Reviewed by Ian Lipke

This book by West Australian author, Jacqueline Wright, has it all. On the surface it tells the story of Annie, a not-very-likable anthropology graduate who, with no experience of life in Australia’s Outback, leaves the city to learn about the language and customs of the aborigines who populate the camps in and around the fictional town of Ransom in West Australia’s north-west. The immediate trigger for these studies is the massacre of the aborigines in an incident that interests her professor. Annie has issues of her own and uses her trip to evade some of the consequences that stem from her troubled life. While she is wrestling with her own inadequacies and the quirky characters she meets, she is made aware that, Kuj, an eight year old child has gone missing. The town is rife with speculation, each story more outrageous than the one before, and Annie struggles to make sense of what is going on. Of course there is something of a love interest in the person of the secretive Mick Hooper, who ultimately is instrumental in Annie’s gaining the research knowledge she is seeking.

 

 

Reviewed by Ian Lipke

In 1954, a four year old girl, playing in a remote Colombian village, was abducted and left in the middle of an equatorial forest. Tired and frightened and very hungry she fights her way through the jungle. Eventually, she comes upon some Capuchin monkeys and mimics their habits and, being seen as not offering any threat, becomes accepted by them as one of their own. She learns to find food, and shelter from the big cats and the fierce storms. To all intents and purposes, she becomes a monkey. For five years or thereabouts Marina Chapman lived with the monkeys before being rescued by hunters and sold into slavery. But the story of The Girl With No Name has only just begun.

This is a story of survival in circumstances of extreme poverty and unrelenting danger. It is a story that bludgeons us into reassessing who is human and who is animal. I was captured by the anecdote of the little girl, the tamarind’s deadly twin, and Grandpa monkey (49 – 50). That this little girl was present when an out of control car went off a cliff and killed her companions, staggered me (157 – 58). I was appalled by the tale of the hunters, the little girl, and the slovenly Ana-Karmen (121ff). And what horrified me was the knowledge that all this was true, that there were many more episodes of blind ferocity and terrible cruelty that this little girl had to suffer. At one point she remarks, “I was an adolescent girl with no home and no family, so when and if I was noticed by any of these men, it would be entirely for the wrong reasons” (197) – and so it proved to be the case. One of the crime bosses attempted to molest her, and a whole new chapter of fear entered her life. But I was thrilled to find that there was also goodness in the world in the form of Maruja, brave neighbour to a Mafia family.

 

Reviewed by Ian Lipke

T.S. Eliot pronounced in The Times Literary Supplement in 1919 that “we know more of Jonson than any of the great writers of his age. There are no mysteries, or at least great mysteries, in his literary career, and the biographer is not driven with the Shakespearians, to conjectural reconstruction from the shards of record and anecdote.” Ian Donaldson has proved the great man wrong in his definitive new book, Ben Jonson: a Life, a comprehensive narrative cum evaluation of Jonson’s life and his writings. In providing illuminating readings of his subject’s work, Donaldson is careful not to draw links that cannot be substantiated between Jonson’s life and Jonson’s writings. Ian Donaldson’s book is a veritable work of scholarship, as Ben might say but didn’t.

           

 

Reviewed by Sharon L Norris

Resilience.  If you look up the meaning of this word you will find many definitions: ‘the ability to recover quickly from illness’ (www.answers.com), ‘the capacity to withstand stress and catastrophe’ (www.pbs.org),  or ‘the tendency to cope… with adversity’ (www.wikipedia.org).  Susanne Gervay and Serena Geddes’ delightful new children’s book  Gracie and Josh embraces all of these definitions of resilience – in children.

 

Gracie and Josh are siblings whose lives are dominated by Josh’s ongoing fight against an unnamed serious illness. He’s often sick, wears colourful beanies to hide the fact he has lost his hair, and visits the hospital frequently for treatment. He has good days and bad days and all the while his younger sister Gracie is doing what she can to help him get through this trauma. She entertains Josh by dressing up and performing in the films he likes to make on his movie camera when he’s well enough.

Reviewed by Hazel Menehira

This latest release by Geoff Page would be one of the most user friendly poetry books available today. It has immense appeal with lines that roll off the tongue depicting captivating studies of blokes, sheilas and all the characters that made a small laid back Australian town tick in the year of 1953.

 

 

Reviewed by SEB 

In November 2007, the body of a young British student was discovered in the house she shared with a group of students in Perugia, Italy. Meredith Kercher had been brutally stabbed and her throat cut. A few days later the Italian prosecutor jailed three people for Meredith’s murder: her American flatmate Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito, Knox’s Italian boyfriend, and Rudy Guede a disadvantaged young African-born Italian. The accused spent four years in jail enduring a sensational court case that initially convicted all three of murder but on appeal, eventually acquitted two, Knox and Sollecito, of all charges. Guede remains in jail. Death in Perugia: The definitive account of the Meredith Kercher case from her murder to the acquittal of Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox  is journalist John Follain’s account of the gruesome affair.

Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

Playing it Queer begins with historical, and theoretical, chapters about the development of queer identity, the cultural position of contemporary music, and the art form of camp. These chapters form the foundation for Dr. Taylor's recent research into queer performances, and audiences, in Brisbane and Berlin. The case studies of local performers, and international queer spaces, are contextualised within the history of drag, feminism, punk, and the mainstreaming of queer dance culture into what is called 'gaystreaming'.