Review of Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage

In 2010, there was a session at the Brisbane Writers Festival entitled ‘What do Iraqis think?’, with Richard Hil and Paul Wilson. They are two of the three authors (the other being Michael Otterman) of the book, Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage, which details what life is like for Iraqis since the invasion in 2003 by US and allied forces. We were all seated in a small but cosy space in the State Library of Queensland, with a view of the river behind the writers, and we were hearing things that were anything but cosy or comfortable.



These discomforting things are described thoroughly and well in the book, leaving no doubt as to the toxic effects of the war. Is this why there has been so little discussion of this volume in the mainstream media? Apart from that session at the festival, I have not read any full reviews or seen any articles or interviews in any Australian newspapers or journals. The website of Michael Otterman lists media attention, and I note some articles published in New Zealand and in New Matilda online. Otherwise, silence.

Continued at M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media.

Review of Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun by Liza Bakewell

First of all, this is a beautifully presented book, with an eye-catching and humorous cover. How a book looks and feels, before the reader even opens it up, is important. The reader’s senses are alive immediately.

Liza Bakewell is a linguistic anthropologist but Madre is not an academic tome; more like a dance through the linguistic history and difficulties of a word in the Spanish language that does not just mean ‘mother’. Madre, it becomes clear, can take on all sorts of meanings depending on the context of its use.


And most of the time Bakewell writes with fun and energy, using interesting phrases and descriptions that catch the attention and hold it. From the first page I liked the way she describes houses as ‘salty white and sandy brown’ with ‘lawns trimmed and polished as fine as I imagined the proprietors themselves’ (11). She introduces her friends and colleagues throughout the book in a way which makes them real on the page, and presents dialogue fluently and naturally.


Continued at The Compulsive Reader.

Review of Obesity: The Biography

The dustcover of Obesity: The Biography shows a painting by Benjamin Marshall of a famously obese Englishman, Daniel Lambert. When he died in 1809, at the age of thirty-nine, he was five foot one inch in height and weighed 739 pounds. Sander L Gilman records that a wall had to be demolished in order to remove him from his room (3). He notes that he 'came to represent the freakish nature of fat'--he was apparently recommended as a sightseeing stop if you were visiting London--but he was also described as a temperate eater and drinker, perhaps as an affectionate rather than accurate observation. The brief story of Mr. Lambert is a human touch and an interesting one in an otherwise frustratingly uneven text that lacks cohesion. Gilman writes in detail about the people through history who wrote on the body and its size, and all the likely influences upon it, and how attitudes and approaches to weight changed. These influences could be both external, such as culture and religion, or internal, such as matters of self-discipline, or mental or physical illness. Some of these writers were obese themselves, and wrote autobiographical accounts of their struggles with weight control, detailing their hypotheses on diet and exercise.   Continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Madness: An American History of Mental Illness and Its Treatment by Mary de Young

…throughout history the line between sanity and madness often has been negotiable, and more often than not has been inscribed by gender, race, socioeconomic class and sexual orientation. (26)

The sociologist Mary de Young has written a lucid, literary, extremely approachable history of mental illness in America, paying close attention, as the above quotation indicates, to the social context as well as the medical. If such a history can be 'enjoyable' then this is it; the reader is taken through the definition of madness, the experience of it through narrations and pathographies, or first person accounts, and how it was viewed, handled and treated through colonial days to the present. She describes and explains asylums, the patients who inhabited them, and the treatments to which they were subjected over the centuries, from the humoural approach of the ancients to electroconvulsive therapy, surgeries (of body and brain), and of course psychopharmacology.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Review of Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

Thomas Shapcott’s long last story has the innocent title ‘Sunshine Beach’. There’s nothing innocent about it. All of his stories, in fact, have innocuous titles, but inside them are great currents of emotion and difficult truths. But the novella made me realise just how fine his storytelling is, and how much wisdom is contained within.

Charlie Branson is the main character, and I kept reading his name as Charles Bronson, the tough guy actor with the sculptured rock face, as if he keeps trying to ‘tough’ out the change in his life. Charlie is a widower, his wife Miriam having died suddenly while overseas at a conference. Shapcott shows him clearing every physical object out of his life after her death: the house is sold, the furniture disposed of, even the photograph albums thrown away. He clears out a lot of his own clothing and bins paperwork, until there is nothing left.

Ghosts. No, out with them all. Everywhere he looked, even with so much of the household furniture already sent off to children, in line with Miriam’s will, and with all those ‘might come in handy’ bits and pieces (from long pieces of timber to what seemed like every piece of electric gadgetry ever invented) at last bequeathed to the Salvos, in each room of the house Charlie still found himself looking into a mirror, not a tunnel, of remembering. And what made it worse, each memory associated with each stick of furniture or property was as if each moment of the past were still now. Everything lived still in a perpetual present tense. He had not realised that furniture had this power. (124)

And then he goes back to the holiday town of his early adolescence, Caloundra, where he had experienced ‘glorious times’ (125). He buys a unit, furnishes it with any old pieces he can pick up, and reminisces about Beatrice. She was his brother’s friend, a special girl he got to know when he was fifteen, who now seems to glow with the light of nostalgia, lost youth, longing. He has thrown away the memories that pain him, and grasped with both hands the ones he thinks will comfort.

Continued at Transnational Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2, May 2011.

Review of Swimming by Enza Gandolfo

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.

Go to TEXT to continue reading.

Favourite books read in 2010

These are not necessarily published this year, but the ones I read and enjoyed, in no particular order:

1. Makers by Cory Doctorow
2. Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay
3. The Shaking Woman: A history of my nerves by Siri Hustvedt
4. Killing Time: One man's race to stop an execution by David Day
5. The City and the City by China Mieville
6. The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy: Bodies, Books, Fortune, Fame by Ruth Richardson
7. Ten Hail Marys by Kate Howarth
8. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
9. The Lucy Family Alphabet by Judith Lucy
10. Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals by Christopher Payne
11. Brief Lives: Gustave Flaubert by Andrew Brown
12. Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
13. Otherland by Maria Tumarkin
14. How We Die by Sherwin B Nuland

and one I'm still reading

15. 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

and three I really liked

16. The Possessed: Aventures with Russian books and the people who read them by Elif Batuman
17. A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin
18. Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons

If I had to choose, I'd go for The City and the City as my favourite fiction for the year, and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel tied with The Making of Mr Gray's Anatomy for non-fiction.