Category: Non-fiction - Wabonga Press

One Italian Summer

28/7/2017

Pip Williams: Affirm Press $29.99

WHERE better to experience small-acreage self-sufficiency first-hand than in Italy: a country famed for its sun-ripened produce, luscious artisanal cheeses, plump piquant smallgoods and hearty pastas and breads?
It’s this reasoning that motivates a family of four Australians to pack their bags as lightly as possible and head to the opposite side of the world in search of both skills and inspiration.
Having already relocated from suburban Sydney to a semi-rural block in the Adelaide Hills, Pip, Shannon, Aiden and Riley decide to take their quest for a tree-change one step further by spending several months learning the essentials of the trade as ‘woofers’ – Willing Workers on Organic Farms.
With housesitters in place and sons Aidan and Riley bribed with the promise of gelato every day, Pip and Shannon guide the little troupe through pre-dawn Rome before arriving at the first of four properties on which they will volunteer their labour in return for basic board: a remote bee-keeping operation near Rassina, Tuscany.
As their adventure progresses, woofing carries them to Zambone in Calabria (from where they have a spectacular view of volcanic Stromboli), Pianoro near Bologna in Emilia-Romagna and Cassole near Turin in Piedmont.
In between stints on-farm, the family detours to Sorrento and Positano on the glamorous Amalfi Coast; Mount Vesuvius near Naples, long overdue to erupt again; the millennia-old limestone cave-dwellings of Matera; walled Lucca, with its terracotta-and-stucco labyrinth; and wondrous, watery Venice, where the boys discover that even their hotel-room toilet has its own private canal view.
Along the way they are challenged physically by the demands of planting, weeding, pruning, constructing and conserving for hours in Italy’s fierce midsummer heat and emotionally by the realities of extracting a sustainable existence from relatively few resources and of living side by side for extended periods with hosts they barely know.

The Duchess

7/7/2017

Penny Junor: William Collins £20.00

PERHAPS no woman in history has felt the world’s condemnation more fiercely than the former Camilla Parker Bowles. Yet, for much of the past half century, few people outside her immediate family and close circle of trusted friends have truly understood Camilla’s circumstances.
Rather, she has been known only by reputation, and an exceptionally unfavourable one at that: she has been cited as the callous mistress who tempted the Prince of Wales into committing adultery – the third party in what an entire generation wanted to believe was Charles’ fairytale romance with Lady Diana Spencer, his impeccably pedigreed, glamorous, innocent bride.
Now, in The Duchess, British journalist and longtime royal biographer Penny Junor delivers a contrasting insight.
Junor has been observing the Duchess of Cornwall since she was simply ‘Mrs PB’, newly married to an ambitious career soldier who even during the couple’s courtship flaunted a succession of simultaneous girlfriends (including Charles’ sister, Princess Anne). Andrew Parker Bowles’ philandering continued openly after their wedding while Camilla, rather than pursuing the prince, directed her energy into raising children Tom and Laura and appearing oblivious to her husband’s infidelities.
The Duchess examines the disintegration of both the Parker Bowles and Wales marriages and details the events that led to Charles and Camilla’s reunion after almost a decade of platonic camaraderie.
It documents Camilla’s long and tortuous transition in the eyes of the public from despised ‘other woman’ to royal confidant, companion and, eventually, spouse.
Junor describes the frustrations and embarrassments endured by Camilla as she was stalked by photographers, inundated with hate-mail and lambasted as a ‘home-wrecker’ by Britain’s tabloid press.
Above all, she presents a warm and convincing portrait of a discreet, laughter-loving, honest, down-to-earth individual who is a calming, caring and confidence-boosting influence on the man who one day will become the Commonwealth’s king.

Mrs Kelly

26/5/2017

Grantlee Kieza: ABC Books $39.99

ELLEN Quinn is barely 18 years of age when she falls under the spell of emancipated convict John ‘Red’ Kelly, 30. Ellen’s family have been in Australia for almost a decade, having emigrated from the northern tip of Ireland as free settlers shortly before the Potato Famine swept across their homeland.
Despite his earlier thievery, Red has behaved impeccably since being transported to Tasmania and later relocating to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range north of Melbourne, where works for Ellen’s parents. Although James Quinn is dubious, when his eldest daughter reveals she is pregnant she is allowed to marry.
So begins the adult life of Ellen Kelly: the one-time raven-haired, carefree, horse-loving girl from County Antrim who as a middle-aged matron and mother of 12 children will gain infamy – “the notorious Mrs Kelly”, as she will be dubbed by Victoria’s assistant police commissioner.
It is Ellen’s first-born son, Edward, who becomes the ‘man’ of the household when Red – slowly embittered by years of struggling to earn a legitimate living – slips back into his petty-criminal ways and then dies. At 11, young Ned is ill-prepared to fill his father’s shoes but has little choice in the matter; in 19th-century Greta every slab hut needs a male figurehead.
Behind the scenes Ellen rules, however. Illiterate, she signs both her marriage certificates with a simple “X”, yet when her family’s reputation is questioned she speaks up loudly, proudly and stridently, on occasion defending her increasingly wayward boys in court and in one particularly impassioned incident crushing a policeman’s helmet with a baking paddle as he attempts to arrest her third son, teenaged Dan.
In the end, Ellen outlives more than half of her offspring as a tough, determined, desperate pioneer in one of the harshest periods of Australia’s history.

