Tag Archives: books

‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on May 4, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 322 p.

At the moment there’s a Senate inquiry into the new computer Integrated Assessment Tool that is being used to assess eligibility and assign funding levels for aged care service. It is completely automated, and there is no human over-ride function when the algorithm spits out an assessment that is inappropriate, insufficient or just plain wrong. At the inquiry, the first assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Robert Day, said

The no override comes from the fact that that is an objective outcome….If you have these scores from your assessment, you get this level of classification … there’s no discretionary element (Guardian, 3 April 2026)

SPOILERS

I was reminded of this when reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. My library has designated it ‘Science Fiction’, but there’s not much science fiction about it: it’s just an extrapolation of what is already here. Set in an alternative present day and in response to moral panic about the rising crime rate, The Risk Assessment Administration has been charged with investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes, and it can draw on myriad data sources in order to do so. American citizen Sara Hussein is pulled from the arrivals line at the airport because her risk score is too high. An archivist by training, she has been attending a conference, and she bristles and pushes back at being flagged as a risk. The risk assessment has picked up on a complaint from a fellow passenger on the plane who was off-loaded before take-off because she assisted him when he was having trouble breathing; her response that her employer paid for her flight was questioned because, technically, she had not yet submitted the receipts to recoup her expenses. But most damaging of all for her assessment was the information that the authorities could access from her Dreamsaver, a device that she -along with many other Americans- used to maximize the value from her sleep. As the mother of young twins, trying to keep her career afloat, she had turned to this device to overcome her insomnia and although she didn’t realize it, there among the terms and conditions was her permission for the data to be handed on to a third party if required by a legal enforcement authority. Her dreams revealed a propensity to violence, they claimed, and so she needed to be assessed further in Madison Retention Centre.

So started her months-long stint in an ‘retention centre’ which increasingly became prison-like with 24 hour surveillance, curtailed freedoms presented as ‘privileges’, and enforced work. The organization contracted to run the Madison retention centre, Safe-X Inc., has its own internal economy. It has contracts with outside clients like film studios to have AI generated video content assessed for its verisimilitude; it has its internal laundry and catering facilities which fall under Safe-X budgets. Communications are provided and monitored by the AI-driven PostPal; there is a commissariat where Residents could purchase goods from their own money or from funds provided by their families. She can receive visitors, but the scheduling program is capricious, cancelling her visits without any recourse. Her Dreamsaver is monitored daily, and periods of detention could be extended at whim by the Attendants. In the narrative, you (and she) are never quite sure what is dream, or increasingly nightmare, and what is real.

What seems to be a Kafka-esque and dystopian situation does come to an end- the book has an ending, after all- when she resists, using time-worn tactics of strike and solidarity. In fact, the book is almost optimistic in its ending:

…isolation is the opposite of salvation…she owes her release to the women who joined together to say not….Freedom isn’t a blank slate..[it] is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others…This is what Madison has given her, even as it has taken so much from her- the knowledge that she isn’t alone, that she doesn’t have to be. (p. 321,322)

This is a fantastic book. I only had ten pages to go to the end, and so I sat on the station as my train went past, wanting to finish it. It seems that so many articles and events are converging: I just read Anna Krein’s The screens that ate school, from The Monthly, 2020; at a recent appointment my doctor asked me if I would agree to HeidiAi Co Pilot for Modern Healthcare. Do I read the screen after screen of Terms and Conditions? Did I take the doctor’s word that the recording of my appointment wouldn’t go any further than her computer? Do parents have the courage to push back against Google and Apple programs in their schools? No, no and no. This book isn’t Science Fiction: it’s a warning.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I had read excellent reviews of it.

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‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2006/2008 320 p.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.

I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.

Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.

I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.

I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)

I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.

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‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 445 p.

It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.

Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.

There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.

The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.

It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.

If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: March selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘I You We Them’ by Dan Gretton

Posted on April 18, 2026 | Leave a comment
2021, 1120 p.

Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.

So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.

The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.

Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.

Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.

He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.

All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.

It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!

My rating: Hard to say. 9?

Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.

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‘Silence is my Habitat’ by Jessica White

Posted on April 8, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 150p.

The subtitle of this book is ‘ecobiographical essays’. What a many-stranded thing biography is becoming! Jessica White, the author of these essays and other academic work in the field, defines ‘ecobiography’ on her website in this way:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

This double focus – i.e. deafness or Deafness (she notes the distinctions of that capital letter) as both identity and medical condition, and the physical environment- permeates these essays, which range across both her personal and academic experiences. I admit that I’m not absolutely convinced that her approach needs the specific genre-descriptor of ‘ecobiography’ : is really a separate strand of biography or just a particular consciousness of environment on the part of the subject or on the part of the narrator?. In locating them as essays, she picks up on the etymology of the word ‘essay’ as her attempt to ‘trial’ and ‘try’ her responses to a subject, and to explore her own identity as woman and writer, after the death of her mother.

There are a number of themes that emerge through this collection of eleven essays. The first, as suggested by the title, is that of deafness. “Silence is my habitat” was a comment that the poet Judith Wright made to Heather Rusden in a 1990 interview, one of the few times that Wright discussed her increasing deafness. Reflecting, perhaps, the emphasis on identity in the intervening thirty years, White seems almost frustrated that there are no specific references to deafness in Wright’s poetry, although she and other scholars have detected it in the ‘negative poetics’ of her work- singing the praises of the natural world while acknowledging the inadequacy of words to describe it. When asked why she had not chosen to write about her deafness, Wright replied “Oh, I wouldn’t say it was a choice. I haven’t felt that it was an important part of my life in that way” (p.74). That could not be said of Jessica White. She writes of how meningitis as a three-year old robbed her of all hearing in her left ear, half the hearing in her right ear, and possibly some scarring on her brain (p. 17). She consciously seeks out writers who are conscious of sound and deafness including Fiona Murphy, poet Ilya Kamisky and the online Deaf History Collection of the writing, images and artefacts of deaf people. She explains the difficulties of architecture and the design of academic teaching at university, and how it has exacerbated the workload of a deaf tutor. She titles her essay about the shutdown of borders with COVID as “We Were All Deaf During the Pandemic”.

White shares with Judith Wright a deep environmental consciousness, which she expresses in her essay on Golden Orb spiders in her essay “Quintessence” and bird song- which she can hear- in the essay “On the Wing”. This alertness to the natural world runs through White’s academic work on Georgiana Molloy, the West Australian botanist who arrived in 1830. Molloy appears in the chapters “Intertwining” and ” Unseamed”, while White’s own grappling with her research and writing about Georgiana Molloy filters across different essays. In “Intertwining” where she describes Molloy’s experience in childbirth and loss of infant children, she explores – very honestly- her own yearning for a child, set against her partner’s refusal to have children, and her own awareness that the time for having a child was passing.

“The Breath Goes Now” focusses on her mother’s death: always a confronting event, the tenor of which is often shaped by the relationship between mother and child. In White’s case, it was her mother who was encouraging her to finish her book on Georgiana Molloy before she died- a comment made only half in just as her mother’s chronic lung weakness was curtailing her activities and life. Indeed, these essays emerged as a response to her mother’s death, when she found the architecture of her book and all those words collapsing. Ah Jessica- the death of the remaining parent is another event to be confronted yet, with all the questions it raises about your own identity as child when you no longer have parents.

These essays are beautifully written, as they approach her overarching themes tentatively, circling around them, advancing towards them, then retreating or splintering off to other safer ground before moving forward (literally essay-ing) again. Most of them are between 10-20 pages in length containing many short shards, like a flow of thoughts, asterisked to separate each one from the other, which is a writing style and fashion I am becoming less enthusiastic about, I must admit. They are very honest, especially those describing her relationship with her partner Bruce: perhaps too honest, when she re-reads them twenty years hence? But this honesty is also what gives the reader a feeling of intimacy with the author: a Garner-esque feeling that you have been having a good chat with an intelligent, sensitive friend.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: I encountered Jessica in the Australian Womens Writers Challenge a few years back, was aware of her work on Georgiana Molloy, and was interested to see what she’s doing now. Or does that just mean ‘nosiness’?

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‘The Last Painting of Sara de Vos’ by Dominic Smith

Posted on April 5, 2026 | Leave a comment
2016, 372 p.

I guess that you could say that if a historical fiction book sends you off to internet-land to find out which bits are true, then it has worked. I should have taken more notice of the author’s note which explains that Sara de Vos is a fictional, composite character. But I didn’t and so, yes, there I was half-way through the book, searching high and low for the paintings that are described in the text, trying to find out more about Sara de Vos, only to find myself directed back to publicity for Dominic Smith’s book. So, to save you the search, Sara de Vos is a 17th century fictional character and the paintings described don’t exist, although there are similarities with the few details known about Sara van Baalbergen. Like the Sara de Vos of this book, she was admitted to the the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and married a fellow painter. None of her works have survived.

SPOILER ALERT

But in Dominic Smith’s book, three of Sara de Vos’ paintings still exist- but which ones? The book opens in New York in November 1957, as a painting by Sara de Vos is stolen from the luxurious apartment of wealthy Marty de Groot, plucked from the wall above the marital bed. It ends up in the lands of Australian art historian, Ellie who is studying de Vos, freelancing in art restoration as a sideline activity. Her rather dodgy associate, Gabriel, asks her to make a copy of it. She asks no questions about where it comes from or to whom it belongs: she doesn’t want to know. It’s an opportunity to really study a de Vos painting close-up but it’s a decision that she regrets for the rest of her life, especially as her career blossoms and she becomes a noted academic and curator of Dutch Golden Age paintings. After assuming that the copy (i.e. forgery) has been resolved through her own contact- and more- with de Groot, it seems that her indiscretion of some forty years earlier is about to bring her undone as what she fears is two copies of the same painting are heading towards Australia, for an exhibition that she is curating at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

So what was this painting, source of both desire, possession and trepidation? It was At the Edge of the Wood, thought to be painted by Sara de Vos in 1636, depicting a young girl standing against a silver birch, watching skaters on a frozen river as the sun sets. Through the flashbacks to the 1630s that are interwoven through the book, we learn that it was painted surreptitiously by Sara de Vos, who although admitted to the Guild of St Luke- something almost unheard of for a woman- was expected to paint still life pictures within a domestic setting. She and her husband Barent had been expelled from the Guild for painting unsigned landscapes outside of the Guild strictures and her life is falling apart. She is still grieving the loss of her seven year old daughter, and deeply in debt, Barent has deserted her, leaving her to make her own way.

The book, then, has three intersecting strands: Sara’s story in 17th century Netherlands; Ellie’s life in 1950s Europe and ill-advised venture into forgery and later interaction with the rightful owner Marty de Groot, and 2000 in Sydney when three de Vos paintings are heading to upend Ellie’s career. In places it reads like a mystery, and historical fiction, in other places a critique of the art scene and collecting practices, and an exploration of grief and regret. He writes exceptionally well of Ellie as an awkward, young and inexperienced girl far from home, embarrassed by her virginity and alternately attracted to and repelled by an older man who is interested in her for his own purposes. He does conversation well, and his descriptions of paintings are so crisp that you think that you might have seen them once- even though, of course, you couldn’t have. At times his description of painting and forgery techniques drag a little, but they do pay testament to the research that he has undertaken as part of writing this book.

And what was Sara de Vos’ last painting? Ah well, you’ll have to read the book…

My rating:8/10

Read because: Book Group selection, sourced from Yarra Plenty Library Book Groups collection.

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Six Degrees of Separation: From ‘The Correspondent’ to ….

Posted on April 4, 2026 | 4 comments

It’s the first Saturday of the month- quite literally- and so it’s Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme, hosted by Kate at BooksAreMyFavouriteandBest involves her choosing a starting book, and then you linking six other books to it. Almost inevitably she chooses a book that I haven’t even heard of, much less read, and this month is no exception with the starting book ‘The Correspondent’ by Virginia Evans.

