Category: Non-fiction

Niche Writing

27/3/2020

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press $7.99 Kindle e-book

WRITING being the solitary pursuit that it is, few readers have the chance to truly explore the steps through which their favourite books are born.
Challenging himself to lay bare his literary process does not intimidate Christoffer Petersen, however.
In recent years Petersen – a Brit whose chosen pen name is quintessentially Danish – has produced dozens of novels, novellas and short stories and at the same time established for this stable its own ‘Arctic noir’ niche.
Not only has Petersen created these stories, he has also doubled as the independent publisher of both hardcopy and electronic editions through Aarluuk Press. Most recently he has taken his involvement to the extreme by adding an e-book ordering portal to his website, enabling him to control the all-important sales and distribution.
Now, in a guide intended for “emerging authors, amateur writers and readers”, Petersen explores his chosen pathway in a step-by-step analysis of what has worked, and why, along his journey to becoming self-sufficient.
Characters such as David Maratse, Petra ‘Piitalaat’ Jensen, Fenna Brongaard, Freja Hansen and Jon Østergård are the human face of the battle against crime in Petersen’s Greenland and Denmark, occasionally venturing further afield to pursue a suspect in the US, Canada, the UK or Iceland. His own experiences in and understanding of these locations fuels descriptions with precisely the degree of detail that’s needed to engage the public and generate enticing backdrops to his action sequences.
Petersen’s ‘how to’ sections are grouped into two clear themes: ‘niche’ and ‘writing’ – the who, what, why, where, when and how of finding, defining, developing and populating a niche with original content that will sell, and of then sitting down at a desk to generate this. Presented in manageable, bite-sized chapters, his advice is both practical and motivational, delivering sound guidelines to drive planning and productivity.

Bewildered

25/10/2019

Laura Waters: Affirm Press $29.99

LOSING her travelling companion on just the second morning of a 3068km hike does not bode well for Laura Waters’ chances of tramping the entire length of New Zealand’s two main islands from north to south.
It’s a catastrophe-in-the-making that under any other circumstances could derail such an ambitious project completely.
Waters, however, simply steels herself, acknowledging silently that somewhere deep within she’s been almost expecting to have this happen. She might not have known precisely how it would unfold but the fact her carefully calculated plan has been upended at the very beginning does not really surprise her.
Despite the disarray, there’s no question as to whether Waters will continue independently. For this Australian travel writer, there’s no going back – not in the short term, at any rate.
Never having done any true long-distance walking, much less camped alone, she’s left a secure job in Melbourne to spend the next several months on Te Araroa: “the long pathway” that links the uppermost tip of Northland, Cape Reinga, with the Bluff, directly below Invercargill. It’s a lightly trodden trail that’s little known outside serious hiking circles, sketchily signposted and almost indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub or forest for much of its length as it traverses soft sandy beaches, heavily trees mountain ranges, dormant volcanoes and the intimidating expanse of Auckland’s spread-out suburbs and industrial estates.
Carrying all her own survival gear and food for up to a week at a time, 40-something Waters is determined that nothing – not the attrition of fellow trampers, not her own physical pain and not dispiriting weather – will break her focus.
Her story is the Australasian version of Wild – an exploration not only of New Zealand’s ruggedly beautiful but tortuous environment but also of one woman’s commitment to honour her promise to herself.

Through Ice & Fire

18/10/2019

Sarah Laverick: Macmillan Australia $34.99

TWO things of note occur in Newcastle, near Sydney, in 1989: the city experiences a magnitude 5.6 earthquake that damages 50,000 buildings and cost $4 billion in repairs, and Australia’s first locally built Antarctic icebreaker, Aurora Australis, is launched.
It isn’t exactly an easy birth. Early in the process engineers at Carrington Slipways discover inconsistencies in plans supplied by renowned Finnish shipyard Wärtsilä Marine: ducts do not join up, services overlap, pipes are forced to compete for the same bulkhead space. With patience and ingenuity the team forges ahead – only to have production derailed again shortly thereafter when Wärtsilä enters bankruptcy.
Despite these hurdles Aurora Australis is completed on time in 1990 and delivered to operator P&O Polar on behalf of the Australian Government.
Fitted with 133 berths, it incorporates an array of laboratories, hull-mounted oceanographic sensors, a central data-logging system, a commercial-sized trawl net, finer sampling nets, a conference facility, a photographic darkroom and a surgery. It is the most sophisticated vessel ever used by the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition.
Its first voyage of significance is to Australia’s three stations on the edge of the continent itself (Casey, Mawson and Davis), combining on the brand-new ship both new personnel and new systems – a recipe for certain frustration if not complete disaster.
This is the start of a 30-year career during which Aurora Australis survives fires, besetment, breakdowns, a grounding, illness and injuries, and the failure of key pieces of scientific monitoring and recording equipment, all while making a priceless contribution to Antarctic research. Presented in biographical style, Through Ice & Fire records the highlights and lowlights of three decades of sailing in one of the world’s harshest environments and pays tribute to the people who populate the ship through until its retirement in Hobart at the end of the 2019–20 summer season.