The Art of Cycling

10/2/2017

Cadel Evans: ABC Books $49.99

SOME athletes have a fascinating story to tell but aren’t natural storytellers. Others can communicate beautifully but don’t necessarily have much out of the ordinary to share.
And then there’s Cadel Evans: son, father, friend, idol and almost certainly Australia’s greatest multi-discipline cyclist.
It seems hardly any time has passed since Evans – one of only two non-Europeans to have legitimately won the Tour de France – completed his final competitive ride: a race bearing his name along the Great Ocean Road. That was exactly two years ago this week.
In his third book, a retrospective of a 20-year professional cycling career, he lays bare his life tale, from receiving a beginner bicycle at the age of four to relaxing into retirement.
This is a genuine autobiography, written by Evans as a means of slowing down and refocusing his life after he stepped away from racing as a 38-year-old.
It records his earliest memories of childhood: moving from a predominantly Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory to rural NSW, then Plenty on the hilly, forested fringe of Melbourne. It was there that Evans, aged 14, became his own first coach, devising a rigid training regime, honing his diet and critiquing his performances day by day.
Evans reflects on twice winning the mountain bike world championship, contesting the most prestigious road cycling events – among them, the national tours of France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Germany, Poland, Oman and Australia – and attending four Olympic Games, and comments candidly on subjects ranging from injuries, chronic illness and exhaustion to interpersonal relationships, team politics and the deep-rooted drug-taking that disadvantages ‘clean’ competitors and mars his beloved sport.
He tells of taking inspiration from the Dalai Lama and Belgian cartoon adventurer Tintin, starting a family by adopting Ethiopian-born baby Robel and dividing his downtime between home-bases in Switzerland and Barwon Heads.

The 15:17 to Paris

7/10/2016

Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E Stern: Text $29.99

“WHEN I have a class reunion kind of thing, we just have a beer; we don’t, like, tackle terrorists or anything.” The voice is unmistakable: Barack Obama.
It’s late August 2015 and, huddled over an iPhone in northern France, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler are being congratulated by the US President.
Only hours earlier Skarlatos and Sadler were two typical young, slightly hungover American tourists making their way haphazardly through Europe with buddy Spencer Stone.
Now all three are international heroes – the result of having been in the wrong place at the right time on a train between countries. Confronted with the unthinkable, the Sacramento 20-somethings have discovered a depth of courage none of the trio had known for certain that they had.
Doing the rounds of the continent, Skarlatos is spending pay accumulated during his National Guard deployment to Afghanistan; Stone is on leave from an airforce position in the Azores where, on his third attempt to find a military role that suits, he is stationed as an emergency medical technician. Sadler, the most academic of the three, is a college student who at his friends’ urging has used a credit card to finance his share of the adventure.
Between Amsterdam and Paris the men have just interrupted an attack that could have seen hundreds of people shot, stabbed or incinerated by a Moroccan national with a festering gudge against the West. Together they have overpowered a terrorist armed with a handgun, a boxcutter blade, a semi-automatic assault rifle, nine magazines of ammunition and a bottle of fuel.
Naturally, the world wants to hear their story.
Through this book Skarlatos, Stone and Sadler tell how they first met as boys thrown together by circumstance – three socially awkward misfits bonded by a common love of weapons – who never dreamt of becoming celebrities.

Sightings of the Sacred

30/9/2016

Daniel Naudé: Prestel $US55.00/£35.00

LONG, wide, curly, straight or curved: the horns adorning the cattle that feature in photographer-writer Daniel Naudé’s dramatically handsome coffee-table book are as spectacular and distinctive as hairstyles or gowns at any red-carpet event.
South African Naudé captures with exquisite artistry the grandeur, grit and grace of his continent’s native breeds, beginning with the traditional Ugandan Ankole.
In its homeland the Ankole is critically endangered, not in the 21st century by trophy hunting – although its outrageously oversized horns are an obvious prize – but by crossbreeding with milk-rich imported Holsteins and wild plains buffalo.
Naudé sets his pen-portrait of present-day Ankole against the void left by the loss of the Watusi (neighbouring Rwanda’s equivalent), the now-extinct cattle whose horns were known to span up to three metres.
Today, populations of Ankole have been established on reserves in an attempt to protect this cultural icon from annihilation.
Off Africa’s east coast Naudé finds on Madagascar another eye-catching breed: the African-Indian humped Zebu.
Living in isolation on the island, the Zebu faces no threat of outbreeding; as the only bovine strain present, it is guaranteed a continuing pure bloodline.
Rounding out the collection, Naudé’s third chapter of portraits is set in India, where Nandi the Bull is venerated as a divine religious being and cattle in general are sacred to hundreds of millions of Hindus. In India he examines the practice of honouring animals as earthly incarnations of the Hindu gods and attends the annual Mattu Pongal festival celebrating the crucial role played by cattle in agriculture.
Naudé describes in words and pictures not only the breeds themselves in all three countries but also their human keepers, exploring the longstanding relationships that bind the species.
The concise text is educational and emotive, the images worthy of being framed and hung on any gallery wall.