My first thought about a ‘correspondent’ is that of being a foreign correspondent. Geraldine Brook’s Foreign Correspondence, written in 1998, is a book in two halves. The first half is a memoir of growing up in Australia and collecting a number of international penfriends back in the day when you had to wait weeks for a letter from overseas. The second half is about her life as a foreign correspondent, who in her off-duty times catches up with her erstwhile penfriends to ‘investigate’ how their lives have turned out. It’s a great book for baby-boomers and laugh-out-loud funny in places.

One of the foreign correspondents on ‘our’ ABC that I respect deeply is John Lyons, who is often the target of criticism particularly by conservatives and pro-Israel groups, but whose observations I always find honest and not always comfortable. Balcony Over Jerusalem (see my review here) is a memoir of the six years that Lyons spent based in Jerusalem as Middle East correspondent for the Australian, not a newspaper that I read often. He has worked for most of the media groups in Australia: Murdoch with the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and now for the ABC as their Global Affairs Editor. As Middle East correspondent generally, his brief extended to countries beyond Israel. He was there to witness the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent crackdowns in various countries and the political permutations in Iran, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. However, his major emphasis is on Israel, and the politics that have shaped the United States response, which flies in the face of world opinion which is gradually hardening against Israel. It was one of the 5 books given to Australian MPs for summer reading in 2025 on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict for summer reading, endorsed by both Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) and the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), and sent with a letter signed by more than 50 writers including Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Charlotte Wood, Benjamin Law, Anna Funder, Trent Dalton and Hannah Kent.

Also in the Middle East is Lebanon Days by Theodore Ell (my review here) It is the story of the two-and-a-bit years between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2021 that the author spent in Beirut as the partner of an Australian Embassy official- a time in which Beirut roiled under street protests as part of the thowra (i.e. revolution) which was eventually put down by Hezbollah (or as he writes it ‘Hizballah’) and the COVID lockdowns, during a time of economic collapse exacerbated by government corruption, which in turn laid the conditions for the Beirut port explosion that changed his life.

The Beirut Port Explosion of 2020 is the central theme of Beirut 2020: The Collapse of a Civilization by Charif Majdalani (my review here). The English language version starts with a very useful preface ‘Lebanon: the lessons of complexity’ which provides a potted history of Lebanon over 9 pages. It then moves to a series of journal articles, starting on 1 July 2020. His diary entries are interspersed with short explanatory chapters, which expand on the information given in the preface about corruption, protest, the piles of rubbish. The presence of COVID and the refugee influx are mere background details. Still the book inches closer to the explosion that we know is going to happen. This book tries to end on an optimistic note, but it rings rather hollow- especially now.

Still in the Middle East, but now historically, with the fantastic Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. Palace Walk is the first book of the trilogy. It is set in Egypt in 1919 during the uprising for independence against British occupation. It is the family story of Al-Sayyd Ahmed in a time of rebellion, when modernity and the adult independence of his children chips away at his sense of traditional authority.

And to round off and to return to the theme of correspondence, I finish with another historical book, Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag’ by Orlando Figes (my review here). Moving out of the Middle East to yet another of the world’s troubled areas, this book is based on an archive of letters between Lev Mischenko, who spent eight and a half years on the extreme edge of Russia in one of the gulag camps in the Arctic Circle after WW2 and his partner Svetlana Ivanova. There are maps, photographs, explanations and Figes explains not only the minutiae of labour camp life, but also the sweep of Soviet politics on the outside during the time that Lev was imprisoned. But the real, real strength of this book is Lev and Sveta’s story, and the beautiful, nuanced, tender letters that they shared over this time.

It must be a sign of the times and my own unease over where the world is heading that has dominated my choice of Six Degree books this month. Sorry…but all of these books were excellent, in a time when I think it’s important that we keep looking outwards when all we want to do is curl up and wait for it all to go away.

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‘Ankami’ by Debra Dank

Posted on April 2, 2026 | 2 comments
2025, 152 p.

Both visually and in its subject matter, this third book by Debra Dank and her first We Come With This Place (see my review here) are linked. However, the tone of this book is different: instead of being a celebration of family, country and continuity as her first book was, this book is infused with an anger which is moulded into regret. The beautiful writing is still there, but there’s an injury here as well. I wonder if the timing of this book has something to do with this? It was published in 2025, post-Voice Referendum. I see the defeat of the Referendum as a mean-spirited rejection on the part of white Australia of the responsibility to listen – something that Governments seem happy to do with lobby groups, particular religious groupings and big business, but not our First Peoples whose ‘brand’ we blithely adopt at international events like Olympic Games and tourism advertisements.

She herself acknowledges her anger, which she capitalizes with an Upper Case A. As soon as she awakes, her uninvited bedfellow Anger whispers to her and causes her body to tighten. As she tries to locate where Anger comes from, she moves to “the outskirts of my reminiscence”, where she finds

sombre sub-memories that suggest the what might have beens, the sentient breathing of those who did not have the opportunity to make themselves more substantial by their living, but I find them there all the same, prowling like misshapen birds waiting to tell a calamitous story. I know too much about those birds, their earthly form an unsettling combination of shiny black feathers and yellowish beaks, staring eyes… and about their stories. They are often around, the flapping of their wings and their cawing voices adding to the daily rhythms of my living steps, but inside, with my unseen companion, Anger, they seem to offer obscure warnings of imminent and dire happenings. (p. 34)

So what has happened between her first and second books? Certainly in We Come With This Place there is violence and injustice but her Anger/Regret in this book starts as whispers from aunties who tell her of voices “all them kids” that cried at night, and older women in the community who urge her to go up to the islands in the north because her father had family there. When she asked her father, he denied that he had any other unacknowledged siblings. There was an appointment with an Aboriginal agency trying to link up families again that seemed to be fruitless. Then there was the unsolicited and unexpected phone call from a woman who was putting together and thought that they might be related on account of their shared name. There was silence when Debra told her that she and her father were Aboriginal. There was a silence. “Oh well, um, that’s nice. Er, you have a nice day”. (p. 81)

Then there is finally, definitely, the documents that she located in the National Archives.

Time collapsed in those moments of opening the attachments and doing the cursory read that I thought would be adequate to find what I had assumed was waiting to be found. I was looking for an easy telling of names and places and times that I already knew, not this thing that greeted me with a wicked and vengeful eye. In that moment I was so very grateful for those documents but there was an awful, almost hateful, separation too. I discovered that my father had not one sibling but four, who were taken, that my paternal grandmother had given birth to ten children, not the six that I had known about. Those four others seemed to be part of the Stolen Generations, and later, as I sat in silence to process that, I remembered that there had been whispers. (p. 62)

What seems to be particularly galling is that these four children are an absolute void. They are not named, or numbered. The document from the National Archive was a letter advising of the death of her maternal grandmother, the mother of 10 children. Her youngest child had died, and the other living five children were on the Alexandria station. The author of the letter didn’t know where the other children were.(p. 94) When the protector arrived up at Alexandria station, he expected to find the children there, but “I understand it is the practice to trade workers between this one and that”. (p. 87)

In the Redfern speech in 1992, Paul Keating (or Don Watson his speechwriter) spoke of the failure of imagination on the part of White Australia. Despite the bland language of the time, it doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to recognize child removal or slavery.

Here is the ‘Ankami’ of the title: “to give life to”. Her book gives life to these children of the absence. She recognizes that it is not anger, but sorrow at the ‘should have beens’ of these four missing siblings, aunts and uncles, and the web of cousins that might have been wrapped up into the family, as she had been.

