Oil On The brain, by Lisa Margonelli

This book charts journalist Lisa Margonelli’s investigation into where petrol comes from, how it is made and retailed. Margonelli employs her journalistic skills throughout, investigating from the source rather than reporting from and commenting on established research. This gives Oil On The Brain a refreshing, on the ground perspective.

By investigating things we all take for granted, Margonelli uncovers lots of fascinating little facts and figures about petrol and its manufacture.

We start at the petrol station, then move back to the refinery, the drilling rig, the oil market and then the various sources, countries like Venezuela, Chad, Nigeria, Iran. The last chapter concentrates on China, and its burgeoning economy and ambitious citizenry who have designs on all owning a car for themselves.

There is also a fascinating chapter on America’s strategic petroleum reserve. This is a huge oil reserve that apparently will keep the country going for some two months if there’s a disaster and oil supplies are interrupted.

An interruption in oil supplies would of course be a political problem. A lot of this book is devoted, after all, to the unstable countries that produce the oil, one of the hidden costs behind ‘cheap’ oil. For example, the Iraq war has been conservatively estimated to have costed 3 trillion dollars. That cost is never included in the price of oil.

When you weigh up all of these hidden and unstable costs (and this doesn’t even factor in environmental damage and the health and safety aspects of pollution), you come away thinking that our sophisticated societies are completely bonkers.

Our whole society is built on oil, yet there is so much extraordinary risk behind it all. The thinking in Western societies seems to be that a technological fix, a new source of energy, is simply a given. It’s not an if situation, but a when.

To me this is a question of reality keeping up with fantasy. Most people aren’t interested in where oil comes from, or how petrol is made. The political situation in Nigeria or Chad is not high on our list of priorities. Instead we get angry at rising petrol prices (here in Australia anyway) and demand government to do something, which they can’t.

This is a book that takes a lot of interesting angles. Recommended.

The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas

It’s been a while since I read a Dumas novel. I forgot how much fun they could be.

Dumas writes in what seems like a mad, improvisatory sprint, his literary landscapes sprouting flowers and gambolling characters as he proceeds apace.

Nor when adding ingredients to his exotic fictions does he hold back on the spices. In this novel, Dumas shows his fondness for fascinating little digressions. We learn about history, politics, art, psychology, and of course, the art of love.

Of all the ‘classic’ novelists I’ve read, Dumas is one of those who comes closest to writing the trashy, popular novel. He perhaps saves himself by freely admitting within his actual novels that they are transparently plotted.

Dumas appears to be saying that plots don’t matter, but character and psychological development do.

(In The Black Tulip he several times intrudes as narrator to comment on the obvious nature of his plot.)

Dumas took a real historical even, a political assassination, as a point of departure for The Black Tulip. Reading the opening chapters I wondered when this complex historical data would fade away and some compelling, central characters emerge.

The Black Tulip it turns out is a romantic tale built around a young man’s passion for cultivating tulips.

Dumas’s genius is to make such a novel seem like such an easy feat to accomplish. The novelist weaves such a huge array of material into a mere two hundred pages.

I was one hundred and fifty or so pages in when I started to sense the novel was drawing to a resolution and I felt a pang.

I was enjoying Dumas’s wizardry so much that I didn’t want it to end.

Fans of Dumas will find this a marvellous read that ends too soon.

The Future Of Jesus, by Peter Jensen

It’s been years since I’ve read anything in the Boyer lecture series. Dr Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, gave this 2005 Boyer lecture.

Let me say at the outset, this is the most awful, pathetic, intellectually dead essay or book I’ve ever read.

Perhaps the cover and title tells you all you need to know, The Future of Jesus.

One wonders if Dr Jensen is going to look into the future for us, and advise of Jesus’s future plans. Or should a question mark come after the future of Jesus? Does he have a future in Australia, will church attendances continue to dwindle?

Jensen doesn't really make clear what he means by this weird title. It surely can't be a statement. How would Jensen know? So it seems more likely to be a question. Yet Jensen argues against this in the body of the essay.

Even more bizarrely, the cover of the book mimics an Ipod commercial. Jesus is shown in silhouette, holding an mp3 player, as though he’s a hip, young thing, perhaps listening to something by Hillsong church?

Dr Jensen makes his Jesus look so insubstantial and unsure of himself that you often find yourself wondering how much it would take to bump the Archbishop into the realms of atheism. This lecturer seems to hold his faith together by delicately suspending reality.

There was much in this book that simply was mind boggling to read. His chapter on the miracles of Jesus, and how we can prove they actually happened, had this reader scratching his head. Some sentences I read over and over but could not make head nor tail of.

Once again, these religious figures seem to think they know more about Jesus than he actually knew about himself.

You really have to feel sorry for Jesus, having these crappy emissaries. I hope he can forgive them.