The Panama Papers

23/9/2016

Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier: Oneworld Publications £12.99/$US17.99

“INTERESTED in data?” It’s February 2015 and in Germany investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer is presented with what quickly becomes the most daunting yet satisfying challenge of his media career.
Obermeyer is at home one evening when an email arrives from an anonymous correspondent. The writer has something intriguing to offer: records detailing the day-to-day interactions of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. “Mossfon” is one of the world’s most active shell-company providers, generating the link that enables individuals and organisations in closely regulated jurisdictions to “go offshore” in order to conceal their business dealings from former spouses and government authorities alike.
In the ensuing weeks, Obermeyer accepts via encrypted channels of some 11.5 million documents in the world’s biggest ever corporate data leak. More than 214,000 companies are identified and politicians including presidents, prime ministers and dictators are implicated. The names “Putin”, “Cameron”, “al-Assad” and “Gaddafi” surface time and again.
Obermayer is unable to handle this volume of information single-handedly. His solution? To draft in newspaper colleague Frederik Obermaier and expand the search for collaborators around the globe, seeking input from two Australian contacts. Firstly, the “Brothers Obermay/ier” (in reality, they are no relation) approach Irish-Australian Gerard Ryle, head of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists in Washington DC, who agrees to help assemble a worldwide team to scrutinise the rapidly mounting landslide of material. With Ryle’s assistance they then gain access to Nuix Investigator, sophisticated Australian forensic search software.
Soon almost 400 journalists are dissecting the data, and on April 3 2016 the resulting reports are rolled out simultaneously. It is a tsunami of financial disclosure on a scale not previously imagined, let alone seen.
In another context this could be the storyline of a new Bond thriller but there is nothing fictitious about the so-called Panama Papers and the clandestine machinations they reveal.

Slow Boats to Europe

16/9/2016

Trevor Cherrett: tbcherrett@btinternet.com £5.00

TAKE two adventurous Englishmen, a desire to float clear across Europe and an assortment of watercraft, conventional and otherwise.
The result? The offspring of this rare blending is a highly entertaining travel memoir that is in equal measure informative, instructional and hilarious.
When community planner and long-time recreational sailor Trevor Cherrett and his offsider Pete decide to bring to life their shared dream, neither can foresee exactly how their exploration of three of the continent’s great rivers will unfold. All the pair can say with certainty is that they are determined to see through their pledge to journey together to the far eastern fringe of Europe. Having dismissed the idea of making the trip in a boat of their own, they agree to take a combination of whatever waterborne transport they can secure along the way.
What ensues is a three-year, five-stage pilgrimage from the North Sea to Romania’s Black Sea coast, bisecting the seven countries that hug the banks of a 3500km span of the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers.
The tone of Cherrett’s narrative is set in the opening pages, when an inauspicious start in the Netherlands sees the friends struggle so severely with unfamiliar technology, techniques and language that they risk capsizing the project on their first afternoon afloat.
Cherrett’s pen-sketches of the towns and cities through which the pair sail are lively, colourful and down-to-earth.
He describes with self-deprecating humour and humility the embarrassing, frustrating and heartwarming incidents that eventuate, writing at an engagingly personal level yet providing a thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable general commentary on European history, culture and politics in an era of significant change. This context makes Slow Boats to Europe a fascinating insight for sailors and landlubbers alike.
The inclusion of route maps and dozens of photographs throughout the book adds to its appeal.

Hack in a Flak Jacket

26/8/2016

Peter Stefanovic: Hachette Australia $29.99

DEATH, disasters, destruction, disease: Peter Stefanovic has endured the worst imaginable circumstances in some of the world’s most dangerous places in the course of his employment as a television news journalist.
In a sensitive yet self-deprecatingly humorous professional memoir, Stefanovic recounts the highlights and lowlights of his eight years as a foreign correspondent for the Nine Network, based firstly in Los Angeles and later in London as he covered events across North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Having followed his brother Karl into the media, the younger Stefanovic was posted overseas at the age of 26.
Among his earliest assignments were bunkering down in Texas as Hurricane Ike swept ashore and interviewing distraught fans on the day Michael Jackson died. In 2010 he was despatched to Haiti while the earthquake that killed at least 100,000 people was still reverberating.
From London he travelled to South Africa for the original trial of Oscar Pistorius, to Norway in the wake of a fundamentalist right-wing gunman’s murder spree, to France as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo assassins was in progress and to Iraq for a meeting with an all-female militia unit behind ISIS lines.
Stefanovic takes readers for an edge-of-the-seat ride through the Arab Spring uprisings, the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya and the relentless warring that is characteristic of Gaza. He records the anguish and agony created by the carving up of Ukraine and describes the suffering wrought by the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.
On the surface the “flak jacket” of the book’s title is literal: the body armour Stefanovic wears while reporting from the frontline or shadowing rebel groups among bullets, tear gas and low-flying bombers. More deeply, however, it is a perfect metaphor for the subconscious emotional defences he erects in response to traumatic stress experienced repeatedly while at work.