I realize that I’m not angry at all, that what I’m feeling is loss, loss that is pervasive and soul deep and profound. I see now that wandering through my body to eventually arrive at what may be close to my soul, that careful travelling gaze found the site that hosts my sorrow. I live with long term loss that is impossible to grieve for because I don’t know who I should miss. I didn’t learn their faces. I didn’t feel their joy or wrath; they never taught me the things they needed to teach me as much as I needed to learn them. Mostly I don’t know how to miss them because they were never there, merely half-imaginings on that opaque edge of my knowing of what should have been, but they’re there in ways that I can never escape because they’re in my blood. And somehow I’m grateful for that because they deserve so much more than to only exist in that horrible arrangement of ink. (p. 177)

Danks spends quite a bit of time in this book talking about fruit cake, which seems a paradox. It is a fruitcake from a recipe brought from Scotland with the ‘settlers’ of her family, that has been handed on from daughter to daughter. She talks about her non-indigenous father-in-law’s stories of his childhood and the perils of surfing and the sea, stories that he had told many, many times before. We all have history, but only one history is told; only one history is recognized.

I think there is a particular kind of superficial living gripped by folk who hear only one history, only one way of thinking…let’s all be truly courageous about owning our entire history and acknowledging all of it, and then be proud- an informed pride, rather than one that is steeped in wilful ignorance. (p. 111-2) …. The central truth in this story is that all Australians now benefit from what was done to my family and to almost all other Aboriginal families in Australia and it can only heal us all to admit that much at least. But I don’t know that such a young country has the maturity to accept that. (p. 179)

It doesn’t. This is what Australia said ‘no’ to.

This book is confronting and asks difficult questions that we don’t want to answer, but it is not bashing you over the head with guilt. As Antonia Pont, who wrote the Foreword notes, the book “circles, spirals, sidles close to, and also confronts legal, political, communal and personal facts and happenings, with a rigorous yet not overplayed scholarly knowledge of the detail” (p.xii) It is a bit like probing the skin around a wound: touch, flinch, but touch again more gently. Such grace in allowing us the space to be so tentative, but still quietly insistent that there is much work yet to be done. ‘Ankami’ has been shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Award. It didn’t win, but it would be a worthy winner.

My rating: 9/10

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 March 2026

Posted on April 2, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Climate Question (BBC) Seeing the cascade of concrete rubble in Lebanon, and the belching smoke from missile and drone attacks on oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East, I can’t help thinking about the environmental implications of America and Israel’s war on Iran. I’m obviously not alone. In this episode, What’s the Climate Cost of War host Graihagh Jackson chats to two leading experts ( Neta Crawford, Professor of International Relations, University of St Andrews and Dr. Benjamin Neimark, Associate Professor at Queen Mary, University of London) about the carbon footprint of battle itself – the jets, the bombs, the supply lines – and the impact of maintaining armies and bases during peacetime. They discuss Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the current US-Israel war with Iran. They point out that militaries have a huge climate impact even in peacetime, because they are always mobilized, and the procurement of highly engineered weapons has a climate impact too. They point out that the military doesn’t have to report emissions because they received a carveout in the Kyoto accord, and reporting was made voluntary under the Paris climate accord. However, the military are reducing emissions because they are concerned about extreme weather and the instability it causes, and the mass migration which might result.

The Rest is Classified Episode 122 Kim Philby: An Assassin in Spain (Episode 2) By now Philby’s Soviet handlers had charged him with the task of infiltrating the British state- starting with his own father, who was a rather eccentric Arabist. Kim and his friend Tim Milne (the nephew of Winnie the Pooh writer AA Milne) travelled in Europe and witnessed the rise of fascism. He began working as a journalist, and was sent on assignment to hang around with the Nazis. From there he was sent to the Spanish Civil War to cover the right wing forces for the ‘Times’ and was encouraged to get close to Franco. In 1937-8 many Soviet handlers were purged by Stalin, and he was cut loose for a while, with little or no contact with his handlers. In 1939 Germany and Russia signed the Nazi-Soviet pact, which must have really done in the heads of anti-Nazi Communists- all of a sudden they were on the same side! He met Litzi, a sexually liberated Communist, and they married. and went back to England together. Then he was sent by the Times to report on the British army, which of course he fed to Russia, which was still too involved in its own purges to take much notice of him. At this stage, the other Cambridge Five were more successful in infiltrating the British Establishment- for example Guy Burgess was working at the BBC, where he was very well connected. When Burgess was recruited by MI6, he lobbied to get Philby in, although Burgess himself was soon sacked and returned to the BBC and then the Foreign Office. Philby joined the British Secret Intelligence Service after his father vouched for him.

