Kate Wilks is a swimmer; she moves far more easily in the water than she does on land, and she has been swimming all her life. The symbol of water is all through this first novel by Enza Gandolfo, and makes for a flowing feel, the words sometimes drifting, sometimes whirlpooling, sometimes rushing, crashing, or still.But Kate, now near sixty, meets up with her ex-husband, the sculptor Tom, at a photography exhibition. Kate is the subject of one of the photographs, naked and standing in the sea; the photographer is her best friend Lynne’s daughter, Tess, both mother and daughter are very important in Kate’s life. But Tom unexpectedly asks her ‘Do you think…we might have stayed together if we’d had children?’ (11).
And this question becomes the impetus for Kate to go back into her memories of trying to have a baby. She digs out an unfinished manuscript called ‘Writing Sarah’, a collection of fragments and chapters that describes her thoughts and feelings as she fell pregnant, only to miscarry each time. The core of the book is Kate’s exploration of what it means to be childless, to want a baby so badly that you give her a name and imagine her so clearly that she almost becomes real. Almost, but not quite.
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Ramona Koval appeared at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival, being interviewed, along with Anna Krien, by Stephen Romei. She discussed a number of interviews included in Speaking Volumes, making mention, amongst others, of Harold Pinter and Joyce Carol Oates, for quite different reasons. She makes a fascinating interviewee, so open to whatever is asked her, and willing to sing as well – in Yiddish! Although there is no singing mentioned in the book, Koval notes that she and Saul Bellow spoke some Yiddish after their interview ended.
There is a theme through these nineteen pieces by doctors and one psychologist, that of remembering the humanity of both doctors and patients. Medical students are often taught that they should keep emotionally distant from their patients, that it will help with their treatment of them, and also with their own self-preservation. But to carry this to the extreme, or to carry it to every single patient regardless of the circumstances, is that appropriate? Or even possible? What sort of person could not get involved, to some degree, with a dying patient they have cared for?
Kevin Brophy has written two books about creative writing, Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (1998) and this one, Explorations in Creative Writing. Both of these explore areas of creativity and writing that make them decidedly different from most other books on the subject: they are not how-to books, not strictly 'inspirational', nor are they strictly 'scholarly' approaches to literature. They are truly explorations of the vastness and intimacy of creative writing, with particular emphasis on the imagination and surrealism.
When you read Dubravka Ugrešić, be prepared to go where you’ve not been before.
There are many popular books on neurology, neuroscience and psychiatry, including those by the well known neurologist Oliver Sacks, and the wildly successful title The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. When he visited Australia recently, Doidge's sessions at writers' festivals were filled to capacity, and it was not difficult to see why: his own speaking style was professional but warm, he could answer any question, and he was offering the hope of our brains being more 'plastic' than we thought, and able to heal from stroke and injury.
I read this impressive and intensively researched book from the point of view of an educated general reader, a woman and a feminist, but not an expert on rape or sex crimes in general. It is highly controlled, well argued and scholarly, but with little jargon, and she does occasionally interject her own feelings. In fact, she states in the preface that her reason for writing the book was fear, followed by anger at a statistic: 'I read a Home Office report that revealed that only 5 per cent of rapes reported to the police in the UK ever end in a conviction' (vii). This anger does not drive the text, but it indicates the passion that ignited the task, and the book is better because of it. And each section has an epigraph, verses from Cecil Day Lewis' poem 'Sex-Crime', which balances the facts with poetic representation of the injustice of rape and its aftermath.
This handsome-looking book, with the Ansel Adams photograph on the dustjacket, attracted me, although I paused at the ‘healing’ in the subtitle. It sounded a little flaky, and I didn’t acquaint nature with the healing of any of the artists and writers listed. Some of them did not seem to be very ‘healed’ by anything, such as Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. But I was prepared to be convinced that I was wrong. 
It was reported recently that Raj Patel had been declared a Messiah by a religious organisation. Apparently, this was misleading, as the group did not name him specifically. Patel's response was a good-humoured, slightly embarrassed, denial and a statement that we shouldn't be relying on Messiahs of any sort to tell us what to do anyway.
The Secret, a book by a former television producer called Rhonda Byrne, professes to contain all that you need to know to be healthy, wealthy and happy, distilled from the wisdom of many thinkers over the ages. The essence of this secret is that if you believe hard enough that money, health or love will come your way, it will. Send your wants out into the universe, and the universe will send you the goods back. 
In the light of current debates over health care, this book provides some sobering and relevant insight. Towards the end of his thorough and balanced history of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), John Dittmer provides a chapter entitled ‘Health Care Is a Human Right’. It has an epigraph from Aristotle: