Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

September 2022, no. 446

Welcome to the September issue of ABR. This month we look outwards, with articles on international politics and international relations. Our cover features include two compelling articles on Afghanistan by Kieran Pender and Kevin Foster, while James Curran examines Australia’s complicated relations with China. Elsewhere in the issue, Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews a new biography of Vladimir Putin and Luke Stegemann reviews two other books on Russia, including Fitzpatrick’s latest history of the Soviet Union. Alison Broinowski examines a new book by former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Also in the issue are reviews of new fiction from Sophie Cunningham, Siang Lu and Paul Daley along with Michael Hofmann’s appraisal of Elizabeth Hardwick’s uncollected essays. Other highlights include Tara McEvoy on Seamus Heaney in Australia and Michael Garbutt on Paris’s Museum of Mankind.

Subscribe
Buy this issue
Read the facsimile edition
Nicholas Bugeja reviews Unknown: A refugee’s story by Akuch Kuol Anyieth
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Memoir
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: The mysterious child
Article Subtitle: A memoir of violence and deracination
Online Only: Yes
Custom Highlight Text:

‘I want to tell you about a different kind of world, one that exists within the world we live in,’ writes Akuch Kuol Anyieth in her memoir, Unknown, thus inviting her readers to empathise with the singular plight of refugees. For much too long, refugees have been overlooked or rendered invisible; they are confined to refugee camps, detention centres, and hotel rooms, condemned to the margins of society, and denied entry to territories in order to seek safe haven. Anyieth’s endeavour, through the personal medium of the memoir, to foreground the lives and perspectives of refugees is admirable, given that it obliges her to relive past traumas. Unknown is a vivid, embodied portrait of Anyieth’s resilience and her will to overcome.
Article Hero Image (920px wide):
Article Hero Image Caption: Akuch Kuol Anyieth (photograph by Fred Kroh)
Alt Tag (Article Hero Image): Akuch Kuol Anyieth (photograph by Fred Kroh)
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'Unknown: A refugee’s story' by Akuch Kuol Anyieth
Book 1 Title: Unknown
Book 1 Subtitle: A refugee’s story
Book Author: Akuch Kuol Anyieth
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $34.99 pb, 319 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/AoNL4a
Display Review Rating: No

‘I want to tell you about a different kind of world, one that exists within the world we live in,’ writes Akuch Kuol Anyieth in her memoir, Unknown, thus inviting her readers to empathise with the singular plight of refugees. For much too long, refugees have been overlooked or rendered invisible; they are confined to refugee camps, detention centres, and hotel rooms, condemned to the margins of society, and denied entry to territories in order to seek safe haven. Anyieth’s endeavour, through the personal medium of the memoir, to foreground the lives and perspectives of refugees is admirable, given that it obliges her to relive past traumas. Unknown is a vivid, embodied portrait of Anyieth’s resilience and her will to overcome.

Read more: Nicholas Bugeja reviews 'Unknown: A refugee’s story' by Akuch Kuol Anyieth

Write comment (0 Comments)
Open Page with Robbie Arnott
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Open Page
Custom Article Title: An interview with Robbie Arnott
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: No
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: An interview with Robbie Arnott
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

I like criticism that engages deeply with a work and brings interesting readings to the text that I might not have seen myself. For those reasons, I admire the writing of Oliver Reeson and Khalid Warsame.
Article Hero Image (920px wide):
Article Hero Image Caption: Robbie Arnott (photograph by Mitch Osborne)
Alt Tag (Article Hero Image): Robbie Arnott (photograph by Mitch Osborne)
Related Article Image (300px * 400px):
Alt Tag (Related Article Image): Open Page with Robbie Arnott
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Open Page with Robbie Arnott
Display Review Rating: No

 

Robbie Arnott’s début, Flames (2018), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award and a Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize. His follow-up, The Rain Heron (2020), won the Age Book of the Year award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Voss Literary Prize and an Adelaide Festival Award. His latest novel is Limberlost (2022). He lives in Hobart.

 

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?
I’ve always wanted to go to Patagonia. Even thinking about it fills me with a sense of adventure and isolation and natural beauty. I feel as though if I went there I’d come to some new understanding of things. It’s a silly feeling, but I can’t shake it. 

What’s your idea of hell?
Any meeting that goes for more than half an hour.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Passion (or the dreaded Vision). I think both are often used as excuses to treat others poorly.

What’s your favourite film?
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011).

And your favourite book?
Old School (2003), by Tobias Wolff.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
I have some friends who died young, so I’d go to the pub with them.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
Learnings (or any corporate jargon). Every time I hear jargon, I feel as if the world loses a bit of colour. I’d like to see blood referred to as claret more often. It reminds me of my grandfather, and the vibrant way he would use language and colloquialisms.

Who is your favourite author? 
I find this hard to answer, because there are many writers who have written books I adore, but I don’t necessary love their whole body of work. So I’m just going to say Annie Proulx. Her writing means a tremendous amount to me.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Philip Marlowe. He’s compelling, charismatic, and funny. Despite all his toughness and bluntness, he is kind to people who need kindness. 

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Curiosity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?
The Redwall series, by Brian Jacques.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire.
J.K. Rowling.