Elephant Dawn

29/7/2016

Sharon Pincott: Allen & Unwin $32.99

IF THERE'S one animal that symbolises Africa more than any other, it’s the elephant, yet within our lifetime, researchers predict, the last wild herds of this species will most likely disappear.
One of the most vulnerable elephant populations is in Zimbabwe, a country whose chronic social, political and economic conflict relegates wildlife conservation to the bottom of the priority pile for desperate subsistence game poachers and greed-crazed government officials alike.
Undaunted, in 2001 elephant-lover Sharon Pincott gave up an executive IT career in Australia and moved from inner-city Brisbane to the sparsely populated wilds of Zimbabwe’s western bushland. There, she set out to observe and then name and catalogue the hundreds of individuals that make up the Presidential Elephants, a group of 17 extended families ranging over a mix of private and public land adjoining Hwange National Park.
Elephant Dawn documents Pincott’s experiences, from her frustrating struggle to obtain a Zimbabwean entry visa to her brushes with the scorpions, black mambas and baboons that from time to time made themselves comfortable in her native-style hut. Most of all, it describes the author’s attachment to the elephants –young or old, newborn or battle-scarred – that, despite the supposed protection extended to them by President Robert Mugabe, 15 years after Pincott first began to identify them continue to face bullets, snares and poison as their numbers dwindle.
Her story is both a personal record of one woman’s endeavours and a first-hand analysis of the factors that together triggered the most self-destructive period in Zimbabwe’s history.
Elephant Dawn summons laughter and tears, smiles and grimaces, anger and pride at the determination with which Pincott carries out her mission, funded through her own efforts and in the face of considerable – at times life-theatening – opposition from parochial Zimbabweans determined to see white residents expelled from the country.

How (not) to Start an Orphanage… by a woman who did

24/6/2016

Tara Winkler and Linda Delacey: Allen & Unwin $32.99

AT THE age of 19 Tara Winkler travels to Cambodia for the first time as an add-on to a roadtrip centred primarily on Thailand and Laos.
It turns out to be a confronting experience. In one of the lesser-known Cambodian cities she encounters apparently parentless children cramped together in sub-standard conditions. That introduction to Battambang occurs in mid 2005.
Soon back in middle-class Sydney, Winkler does not forget the experience, honouring a vow to raise donations for the group. Eighteen months later, she returns to hand over those funds.
The sense of achievement does not last, however. In 2007, on her third visit to Battambang, Winkler is appalled to find the situation has deteriorated markedly. The children are poorly fed and lack medical attention and long-serving staff members have been fired; worst of all, a teenage girl is being sexually abused by the former monk who controls the orphanage. Desperate to help and buoyed by the can-do enthusiasm of youth, Winkler decides on the spur of the moment to create an alternate home. Within days she has secured premises, been granted government accreditation and made herself responsible for 14 physically and psychologically traumatised dependents.
Yet, over time, prompted by public scrutiny of her leadership and her own rising maturity and self-awareness, Winkler begins to rethink her actions. Having been shocked to discover that almost all of her so-called “orphans” have living parents, she questions the practice of institutionalisation. She also debates the wisdom of involving beneficiaries – the children themselves – in fundraising activities and asks why untrained, unvetted Western “voluntourists” are allowed access to attention-starved Cambodian minors and what effect these short-term visits have.
Winkler’s frank, inspiring and sometimes-humorous account of her accomplishments and failures sheds light on the pros and cons of well-intentioned foreign involvement in the developing world.

Ticket to Ride

17/6/2016

Tom Chesshyre: Summersdale £9.99

FORTY-NINE individual train journeys covering almost 36,000 kilometres through 22 countries on five continents – surely there must be a story or two worth telling in all that?
There’s an entire book, in fact, presented in colourful, bewitching and often-humorous fashion by British travel writer and rail enthusiast (read “train spotter”) Tom Chesshyre: journalist, raconteur and passionate passenger.
From the station platform at Crewe in England to the endless nut groves of Iran, the nausea-inducing switchbacks of the Andes and the battle-scarred valleys of the fractured Balkans, Chesshyre not only documents the mechanical intricacies of a plethora of locomotives and carriages but captures equally clearly the quirks and lurks of the people who ride them.
In a series of professional adventures that at times verge on tumbling into boys’ own escapades Chesshyre spends a carefully calculated 21 days, one hour and 28 minutes in motion on one track or another.
En route he experiences the Orient Express in two very different incarnations, revels in the refurbished glories of the Tolstoy Night Train, ventures deep beneath the surface – literally – of North Korea aboard the Pyongyang Metro and learns to dodge verbal missiles on the Indian Pacific while traversing the sand-blasted expanse of the Nullarbor Plain. China, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Poland, France, Kosovo, Finland, Russia, the US, Peru: Chesshyre’s wanderings cause him to rub shoulders with some of the world’s true rail powerhouses and several of its smallest, most disadvantaged also-rans.
Fittingly, his travels conclude back in Britain, the traditional home of rail technology and site of spectacular, untamed scenery along two Scottish Highland lines.
Ticket to Ride is one book that really can be said to offer something for virtually everyone: an easy blend of good (and not-so-good) food, entertaining (if occasionally obnoxious) company, insightful current affairs, enchanting geographical snapshots and potted histories exploring railroads’ role in society.

