cases and read like the best of true crime – enigmas to be solved. The book offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving too much power, unchecked, to one person. Clearly the work of forensic pathologists, as presented in A Witness of Fact, requires rigorous peer review before being used in courts of law. Once legal decisions have been made, lives can be ruined for decades. Or forever. Derek Bromley, who still protests his innocence of murder, has been behind bars for close to forty years. He could have walked free in the early 2000s if he'd admitted guilt, but maintains his innocence. He was convicted in large part on Manock's evidence, which has come under increasing scrutiny in the past two decades.

Public interest journalism mixed with compelling true crime cases.

A Witness of Fact: The Peculiar Case of Chief Forensic Pathologist Colin Manock, by Drew Rooke. Published by Scribe. $32.99

​Review by Chris Saliba

Historian Robyn Annear takes the reader on seven walks through Melbourne.
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Robyn Annear is well known for her pithy, always amusing histories of Melbourne, including Bearbrass and A City Lost and Found. In Adrift in Melbourne, Annear takes the reader on a perambulatory adventure through the city's major landmarks and its lesser known byways. Street corners, dead ends, crumbling buildings all have their story to tell. Not only the streets, but beneath we find an old Melbourne - “Pompeii-like” - buried underground. Old houses, fences, cellars were built over, leaving a mysterious subterranean world. Archaeological digs in the notorious Little Lon district, famous for its brothels and rough characters, show its erstwhile residents not so down at heel as once presumed. They owned, among other things, fine China and jewelry.

Melbourne is not just its monuments and street grid, and Annear takes joy in its varied personalities and unusual professions: mesmerists, fortune tellers, wig makers, tooth pullers, herbalists, phrenologists, quacks and crooks. Indeed, the city is its people, the mad shopkeepers, visionary business people such as Edward Cole (famous for Cole's Book Arcade) and even the tramps who cling to the city for succour. The descriptions of Bourke Street's Job Warehouse drapery store will bring back memories for many, with its dingy, unkempt windows and notoriously querulous proprietor. Even the intrepid Annear was too scared to enter.

Adrift in Melbourne is a vivid history that moves back and forth in time, from pre-invasion to now. Readers who have lived in or regularly visited Melbourne will recall places from the past: the clanging noise of Coles Cafeteria, the short lived skateboard ramps at the old Queen Victoria Hospital site, the 1980s City Square. The hilly Flagstaff Gardens, we learn, is one of the few places in Melbourne that retains its original landscape. If you want to imagine Indigenous Country before white settlement, go visit.
An entertaining romp and joyous celebration of a city that keeps on giving.

Adrift in Melbourne, by Robyn Annear. Text Publishing. $27.99

Review by Chris Saliba

A compelling social and economic history of Tasmania's convict class that made their way to Victoria.

Vandemonians were convicts originally sent to Van Dieman’s Land, later migrating to Victoria. They were an underclass much abhorred by Victorian society. Many hid their convict past – even from their own children - making up fake identities, backstories and names. The history of Victoria’s Vandemonians is one of violence, alcohol, poverty, disease, starvation, repeat court appearances and jail time. Careers in crime could be multi-generational, passed down the family tree. Children often died young, from disease, hunger or neglect. Sexual abuse of children was shockingly common. In short, the odds were stacked against ex-convicts, and they often failed to produce a lineage, making them lost to history.

Historian Janet McCalman has written a sharp, intellectually bracing portrait of this doleful cohort of early Victorian settlers. Based on research from the Ships Project, McCalman presents a gallery of tough, tragic and yet resilient battlers who carved out a precarious existence in a hostile world. With its strong grasp of the economic, social and historical forces that entrench poverty and disadvantage, Vandemonians illustrates how so many of these problems are still with us today. A first class history that will surely become a classic.

Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victoria, by Janet McCalman. Published by Miegunyah Press. $39.99

Review by Chris Saliba