The fact is, we know next to zilch about Jesus. To my knowledge, there is one brief contemporaneous reference to him, in the Jewish historian Josephus’ writings. (Josephus' writings also make reference to Jesus's brother, James and John the Baptist.)

The gospels were actually written some two generations after Jesus's execution. What we read in the New Testament is what was passed down by word of mouth.

To me, Jesus was the greatest moralist there ever was. His teachings should be studied by everyone.

The last thing Jesus needs is someone like Dr Jensen trying to make him relevant for us all, tarting him up in an mp3 player, a visual concept thought up by some advertising executive. For shame!

I’m amazed that Dr Peter Jensen is such a big muckety-muck in the Anglican church. No wonder people don’t go to church as much as they used to. You need someone to give a convincing message.

I sincerely don’t think that Dr Jensen is even convinced by his own message.

Real Food, by Nina Planck

Anyone who dabbles in so much scientific theory is bound to end up with a confusing and somewhat contradictory book. My eyes glazed over at all the acronyms Nina Planck liked to use.

I simply could not keep up with all of this sophisticated foodie nomenclature or be bothered referring back to the glossary of terms. (Here’s a few: ALA, DHA, DPA, CRP, CLA, HDL, LDL, CHD, GLA.)

In the end, after trawling though so many scientific ‘findings’, the author had to admit that she really could not give a clear answer to what causes heart attacks, a modern epidemic.

Which is all well and good, because we want to know that experts don't really know the answer to that question. Planck suggests that we don't smoke, eat in moderation, avoid processed, artificial foods, and exercise plenty. All common sense advice that everyone knows. More controversially, Planck says that animal fats - butter, eggs, cheese, milk - don't cause heart problems. In fact, a lot of Real Food is a defense of fats. Planck believes they're actually good for you.

I got a bit frustrated with Planck’s peppy, know all style. Sometimes she’d quote one latest study on some vitamin or food component, claiming some kind of health benefit. It's almost like putting in a throwaway comment quoting these latest studies. I thought why bother with some drop in-the-ocean scientific finding. It could mean nothing tomorrow, superseded by some new finding.

Nor did I entirely trust her complaint that a vegetarian diet she embarked upon in her early twenties caused her all manner of health ailments. We are told that once the author went back to a meat diet, she felt one hundred percent better. This sounded a bit fishy to me (no pun intended).

Planck also talks a lot about what she likes to eat, as if whatever she eats is good for all of us. As if we're even interested. What do I care how much lettuce she eats per day, or how much salt she keeps in storage?

That aside, the basic thrust of this book is: avoid industrial foods and only eat a traditional diet.

If you follow that simple, common sense advice, you don’t really need to read this book.
The old adage, eat anything you want, but in moderation, is perfectly useful here.

The most fascinating part of the book is Planck’s defence of traditional fats as being good for you.
Her argument that babies are raised on mother’s milk, full of fat and cholesterol, made complete sense to me.

Michael Pollan’s book, In Defence of Food made a similar point about real fats (as opposed to artificial, industrial fats, like margarine).

I would have to do more research on this topic to attain my own understanding of the subject, but it appears that full fat butter, cheese, milk, yogurt are all good for you. There’s good stuff in the fats.

Our bodies need fats to function properly. Our brains are in fact 60 percent fat.

Why aren’t we learning more about this in the media? Vested interests, embarrassment that official government health guidelines have been wrong for so long.

Both Pollan and Planck lay the blame for high levels heart attack at the feet of processed, artificial foods.

Both Pollan and Planck say this: eat real, whole foods, plucked from the earth, and be happy!

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You can check out Nina's nifty website at http://www.ninaplanck.com/.

Faith Of My Fathers, by John McCain

I don’t know at all how to take this book. It reads like a cartoon of masculine heroics. The book didn’t resonate psychologically, emotionally or even politically.

I decided to pick up a copy after hearing a radio interview with someone who’d studied McCain and recommended the book as a rollicking read.

As mentioned above, the book is so two dimensional it’s hard to extract anything of value out of it.

Basically, the book is a hymn to military values. Both McCain’s father and grand-father were high ranking navy officers. McCain has absolutely no desire to forge his own independent values. All military values are good values, no matter what.

Part one is a bio of his grand father, part two draws a portrait of the father, and part three describes John McCain’s experiences as a prisoner of war.

You’d think that part three would be utterly absorbing, providing penetrating insights on what it’s like to be a prisoner of war and experience all manner of humiliations and hardships.

Yet the book’s deep reverence for military values, for the group above the individual, precludes any of this. Hence this memoir reads like a Boy’s Own Adventure story.

Compare this will Barack Obama’s first book, a memoir of his father, or rather absent father. Obama’s book is almost too much in earnest, too striving for honesty. Obama in the end talked too much in his book. McCain by contrast says virtually nothing.

The styles of these two presidential candidates are striking. Obama is the political songbird, captivating audiences with his beautiful rhetoric.