The Umbrian Supper Club

3/6/2016

Marlena de Blasi: Allen & Unwin $29.99

TAKE five women, one rustic makeshift kitchen and one shared weekly meal. Blend with tenderness, add a liberal pinch or two of understanding and season generously with love. This is the down-to-earth formula behind American expat Marlena de Blasi’s latest instalment from Italy.
In The Umbrian Supper Club de Blasi examines life in the tiny village of Orvieto in rural Umbria – a little-known landlocked region between Tuscany to the west, Marche on the Adriatic Sea coast and Lazio to the south.
In four distinct chapters de Blasi profiles Miranda, Ninuccia, Paolina and Gilda – her four co-conspirators in both convivial conversation and communal cuisine.
Buxom and boisterous Miranda has been celebrating her 76th birthday every year for as long as de Blasi has known her. Widowed, she has no desire to remarry, despite sharing an apparently contented long-term alliance with a man whose companionship she treasures.
Temperamental, take-no-prisoners Ninuccia has returned to her native Umbria after living as a new bride in her mother-in-law’s house in Calabria. She now remembers fondly her time in a community where gang executions were commonplace.
Aged 60, cooking teacher Paolina has just received her first marriage proposal, causing her to hesitate, uncertain as she weighs up changing the delicate daily balance that surrounds her.
And Gilda, with no biological offspring of her own, recalls the painful days of a youth in which she mothered three small children and ran an entire household while still a child herself.
This is Sex and the City without the Cosmopolitans, Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants without the teen-girl insecurity, Steel Magnolias without the tears.
For lovers of wholesome, uncomplicated, hearty food The Umbrian Supper Club also contains ample inspiration for experimenting at home: brandy-soaked wild boar, slow-cooked pork chops with cinnamon and prunes, and red-wine-and-butter-braised pasta with a dark chocolate garnish. Buon appetito!

Leaving Before the Rains Come

27/5/2016

Alexandra Fuller: Vintage $22.99

GROWING up in the backblocks of rural Zambia, surrounded by the turmoil and terror of Rhodesia’s civil wars and the constant uncertainty of post-colonialism, life is never dull for Alexandra Fuller. As the daughters of an English-born farmer and his Anglo-Kenyan wife, Fuller and her sister learn to negotiate a hazardous landscape, potentially lethal wildlife, rampant diseases and political volatility. Complicating the mix is their mother’s emotional instability and both parents’ excessive drinking and financial recklessness.
Nothing prepares the girls, however, for life in the wider world.
Beyond the relative comfort of her father’s various farms, as a young wife living with her American adventurer husband in the capital, Lusaka, Fuller first encounters the unfamiliar insecurity of feeling alien. With each new life event – the birth of her children, the family’s move to the US, the couple’s search for work and acquisition of a mortgage – Fuller’s discomfort escalates.
Emotionally distanced from her husband, she begins to wonder if their marriage can survive the pitfalls of a materially driven Western existence in a culture completely at odds with her simplistic upbringing.
In Leaving Before the Rains Come Fuller grapples with the possibility that the union is beyond salvation: “Ours (has) contracted into a grocery-list relationship – finances, children, housekeeping,” she writes. She describes the loneliness and isolation of first-time motherhood and the lack of support that leaves her floundering.
At the same time she questions her own identity. No-longer truly African, she finds herself caught somewhere between her youth in tropical southern Africa and her adulthood in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Idaho, distanced physically from one place but never quite fully acclimatised to the other.
Fuller’s frank assessment of her uncomfortable circumstances creates a memoir that is likely to trigger self-examination in many readers and prompt some to review their own choices.

In Brazil

20/5/2016

Fran Bryson: Scribe $32.99

WITH anticipation of this year’s Olympics now on everyone’s lips it’s hardly surprising that the games’ host, Brazil, is attracting more than its usual share of international attention.
Through a series of chapters profiling specific locations and events, Fran Bryson offers a colourful glimpse into the world’s fourth-largest nation, second only to Nigeria for its population of people of African heritage. (Approximately 100 million modern-day Brazilians are descended at least in part from slaves.)
Bryson draws comparisons between the histories, cultures and geographies of Australia and Brazil, arranging her observations – formed during repeat visits over many years – by region.
In lively, entertaining and at-times highly humorous detail she describes Easter passion plays performed by telenovela (soap opera) stars in Nova Jerusalém; the rise and then decline of the rubber industry around Xapuri in the upper Amazon Basin; the pedestrian-unfriendly but eyecatching architecture of the capital, Brasília; and the terror generated by taking public transport (“It can be curiously liberating travelling at such speeds that if something goes wrong, you know you won’t survive”). She relates tales of bushrangers’ exploits in the badlands of Piranhas, where the severed heads of 11 outlaws were arranged and photographed on the cloth-covered front steps of the local town hall, and remembers the eight young men and boys shot and killed by rogue police in the Candelária massacre of homeless people in Rio de Janeiro in 1993.
She also examines the at-times-uneasy marriage of Catholicism and African spiritualism that has produced in Brazil a unique religious landscape.
Along the way Bryson notes that Tasmania’s last Aborigines have not in fact died out but are alive and well in the small island communities of Bass Strait – an unexpected inclusion in a book about Brazil but one that in this instance feels natural.

A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Camino Portugués

29/4/2016

John Brierley: Findhorn Press Ltd US$25.99

ITS title is somewhat self-deprecating in the case of this newly updated, seventh-edition guidebook: in actual fact it describes in almost-literally-step-by-step detail not just one but 10 variations of the pilgrims’ pathways that wend their way northwards through mainland Portugal.
While writing on the infinitely better-known Spanish routes to the tomb of St James in Santiago de Compostela (originally a Roman town; Santiago is the saint’s Spanish and Portuguese name and compo stellae is Latin for “field of stars”) fills several feet of shelf-space in the pick of travel-focused bookstores, the Portuguese caminos are almost ignored in many quarters. Brierley’s sensitive, thought-provoking and motivational introduction to these less-travelled options is a perfect pocket companion for anyone intending to set out on the walk but at the same time delivers an entertaining and informative armchair experience for those not able to actually make the trip.
Beginning with an overview of modern-day pilgrimage, Brierley leads readers through the 10 alternatives, all of which start at Lisbon’s cathedral (the Sé) and head northwards either shadowing the coastline or traversing the country’s agricultural interior before crossing the international border at Valença. The background to the overall pilgrims’ trail is rich with Celtic colonisation, maritime discoveries and Medieval knights Templar crusades.
The production might not be of coffee-table-quality but the accuracy of the text and maps more than compensates for any lack of eye-catching full-page photographs.
Every stage of the possible paths is described succinctly and in the context of Christian belief, with explanations of the significance of religious sites, practical advice on the physical necessities of traversing more than 600 kilometres by foot and prompts for personal reflection during the trek. Lined space is included at the end of each stage chapter, enabling this guide to double as a journal kept by those who take up the challenge.