Read more: Open Page with Robbie Arnott

Write comment (1 Comment)
Benjamin Huf reviews The New Economics: A manifesto by Steve Keen
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Economics
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Antinomian economics
Article Subtitle: Steve Keen’s affront to received wisdom
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

In November 2011, amid the Occupy Movement that followed the 2008–9 recession, seventy-odd Harvard students walked out of their introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw, author of the world’s bestselling economics textbooks. The students protested that Mankiw’s faith-in-markets economics had little relevance for their crisis-riddled world. The walkout proved more than a campus stunt. Similar protests followed in universities across the world. Senior academics threw in support. New networks and organisations emerged, proposing alternative economics curricula, forums, and ideas. Their aim, as one campaigner put it, was to combat the ‘fantasy world of neoclassical economics – a faith-based religion of perfect markets, enlightened consumers and infinite growth that shapes the fates of billions’.
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Benjamin Huf reviews 'The New Economics: A manifesto' by Steve Keen
Book 1 Title: The New Economics
Book 1 Subtitle: A manifesto
Book Author: Steve Keen
Book 1 Biblio: Polity, $26.95 pb, 218 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/MXLGnM
Display Review Rating: No

In November 2011, amid the Occupy Movement that followed the 2008–9 recession, seventy-odd Harvard students walked out of their introductory economics course taught by Greg Mankiw, author of the world’s bestselling economics textbooks. The students protested that Mankiw’s faith-in-markets economics had little relevance for their crisis-riddled world. The walkout proved more than a campus stunt. Similar protests followed in universities across the world. Senior academics threw in support. New networks and organisations emerged, proposing alternative economics curricula, forums, and ideas. Their aim, as one campaigner put it, was to combat the ‘fantasy world of neoclassical economics – a faith-based religion of perfect markets, enlightened consumers and infinite growth that shapes the fates of billions’.

Read more: Benjamin Huf reviews 'The New Economics: A manifesto' by Steve Keen

Write comment (0 Comments)
David T. Runia reviews The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the literature of late antiquity by Simon Goldhill
Free Article: No
Contents Category: History
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: A new history of time
Article Subtitle: How Christianity transformed antiquity
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century bce Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it. 
Article Hero Image (920px wide):
Article Hero Image Caption: Central part of a large floor mosaic, from a Roman villa in Sentinum (now known as Sassoferrato, in Marche, Italy), c.200–250 ce. Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. (Detail from a photograph taken by Bibi St Pol at the Glyptothek, Munich/Wikimedia Commons)
Alt Tag (Article Hero Image): Central part of a large floor mosaic, from a Roman villa in Sentinum (now known as Sassoferrato, in Marche, Italy), c.200–250 ce. Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. (Detail from a photograph taken by Bibi St Pol at the Glyptothek, Munich/Wikimedia Commons)
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): David T. Runia reviews 'The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the literature of late antiquity' by Simon Goldhill
Book 1 Title: The Christian Invention of Time
Book 1 Subtitle: Temporality and the literature of late antiquity
Book Author: Simon Goldhill
Book 1 Biblio: Cambridge University Press, $66.95 hb, 500 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/5bN2bb
Display Review Rating: No

Long gone are the days when the discipline of classics was almost exclusively focused on the golden ages of fifth-century Greek and first-century BCE Roman literature and their antecedents. During the past decades, under the leadership of the indomitable Peter Brown and others, the period of later antiquity has become a burgeoning field of research. Yet it cannot be said that the study of specifically Christian thought and literature has been fully integrated into this development. Too often it has remained the domain of departments of theology and religion and of their associated vehicles of publication. In his thought-provoking and stunningly erudite new cultural history of time, the distinguished Cambridge classicist Simon Goldhill not only diagnoses this state of affairs but also seeks to remedy it.

Read more: David T. Runia reviews 'The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the literature of late...

Write comment (0 Comments)
Michael Sexton reviews Bench and Book by Nicholas Hasluck
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Memoir
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Tangible results
Article Subtitle: Reflections of a literary jurist
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Nicholas Hasluck is that relatively rare combination of practising lawyer and accomplished writer. A former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, he has also produced more than a dozen novels and as many works of non-fiction. This duality of roles is not unknown. Two contemporary examples that come to mind are Jonathan Sumption, who was on the UK Supreme Court and is a medieval historian, and Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney whose works include the trial novel Presumed Innocent (1988).
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Michael Sexton reviews 'Bench and Book' by Nicholas Hasluck
Book 1 Title: Bench and Book
Book Author: Nicholas Hasluck
Book 1 Biblio: Arcadia, $44 pb, 348 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/2rNbk0
Display Review Rating: No

Nicholas Hasluck is that relatively rare combination of practising lawyer and accomplished writer. A former judge of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, he has also produced more than a dozen novels and as many works of non-fiction. This duality of roles is not unknown. Two contemporary examples that come to mind are Jonathan Sumption, who was on the UK Supreme Court and is a medieval historian, and Scott Turow, a Chicago attorney whose works include the trial novel Presumed Innocent (1988). It is, however, still unusual, both in Australia and elsewhere. As Hasluck himself points out, there is little respect in the legal profession for those few members who have an interest in literature:

It has always struck me as an endearing trait of those who work within the legal system that if a chap works five days a week at the law, and spends his weekends playing golf or yachting, he is thought to be treating the law with the respect it deserves. On the other hand, if a fellow works five days a week at the law and then goes home and writes novels about truth and justice, he is often thought to be somehow, well, rather … frivolous.

Read more: Michael Sexton reviews 'Bench and Book' by Nicholas Hasluck

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...