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Absolutely Revolting

October 2014, no. 365

Here you will find Scott McCulloch’s captivating Letter from Ukraine as well as Peter Mares on the asylum seeker situation, Patrick Allington’s review of Peter Carey’s new novel Amnesia, and Peter Rose’s examination of Erik Jensen’s unusual memoir of his relationship with the troubled artist Adam Cullen. Also, Frank Bongiorno on Don Watson’s The Bush, Bridget Griffen-Foley on Fairfax, our new Poet of the Month feature with Robert Adamson, and Alison Broinowski’s review of Haruki Murakami’s latest work. We also join in the celebration of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s eightieth birthday with a review of his new poetry collection and of Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion.

Eloise Ross reviews The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan edited by Albert J. Devlin with Marlene J. Devlin
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Contents Category: Film
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‘I get awful intense about these movies I do. I become, in fact, obsessed with them.’ So Elia Kazan (1909–2003) wrote to his daughter in 1957. A workaholic, Kazan was both extremely self-assured and plagued by self-doubt, terrified he would produce mediocrity. He rarely did. As a stage and screen director he achieved remarkable success. Kazan was an egotist, and the confidence he exhibited publicly, and in these letters, is at once impressive and repugnant.
Book 1 Title: The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan
Book Author: Albert J. Devlin with Marlene J. Devlin
Book 1 Biblio: Knopf, US$40 hb, 649 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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‘I get awful intense about these movies I do. I become, in fact, obsessed with them.’ So Elia Kazan (1909–2003) wrote to his daughter in 1957. A workaholic, Kazan was both extremely self-assured and plagued by self-doubt, terrified he would produce mediocrity. He rarely did. As a stage and screen director he achieved remarkable success. Kazan was an egotist, and the confidence he exhibited publicly, and in these letters, is at once impressive and repugnant.

Read more: Eloise Ross reviews 'The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan' edited by Albert J. Devlin with Marlene...

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Nick Haslam reviews How I Rescued My Brain by David Roland
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Contents Category: Memoir
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The brain, notes philosopher Paul Churchland, is the engine of reason and the seat of the soul. David Roland’s memoir of stroke and its aftermath presents a vivid picture of engine failure and a soul unseated. His book lays bare the disorienting realities of brain injury and his gradual but faltering steps towards recovery. In time he adjusts to having a somewhat less powerful cognitive engine and achieves a more well-upholstered sense of self.
Book 1 Title: How I Rescued My Brain
Book Author: David Roland
Book 1 Biblio: Scribe, $29.99 pb, 290 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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The brain, notes philosopher Paul Churchland, is the engine of reason and the seat of the soul. David Roland’s memoir of stroke and its aftermath presents a vivid picture of engine failure and a soul unseated. His book lays bare the disorienting realities of brain injury and his gradual but faltering steps towards recovery. In time he adjusts to having a somewhat less powerful cognitive engine and achieves a more well-upholstered sense of self.

How I Rescued My Brain pivots around a stroke that Roland, an Australian clinical psychologist, experienced in 2009. However, the story begins years earlier, and Roland’s suffering is not reducible to a single cerebral event. In 2006 he is in his late forties and, to outward appearances, the epitome of middle-class success. He has a busy private practice, a family, friends, and property investments. But he is also heartsick. His marriage is in trouble, his investments precarious, his father dying. Anxieties leave him tired and prone to nightmares, panics, pains, and suicidal thoughts. He is disengaging from his work, intensely upset by the suffering of his patients. He diagnoses himself as experiencing a post-traumatic reaction brought on by vicariously experiencing the horrors they have witnessed or perpetrated. Clinical empathy has burned him out.

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Crusader Hillis reviews The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew by Eli Glasman
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Contents Category: YA Fiction
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Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphasis on outreach to non-observant Jews and its belief in the imminence of the Messiah.
Book 1 Title: The Boy’s Own Manual to Being a Proper Jew
Book Author: Eli Glasman
Book 1 Biblio: Sleepers Publishing, $19.95 pb, 175 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphasis on outreach to non-observant Jews and its belief in the imminence of the Messiah.

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Desley Deacon reviews The Little Girl who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America by John F. Kasson
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Contents Category: Film
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Lucky Shirley Temple! Film star biographies are usually made up of a chronology laced with doubtful studio publicity and salacious gossip. But The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression is written by a reigning scholar of American culture, John F. Kasson. A professor of History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kasson takes entertainment seriously. For more than forty years, beginning with Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1971), he has uncovered the cultural significance of popular leisure-time activities, places, and personalities in a style that is both scholarly and entertaining. His Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001) used three mini-biographies to explore the ‘masculinity crisis’ of the early twentieth century. In The Little Girl, he focuses on one icon to help us see how Americans survived the Great Depression.
Book 1 Title: The Little Girl who Fought the Great Depression
Book 1 Subtitle: Shirley Temple and 1930s America
Book Author: John F. Kasson
Book 1 Biblio: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd, $34.95 hb, 320 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Lucky Shirley Temple! Film star biographies are usually made up of a chronology laced with doubtful studio publicity and salacious gossip. But The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression is written by a reigning scholar of American culture, John F. Kasson. A professor of History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kasson takes entertainment seriously. For more than forty years, beginning with Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1971), he has uncovered the cultural significance of popular leisure-time activities, places, and personalities in a style that is both scholarly and entertaining. His Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001) used three mini-biographies to explore the ‘masculinity crisis’ of the early twentieth century. In The Little Girl, he focuses on one icon to help us see how Americans survived the Great Depression.

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Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews Stop the Presses! How greed, incompetence (and the internet) wrecked Fairfax by Ben Hills
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Contents Category: Media
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Article Title: The human cost of Fairfax’s decline
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Fairfax Media, which has churned out millions of words since its beginnings in Sydney in the 1830s, has itself inspired hundreds of thousands of words in the last year or so. First came Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall (June 2013), followed by Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (July 2013). Now comes Stop the Presses! by Ben Hills, a veteran investigative journalist who would no doubt self-identify as a ‘Fairfax lifer’, like many characters in his book. Just in case the theme of these tomes isn’t clear, we have Hills’s subtitle: How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax.
Book 1 Title: Stop the Presses!
Book 1 Subtitle: How greed, incompetence (and the internet) wrecked Fairfax
Book Author: Ben Hills
Book 1 Biblio: ABC Books, $39.99 hb, 394 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Fairfax Media, which has churned out millions of words since its beginnings in Sydney in the 1830s, has itself inspired hundreds of thousands of words in the last year or so. First came Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall (June 2013), followed by Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (July 2013). Now comes Stop the Presses! by Ben Hills, a veteran investigative journalist who would no doubt self-identify as a ‘Fairfax lifer’, like many characters in his book. Just in case the theme of these tomes isn’t clear, we have Hills’s subtitle: How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax.

All three books cover, in their own way, Fairfax Media’s struggles since the 1990s, as it failed to migrate its business to the Internet, and to profitably bring together its print and digital operations. Hills calculates that at the 2012 Fairfax annual general meeting a company which had once been capitalised at $9 billion was then worth $900 million; the loss in 2011–12 was more than half the size of the entire budget of Tasmania; and it was possible to buy two shares for the cost of one Fairfax paper by 2008. As the author explains, Fairfax Media did not have a crisis with audience – its free websites were market leaders – but with revenue.

Read more: Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews 'Stop the Presses! How greed, incompetence (and the internet)...

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