Final Chapters

22/4/2016

Jim Bernhard: Skyhorse Publishing $19.00

AUTHORS often deal with death as a subject in their creative efforts but how much is recorded – when the pen is laid down one last time or the keyboard falls silent – of an individual writer’s own demise?
In Final Chapters Jim Bernhard presents the gruesome, garish and occasionally amusing details of more than 100 well-known authors’ ultimate days.
Arranged chronologically, the chapters begin with the Classical Age and span the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic, Victorian and modern eras.
Bernhard’s preface refers to the morbid curiosity humans feel for death and the questions people ask: “When?”, “Where?”, “Why?” and, most vigorously, “How?”
He also notes: “Even though average life expectancies have substantially lengthened in modern times, writers do not seem to have benefited from the improvement.” To the contrary: the average age at death of classical Greek and Roman writers was about 70 years yet in more recent centuries it has fallen to 65.
Murder, execution, torture and medical conditions ranging from malaria and tuberculosis to leukaemia have felled their share of wordsmiths, as have heart disease and the abuse of alcohol (18 shots of whiskey in a single sitting in Dylan Thomas’s case).
Perhaps the most bizarre death of all was that of Aeschylus, fatally injured when an airborne eagle dropped its prey – a turtle – onto his bald head, intending to crack it open against what the bird apparently mistook for a rounded rock.
At the other end of the scale was Plato, who had as pleasant an end to his life as any tired old biographer could possibly seek: he simply “drifted peacefully into death” either while conducting music or attending a wedding feast.
Final Chapters is a convenient collection for anyone seeking short, sharp sections that can be read in a few minutes each.

City of Thorns

15/4/2016

Ben Rawlence: Portobello $35.00

DREAMS – however distant – of resettlement abroad fuel the sometimes-heartbreaking hopes of residents trapped in the scorchingly hot, desolate limbo of the world’s biggest refugee camp: a combination of three separate but closely inter-related sites ringing the remote Kenyan town Dadaab.
With a population greater than that of Geelong and still climbing, the Dadaab camps house not only primarily Somalis but also Sudanese, Ethiopians, Ugandans, Congolese, Burundians, Rwandans and even an unexpectedly high number of Kenyan nationals, drawn by the promise of the free, foreign-funded medical care and education that their own government is unable to provide. There they are crowded together in makeshift accommodation that in some cases has sheltered two generations born and raised in exile from their ancestral regions.
Rawlence – a former Human Rights Watch researcher – tells the story of the day-to-day existence of these displaced people through the eyes of nine individuals who, due to contrasting but equally traumatic circumstances, have been forced to subsist behind the protective walls of thorn-tree branches that give this book its name.
His intimate portraits of men and women young and old explore the ways through which their paths have converged. Examples of inter-tribal tension hatred illustrate the disharmony that is rife across Africa, an enormous continent inhabited by people whose cultures in some instances are completely incompatible.
Rawlence also documents the rise of Al-Shabaab as a militant, extremist force willing and able to terrorise and kill Africans every bit as readily as it does Western targets.
Should readers expect to find a happy ending to this story? “Happy” might not, in this situation, be entirely appropriate, given the horrendous experiences many of the refugees have had on their way to and at Dadaab. It is perhaps most accurate to say the outcome is not entirely negative for at least some members of Rawlence’s cast.

Spice Journey

24/3/2016

Shane Delia: Murdoch Books $49.99

THREE kitchen ingredients say “Easter” in Australian like no other: seafood, lamb and chocolate.
This year a plethora of fresh takes on that trio is offered in Spice Journey, the printed accompaniment to Shane Delia’s SBS TV series of the same name. In this beautifully illustrated book Melbourne restaurateur Delia documents his travels through the regions whose people played crucial roles in the creation of Easter as we know it today.
Delia starts his exploration in Malta, his parents’ country and an island with a culinary style coloured in the centuries immediately before Jesus’ time by its Phoenician heritage.
Heading east, he visits Lebanon (the ancestral home of his wife Maha’s family), Turkey and Iran. At the other end of the Mediterranean Delia finishes with tours through Morocco and Andalusian Spain.
All six cultures contribute dishes to Spice Journey, some of the most inventive of which have seafood, lamb or chocolate as their hero.
On the seafood front there’s cured salmon with beetroot mayonnaise, pumpkin puree and fennel vinaigrette; cornbread-and-fennel-seed-crusted sardines; and scallop-filled zucchini flowers with smoked-eel dressing and orange and coriander crumb.
Lamb comes in an array of incarnations: as kofte with eggplant yoghurt and a black bread garnish; braised with saltbush and caramelised rockmelon; and slow-roasted with garlic and Lebanese seven-spice powder and served with berry and toasted pumpkin seed yoghurt and nigella-seed bread.
What better to these mains than hot chips sprinkled with flaked almonds, Aleppo pepper, coriander and sumac?
The desserts too combine the best of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavours: mastic pudding with chocolate soil, blackberry sorbet and rosemary pearls; chocolate and pistachio m’hencha (coiled pastry); and smoked chipotle and chocolate fondant with Pedro Ximenez sherry and almond milk icecream.
Thanks to Delia, adventurous Easter dining at home this year is well within reach.