Twelve Unending Summers

2/8/2019

Cholet Kelly Josué: Authority Publishing US$15.99

IN AN engrossing memoir Cholet Josué describes being born in the Bahamas to immigrant workers from Haiti. There he spends his first four years suspended between competing cultures, cocooned by the archipelago’s expatriate Haitian community and unaware that he’s resented by the English-speaking native population.
When an almost-fatal incident prompts his parents to return with their offspring to Haiti, Josué meets his extended family for the first time: aunts, uncles and cousins who together assume responsibility for helping to raise the five Josué siblings. His summers are spent in the country; for the remainder of the year Josué lives with his mother and brothers in Saint-Louis-du-Nord while his father works their farmland.
His priorities are simple: playing soccer (often with a large unripe orange rather than an expensive and puncture-prone plastic ball), studying, telling stories by lamplight and feasting on simple, robust Haitian cuisine prepared in kitchens whose doors are always open to neighbours.
The death of his father, followed by his widowed mother’s move back to the Bahamas as she struggles to support her children, leaves Josué a virtual orphan at the age of eight but living happily in a huge household of warm, welcoming maternal relatives.
His life takes another unpredictable turn when as a 16-year-old he is given directions for embarking on a small fishing boat to be smuggled via a stomach-churning ocean voyage to Miami, North America’s human melting pot.
Finally reunited with his mother, who has made her own way to the US, Josué focuses his body and mind on using his athletic skills to secure a college scholarship. It is only when he is accepted, however, that the implications of his status as an undocumented illegal arrival truly hit, forcing this determined young man to re-evaluate his identity in his adopted country as he strives to establish a legitimate future for himself.

The Bells of Old Tokyo

12/7/2019

Anna Sherman: Picador $32.90

IN THE heyday of Edo, in the millennium preceding the ancient Japanese metropolis’s rebirth as modern-day Tokyo, an isolated, self-reliant society without clocks required an inventive means by which to mark the passing of time. Across the city a network of beautifully crafted bells filled that role, rung by hand to chime the most significant hours of every day.
Now long-since retired, those bells have in some cases disappeared entirely and in others largely been forgotten.
On a personal mission to locate the remaining examples, expatriate writer Sherman negotiates the sidestreets and alleyways of Tokyo’s suburbs. Her wanderings deviate far beyond the standard tourist route, delving into both physical and cultural aspects of Japanese life to reveal a side of Tokyo few visitors have either the privilege or a reason to encounter.
Sherman’s travels lead to a tiny coffee house where beans are roasted to order and the beverage is served in bowls, to the site of a former prison and execution ground, to an avenue of euphemistically named ‘love hotels’ where virtually any fantasy can be explored, and to museums and archives carefully maintained by passionate private collectors. Her journey passes through shrines and temples, bars and parks.
It also crosses periods of history, examining the Japanese calendar, the animal zodiac and a succession of shogunates.
In a region subjected over centuries to earthquakes, tidal waves, fire-storms and floods, Tokyo has been all but obliterated repeatedly – perhaps never more so than during World War II, when entire neighbourhoods of timber houses were razed in infernos ignited by aerial bombing.
Somehow, miraculously, several of the original bronze artefacts have survived.
Alongside these bells, the individuals who care for them are revealed to be national treasures themselves – the keepers of a tradition predating the arrival in the 1600s of European missionaries with their ingenious mechanical timepieces.