The Rest is History Episode 405 The Nazis in Power: The Nuremburg Rallies (Part 2) From their website

““We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out, but because the weapons of our mind didn’t fire” In September 1934, the Nazis held their sixth annual party conference in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. The location held a symbolic resonance for the party, being not only the embodiment of an uncorrupted medieval Germany, and the centre of the First Reich, but also a bedrock of anti-Semitism. It was therefore here that Hitler would lay out his terrifying vision for the mighty new empire’s future, promulgating the superiority and purity of the Aryan bloodline. The rally was a pageant of ritualised fanaticism, recalling the majesty of Germany’s mythic past and all the heroism of classical antiquity. It was the first of many such extravagant displays, replete with parades of marching workers, bonfires, and swastikas, as the Nazi propaganda machine, under the leadership of the grotesque Joseph Goebbels, tightened its stranglehold over Germany. Through the popularisation of the radio, Nazi youth organisations, cinema, and even the Olympic Games, German minds were being steadily remoulded…”

There were 700,000 participants at the rally which included speeches, stage performances and parades. By 1935 Hitler announced that the swastika would be the national flag, and very cheap radios were distributed so that people could listen at home. Radio propaganda was also installed in offices, cafes and stairwells. Women were cloistered within a separate sphere, based on inequality and pseudo-scientific theories. They were moved out of legal and educational positions, and in 1934 were limited to 10% of the enrolment at grammar schools, and soon there would be no female enrolment at all. There were no non-Nazi youth groups: instead provision for young people was funnelled through the Hitler Youth and the League of Nations

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‘The Other Americans’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on March 26, 2026 | 1 comment
2019, 301 p.

The front cover of this book shows a stylized drone-view type drawing of a suburb in America, with gabled houses surrounded by lush green lawn and trees. It looks just the way I imagine American suburbia to look, full of Leave-it-to-Beaver and Brady Bunch types. The ‘Other America’ in this book live in a rural town on the edge of the desert and the “other Americans” who live there are very different to this white, sanitized image.

Late at night in a small town in the Mojave Desert, California, middle-aged Driss Guerraoui, a cafe owner who originally emigrated from Morocco, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. It is assumed that it is accidental, but his daughter, Nora, believes that it was a deliberate ‘accident’ even though her grieving mother Maryam and sister Salma do not follow her in her obsession with finding the perpetrator. The local police are brought in, including Coleman, a female officer that we later learn is of African-American descent, and deputy sheriff Jeremy Gorecki, an ex-Iraq veteran who had grown up in the town and had long had a school-boy crush on Nora. Before the accident Nora had been living in Chicago, trying to carve out a career as a musician, and involved with a married man who had not followed through on his pledges to leave his wife. But when her father is killed, she returns to her home town and again becomes involved with the boys she went to school with, including Jeremy and A. J. and his father Anderson, who owned the bowling alley beside her father’s cafe. However, the accident did not go completely unseen. Efrain, an undocumented immigrant, saw the collision but fear of the authorities stopped him going to the police. He only came forward when Nora offered a generous reward, possible because of a bequest left to her by her father (a bequest resented deeply by her sister).

The story is told in a chorus of nine voices, including that of the dead man Driss. Because they are all telling the story from their own perspective, we learn much more than about just the accident and the investigation, which is rather an anti-climax as far as a police procedural goes. We see parallels between Driss and Efrain, both making a life in a new country; we learn of infidelities in Nora’s own family; we see racism and resentment being played out at multiple levels. Because they are told from each character’s point of view, we gain multiple perspectives on the same event but I feel that, as a writing technique, it’s a bit of a cop-out. The voices were not sufficiently different from each other and the author is relieved of the responsibility of tying them together. It has been done before, and it just felt a bit tired as a style.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I have Leila Lelani’s new book reserved, and I thought I’d read one of her earlier works first.

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