Five Nights in Paris

12/2/2016

John Baxter: Harper Perennial $24.99

SETTING out to write a fresh, engaging guide to Paris is not for the faint-hearted. Paris is, after all, the most visited city on Earth, and many of those visitors end up writing in one way or another about their experiences there.
Not easily deterred, Australian expat author John Baxter set himself exactly that challenge, informed in part by a quarter of a century of living the life of a Parisian local.
Sydney-born Baxter settled in Paris in 1990. With his French film-maker wife and their daughter, he has explored every one of its 20 districts – all distinct in culture and character and offering points of interest seldom seen by regular tourists.
Baxter’s eagerness to show off the city’s nocturnal side is a natural extension of his occasional role as a literary-walking-tour guide. Asked to devise an alternative to day rambles, he hit on the idea of leading newcomers down the famous boulevards and avenues and through the obscure backstreets and alleyways long after most foreigners have sat down to dinner and perhaps a cabaret show.
Five Nights in Paris: After Dark in the City of Light presents Paris at both its sparkling best and its seedy worst: lit up and ready to party, party, party with those in the know.
With chapters arranged around five sense-inspired themes (sound, taste, touch, scent and sight) Baxter invites readers into a real-life version of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris Hollywood success.
His lively narrative introduces characters as intriguing as they are unexpected, ranging from Surrealist painters, early 20th-century photographers and African-American jazz musicians to restaurant front-of-house staff and modern-day burlesque performers. Along the way he describes the X-rated activities of Paris’s bourgeois beneath the chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne parkland and identifies one-time brothels and opium dens among the city’s grand edifices.

Ultimate Travelist

8/1/2016

Lonely Planet Publications $34.99

WITH any new year come new resolutions, new interests, new dreams. Whether used as the basis for a 30-hour plane trip or as a virtual tour from the comfort of an armchair, Lonely Planet’s Ultimate Travelist is an inspirational and educational profile of 500 of the world’s most intriguing places.
Every continent is part of this superbly illustrated, coffee-table-style guide whose content ranges from deserts such as Valle de la Luna in Chile and Death Valley National Park in the US to manmade attractions as diverse as Icehotel in Sweden, Tsukiji fish market in Japan and the Acropolis in Greece. Religious buildings – Spain’s Mezquita, Ethiopia’s Churches of Tigray, Finland’s Temppeliauko Kirkko and England’s York Minster, among them – are numerous, as are palaces, museums, galleries and monuments.
The US is represented by 30 entries; France is a distant second with 17.
The top 10 – the Temples of Angkor, the Great Barrier Reef, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Grand Canyon National Park, the Colosseum, Iguazu Falls, the Alhambra and Aya Sofya – are world-famous but sit comfortably beside dozens of lesser-known treats including Lake Baikal, Russia; Seyðisfjörður, Iceland; Kolmanskop, Namibia; Persepolis, Iran; Stingray City, Cayman Islands; Borobudur, Indonesia; Lisbon’s Alfama, Portugal; and Cimètiere du Père Lachaise, France.
Local readers keen to tick at least one of the top 500 off their ‘must see’ list this year can do so within a half-day’s drive of home – number 12, according to Lonely Planet, from an original field of thousands of candidates is the Great Ocean Road, ranked between two heritage-listed cities: Fez Medina, Morocco, and Petra, Jordan.
Tasmania has three drawcards: Cradle Mountain, the Museum of Old & New Art (MONA) and Port Arthur; other Australian attractions include Blue Mountains National Park, the Sydney Opera House, Uluru, Kakadu National Park and Ningaloo Marine Park.

The Man with the Golden Typewriter

31/12/2015

Fergus Fleming (editor): Bloomsbury Publishing $29.99

TO TENS of millions of fans James Bond is a suave, invincible Hollywood spy with a cultured British accent, an eye for a beautiful woman and an unerring ability to hunt out anyone who threatens the security of the West. Well before the arrival of the big-screen version, however, Bond was born in print.
A new compilation of correspondence both to and by intelligence-operative-turned-writer Ian Fleming traces this evolution from the unveiling of the first of his eventual 14 Bond books through the negotiation of several Bond film deals and concludes shortly after Fleming’s death, aged 56, 12 years later. It reveals the insecurities, frustrations and embarrassment of the author, despite his growing stature as one of the greatest ever espionage novelists, and provides an insight into a man who valued accuracy of detail so intensely that no feedback, no matter how trifling, was brushed aside.
Writing frantically over a few weeks each January-February while on retreat from deep-winter Britain to his Jamaican property, “Goldeneye”, Fleming produced a new Bond best-seller every year; two, in fact, had been completed in his final months and were published posthumously. In addition, he created children’s tale Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and wrote non-fiction works The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
The “golden typewriter” of anthology editor Fergus Fleming’s title is simultaneously a reference to the extravagant purchase made by his Uncle Ian as reward for having completed his first full manuscript – Casino Royale – in the northern spring of 1952 and a play on the name of one of the later Bond books.
If there is any slight fault in this collection it is that the correspondence is arranged by project rather than chronologically, producing an at-times disjointed and occasionally repetitive read; this, though, is more than offset by the intimacy of the conversations between Fleming and his publishing colleagues, readers, friends and wife Ann.