The Tenth Island

11/1/2019

Diana Marcum: Amazon $30.75

NINE main islands make up the Azores; the 10th so-called “island” of the archipelago is the diaspora created by emigration after natural and political disasters ranging from volcanic eruptions to intellectual oppression and physical starvation under the rule of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.
Around the world communities of expatriate Azoreans thrive – nowhere more robustly than in the Central Valley of California, the fruit-and-vegetable-bowl of the US and one of the country’s most productive dairying regions thanks to farmers who originated in the Azores.
Now an autonomous region of Portugal, the Azores remain a haven for these loyal natives, many of whom fly in when possible to spend at least part of the northern summer socialising “back home”.
In this memoir Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Diana Marcum becomes acquainted with a cross-section of Atlantic-born Portuguese-Americans while writing for a regional newspaper in the valley and for the Los Angeles Times.
A brief initial visit to the rural island of Terceira fuels Marcum’s appetite so powerfully that it is inevitable she will one day return for a much longer stay.
The resulting year in a small agricultural village on Terceira’s northern coast allows Marcum to resurrect friendships founded a decade earlier and provides rich detail for this personal portrait of an island group that manages to balance an optimistic present and future with an intense respect for a deeply traditional past.
At the same time Marcum explores issues within her own life, including unfulfilling relationships and a career that has not always followed an outwardly clear trajectory.
With irreverence and humour, sensitivity and passion, she documents the personalities, practices and predicaments that set the distinctive people of Terceira apart as they dodge bellowing bulls, lament lost love, impress with newfound Californian prosperity, savour chewy shellfish and revere crusty home-delivered bread.

Vodka and Apple Juice

30/11/2018

Jay Martin: Fremantle Press, $27.99

JAY Martin is embarking on what appears to be every other Australian woman’s dream: spending three years as a lady of absolute leisure in northern Europe.
Accompanying husband Tom Armstrong on his diplomatic posting to Poland, Martin is at first excited by the promise of free time in which to explore their adoptive city, Warsaw, and its surrounding regions.
The novelty wears thin after only a few weeks, however, and in place of the initial wave of exoticism Martin feels herself quickly drowning under a tsunami of helplessness and rebellion as she struggles to read grocery labels, use public transport and make interpersonal connections in an entirely unfamiliar culture.
Her attempts to master a language of ‘ssshhhhhhes’ leave her mentally exhausted, and the sense of loss brought on by having stalled her own career as a senior political communicator in Canberra in order to travel with her husband leave Martin longing to reclaim the demands of full-time work with its structure and routine. The life of a non-working expatriate wife, it seems, is not the idyllic existence outsiders imagine it to be.
As Armstrong becomes increasingly ground down by his obligations to the embassy, Martin finally starts to regain her characteristic confidence, creating a role for herself as a freelance reporter and establishing a small but meaningful circle of loyal and engaging friends, both local and foreign.
In the process she explores areas of Poland few tourists visit, accepts that vegetarianism is an unfathomable concept to meat-loving pierogi traditionalists and develops a penchant for generous servings of vodka-spiked apple juice.
Yet, as the seasons tick slowly by and the emotional strain on her marriage intensifies, Martin begins to wonder whether she will ever settle comfortably into the apparently endless round of exhibition openings, cocktail parties, black-tie dinners and receptions for Australian government VIPs.

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99

JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

No Going Back

30/3/2018

Lisa Kennedy: Echo Publishing $32.99

“I FEEL guilty and… ashamed. I’m one of those stories you hear about in the news.” Lisa Kennedy’s candid admission sums up the shock and humiliation of having been deceived absolutely by her partner of almost a decade.
Very few Australians know Kennedy’s name. The situation could have been quite different, however, had a story filmed by current affairs program 60 Minutes been broadcast as planned.
In 2010, during what was intended to be a brief visit to introduce baby Daniel to his grandparents and aunt in Istanbul, Kennedy’s Turkish-born husband announced without warning that he had initiated divorce proceedings against her and that their son would live with him. Daniel was seven months old at the time.
After eight years of marriage, Kennedy was completely alone in an unfamiliar country where she spoke only a few words of the local language and whose laws were at best confusing and at worst unashamedly biased against foreigners.
The Australian Government was unable to intervene in what was essentially a domestic matter as far as the Turkish legal system was concerned.
Without her own parents, siblings or friends around her, Kennedy was left to choose between two unpalatable options: concede that she would never regain her son and return quietly to her old life in Melbourne, or dig in stubbornly and weather the antagonism being directed towards her by her husband and his family to continue fighting an expensive and emotionally exhausting battle for Daniel’s custody. Kennedy chose the latter.
When their case was eventually referred to the Family Court in Australia, the report was placed on hold by 60 Minutes. Seventeen months later a film crew from the program was detained by the authorities and an Australian child-recovery operative was jailed for their role in an eerily similar situation involving two Australian-born children Lebanon.

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.

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