Reviewed by Gemma England

My iPod's shuffle mode provides some sort of randomness ahead of workdays that play out the same tunes: Water Cooler Conversation, Allocations, Lunch Cafeteria, Allocations (extended mix) and Polite Farewell - in the identical order every day (4).

At the start of Matt Howard's Taking Off, Ash is going nowhere. He works in the magazine industry, and would loathe his job, except it does not inspire the necessary passion. He likes to remember his workmates by the magazines they work on, instead of by their names, and they, in turn, appear to know nothing about him. His social life has grounded. His recent crush is a girl called Zoe, his workmate's new girlfriend and she is unattainable; Ash accepts this with resignation. And finally there is his home life. He lives with his sister and brother-in-law, and both of them appear as trapped and ready to take off as he does.

Reviewed by Tim Milfull

Nine-year-old, Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey) is in one of those unenviable positions. She lives in a comfortable middle-class home, is loved by her parents and doting grandparents, attends an exclusive school, and relishes the chance to go to church and Sunday School. Sure, her live-wire brother François (Benjamin Feuillet) can be a bit of a pain, but life in general is pretty good. Until her liberal parents take the next step up the ladder of activism, and become communistas. Who else to look to, but to Blame It on Fidel!

Reviewed by Sam Hagaman

Her name is Coco—a blonde, thirty-five-year-old, unattached Australian journalist living the expat life in an attic apartment in Nice, France. His name is Jack—a handsome, fifty-year-old American lawyer with a Mercedes, a pilot’s licence, a plane, and a luxurious French apartment. Oh, and he can cook. And he’s immaculately tidy.

Reviewed by Sam Martin

Why do we read about another person's travels? Is it a learning process, an effort to soak up the first-hand research that our adventurer has gathered along the course of their trip? Is it to ponder upon the more philosophical nature of journey and movement? Or is it more that we wish to place our feet in the muddy, worn boots of our narrator, and think of how we might adapt part of their journey to make our own? Our best travel writers certainly read well against all these criteria, creating texts that are at various times insightful, thoughtful and inspirational. But what of those books whose journeys are no less grand, but are written without the technique or thoughtfulness of more skilful practitioners?

Reviewed by Amanda Roe

The Art of Ill Will, by Donald Dewey, is a handsome-looking publication, printed on high quality paper with superb full colour reproductions of cartoons. The material covered dates from the period of the pre-Revolution colonies to those that deal with George W. Bush and Iraq; perhaps there lies the problem with the book: author Donald Dewey’s sweep is so vast that any depth of analysis is impossible. A personal preference on my part because the subject of graphic satire is of great interest to me, but I really wanted more than “a nice coffee-table title for political junkies” which is how Publishers Weekly damns with faint praise in a collection of review quotes on the back cover. Dewey himself is something of a dilettante, with film actor biographies, a history of baseball fans as well as fiction, drama and magazine journalism listed in his CV. The author’s literary style is probably best characterised by the latter genre.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Emanuel

 

Australian wine experts used to be portly gentlemen of refined taste and mature vintage, whose girth was testament to their lifelong dedication to wining and dining. Avuncular characters, they occasionally took time out from their privileged pastimes to demystify the wine business for the plebs, who were more inclined to drink beer or billy tea.

Reviewed by Glen Thomas

Grammar occupies an odd place in the minds of many people. For thunderous editorial writers of major newspapers, grammar is the centrepiece of a back-to-basics education that needs to be soundly thrashed into the minds of degenerate, lazy students too long cosseted by an ‘anything goes’ curriculum. For opponents of the sound thrashing approach, grammar is an arcane straightjacket that restricts the expression of people who do not need to know the difference between nominative and objective pronouns anyway. And then there is a third group who regard grammar in the same way that I view quantum physics: something best left for other people to understand and worry about. Certainly, there are many supposed rules to English grammar that mean an awful lot to people for no good reason, such as injunctions against ending sentences with a preposition, or the guilt and shame that are attached to splitting an infinitive (although those who denounce split infinitives are themselves a little hazy on what, exactly, an infinitive is).

Reviewed by Lauren Carr

There are a few clues to let you know that Led Zeppelin: When Giants Walked the Earth is going to be thorough, the first being the sheer volume of material (nearly 500-pages), the second is Mick Wall's credibility as an 'unauthorised biographer' with ten previous publications on other rock bands. His writing style echoes early reviews of Led Zeppelin—raw, rough and loud—but ultimately, and most importantly, well-received by audiences.

Reviewed by George Ivanoff

There's nothing new about the notion of children as consumers. They get pocket money and they earn money in after-school jobs, so naturally, advertisers chase their dollars. But there's more to it than that, according to the Media Education Foundation's documentary, Consuming Kids. This well-presented doco sheds some light on just how insidious marketing to children can become. It's quite eye-opening. And as a parent, it's a little frightening.

Reviewed by Brooke Brunckhorst

The Astronomer Royal has high hopes for the future of one of the officers of the First Fleet when it arrives in Australia. Always the outsider, young Lieutenant Rooke sets up a makeshift observatory and quarters away from the main settlement. As local aboriginals make tentative visits to his hut, Rooke’s attempts at simple human communication develop into a friendship with one of the young girls and her inquisitive siblings. She teaches him a new language, while he envisions the fame he might have by bringing the aboriginal tongue to the scientific community in England. While the activities of the rest of the settlement seem far beyond his immediate concerns, an attack on one of the Governor’s men suddenly leaves the Lieutenant facing a choice between friendship and duty. These are the historical facts that form the basis for Grenville’s story. But, like her previous novel The Secret River, The Lieutenant is simple tale that benefits enormously from a fictional re-telling in subtle, but somehow inspiring, prose