Passage to Pusan

18/12/2015

Louise Evans: PB Publishing $19.99

HISTORIANS sometimes refer to Australia's involvement in the North-South Korea conflict in the 1950s as the “forgotten war”. To entire generations these days, however, that period is not merely forgotten; it is completely unknown.
The little many Australians do know revolves mostly around the characters ‘Hawkeye’ and ‘Hotlips’ and their surgical-tent colleagues in the US TV comedy series M*A*S*H.
In reality, for three years Australian soldiers fought under the United Nations flag to help defend the southern half of that country from what it – and the broader democratic world – viewed as communism’s relentless expansion.
Oddly, in half a century dominated by books about two world wars and Vietnam, few have been published to record Australia’s military participation in Korea.
One brand-new exception is a family biography by Sydney journalist Louise Evans, whose uncle was transferred from occupational duties in Japan to the front line on the neighbouring Korean Peninsula.
Evans’ book begins where many traditional stories end: with the death of its hero. In Passage to Pusan, the killing of Private Vincent Joseph Healy in March 1951 leaves a chronic wound in the heart of his struggling working-class mother and siblings and drives Thelma Healy to steel herself for a harrowing personal pilgrimage in which she retraces her late son’s movements by sea a decade later to finally lay flowers on his grave. In reconstructed and stabilised post-war Pusan, ‘Thellie’ is reunited at last with her beloved eldest boy, observing at the same time the state of a region still battling to recover from bitter fighting.
This text and its accompanying images puts into context not only one but three wars in Asia, set against Australia’s economic and social circumstances of those times, describing in bare-bones detail the confronting everyday life of the Healy family in suburban Brisbane and the upbringing that prompted three brothers from a single household to enlist for army service.

Legacy

4/12/2015

Tim Cahill: Harper Collins $39.99

GROWING up in Sydney, Tim Cahill had one aim in life: to play professional soccer. At the time he imagined that would be, at best, with one of the country’s top domestic sides.
The four-year-old with tears streaming down his cheeks as he lined up for his first game could not have imagined that his dream would one day see him move between England, the US and China and travel all over the world.
For Cahill’s working-class parents and older brother, Sean, supporting that single-minded ambition demanded enormous commitment and financial devotion.
Cahill first represented not Australia but his mother’s homeland, Samoa, at the age of 14.
At 17 he was sent by his family to England on the slim hope of being invited to trial with a lower-level club. Within weeks he was weighing up three separate contract offers from the Second and First divisions and, most remarkably, the UK’s Premier League. Loyalty saw Cahill choose the least impressive of the three, Millwall in London, on a salary of £250 a week. There he went on to make 241 appearances as Millwall earned promotion and, almost inconceivably, faced up to the mighty Manchester United in the final of the FA Cup.
The pinnacle of his decade-plus in England was an eight-year stint in the midfield for Everton in Liverpool.
As part of the so-called ‘golden generation’ he became the first Socceroo to score in a World Cup, leading Australia’s impressive run in 2006. He openly admits that making himself available for Australian selection has always been his priority.
Cahill’s candidly written and emotionally transparent autobiography is not, he explains, an end-of-career retrospective; now, at 35, a key member of Shanghai Shenhua in China and continuing to line up for Socceroo duty, he hopes to play on for at least a few more years.

Waterfront

27/11/2015

Duncan McNab: Hachette Australia $32.99

POINT a police detective turned investigative journalist in the direction of Australia’s docklands and the material unearthed is likely to make for a juicy – if not entirely family-friendly – dossier.
That’s precisely what Duncan McNab has produced in Waterfront, a thoroughly researched examination of 200-plus years of “graft, corruption and violence”, as he terms it, in and around the country’s major ports.
McNab’s carefully chronicled history begins with the opportunistic pilfering of supplies from the newly landed British First Fleet and interweaves politics, socioeconomics and conflicting community ethics into a storyline populated by prostitutes, sly-groggers, assassins, drug runners and standover men. Names made familiar most recently by the various Underbelly TV series are scattered throughout the text: Kate Leigh, Norm Bruhn, Tilly Devine and the Kanes.
Waterfront at times veers away from the shoreline and into the inner-suburban underworlds of Sydney and Melbourne, putting into context dealings in some manner linked to the painters, dockers and waterside labourers of each era as the maritime mobsters’ tentacles stretch inland from what McNab refers to as “Australia’s crime frontier”.
The book doubles as a history of the union movement across the two centuries since colonisation, tracing at the same time the establishment of distinct political parties as the country now knows them and detailing a tradition of parliamentary manoeuvring, undermining and deceit dating from the very earliest days of federation.
It also records the arrival of diseases imported unintentionally by sea – smallpox, Spanish flu, the much-feared plague – and reports the wholesale human evictions carried out by governments spooked by these epidemics.
While its focus is primarily wharf-related, Waterfront is not merely for readers with an active interest in ships. Rich with picket lines, scab labour, double-dealing, backbench infighting, opium hazes, royal commissions and more than one clichéd drunken sailor, McNab’s book is every bit as entertaining as it is informative.

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