McCain is offering nothing more than the military culture and values of his father and grandfather. Maybe American voters at the next election will find this appealing and reassuring.

This book gives little clue as to the author’s character.

(NB: McCain didn’t even write it by himself, but employed a ghost, Mark Salter. The book blurb vaguely describes Mr Salter as a member of McCain’s staff. He has co-written several other books with McCain. Maybe they are worth checking out to gain insights into McCain’s thinking.)

This is a weird book.

The Best Australian Political Writing, edited Tony Jones

I was amazed by how poorly Tony Jones writes. His introduction to this collection of newspaper and journal essays is dire. Hackneyed, difficult to read, full of bad turns of phrase. Pur-lease!

I don’t know why, but for some reason I expected something better. That’s not to say I’m a real fan of his interviewing work for the ABC. I’ve often sat cringing as he attempted to slowly roast a political interviewee, thinking, no wonder these pollies always go belly aching about left wing bias at the ABC.

(Note to self: I must try and find the transcript of that interview with Malcolm Turnbull, where Tony Jones had to apologise for trying to ambush him on some issue. The basics of the situation, from what I recall, were that Jones had not done his reading properly and was trying to quote to Turnbull something that was patently false. (UPDATE: The link for that interview is here. It shows Jones at his most petty minded. He had to admit his error at the end of the interview. To the ABC's credit, they aired the whole interview, warts and all.)

So okay, should you read this collection? If you have a life, probably no. If you don’t have a life, then perhaps. Or maybe if you want to find out how dull Australian politics can be.

This book would perhaps be best employed by up and coming journalists and writers as a way of ascertaining good and bad writing styles.

The book is divided up into sections on Rudd’s ascension, Howard’s decline, Aboriginal Australia, the age of terrorism, culture wars, global warming and Australian values.

To my surprise, the essay I enjoyed best was by Noel Pearson, a piece entitled White Guilt, Victimhood and the Quest for the Radical Centre. In fact, again to my surprise, the most outstanding section was the Aboriginal part of the book. Louis Nowra’s essay, Culture of Denial was amazing too. To anyone reading this blurb, I’d strongly recommend you read the above mentioned essays. (Link to Pearson's essay is here.)

The most dull essays were of course to do with political machinations, written by self-important newspaper columnists. I love Michelle Grattan, but her newspaper work falls so flat in a book.

The excerpt from David Marr’s quarterly essay, Yes Prime Minister – We’re a Nation in Authority’s Grip, shouldn’t have been included here. There were much better quarterly essays that could have been used.

The environmental section was really yawnsville, except for Richard Flanagan’s peerless essay Out of Control on the Tasmanian pulp mill.

I didn’t mind Thomas Keneally’s Flattened by a Falafel, and the always fascinating Guy Rundle put in a good showing with his essay Goodbye to all that. Plus I found Mark McKenna’s The Anzac Myth really absorbing.

Plus there’s some good right wing pornography in Tom Switzer’s Conservatives are no longer losing the culture wars.

One last piece of praise goes to Paul Kelly’s The defeat. Well done Paul! Top marks from me.

A book that is best read selectively.

The Lucy Family Alphabet, by Judith Lucy

Some are born comedians, some achieve comedy, and some have comedy thrust upon them. Having read Judith Lucy’s first book, The Lucy Family Alphabet, I’d have to surmise that for this local funny lady the latter is the case.

Being raised by two out-of-the-box parents like Ann and Tony Lucy, it seems their daughter had either one of two choices: turn into a furious madwoman, or laugh herself out of the whole sorry mess.

Judith Lucy took her anger and spun it into side-splitting laughter. Beneath the gags and chuckles though there bubbles deeply complex emotional and psychological undercurrents.

In a recent interview with Richard Fidler, the broadcaster noted to Lucy that she was the type of comedian who had to be making a joke every ten seconds, otherwise they'd be reduced to panic. It seems that even a brief cessation in making light of things for Lucy would allow the whole world to come crushing down. Comedy for this performer is a survival tool. At school, Lucy stopped people thinking she was a fringe dwelling freak by making them laugh.

Using her family for material is not something new for Judith Lucy. Horrid family Christmases, bizarre grooming regimes, a mother with a natural flair for lying, all have been exploited for fun and profit.

The seminal family tale of course is the Christmas that Lucy, at the age of 25, discovered she’d been adopted. After a day of hard drinking and inter-family brawling, Judith quipped to her sister-in-law what a fun family she'd married into. ‘There’s something else you don’t know,’ her sister-in-law said ominously. ‘It’s not some weird sex thing is it?’ Judith quipped. ‘No, it’s to do with you.’ Lucy describes a penny dropping moment. ‘Oh my God, I’m adopted.’

Lucy was shocked into writing The Lucy Family Alphabet when she discovered that a birth relative assumed that she hated her parents after hearing one of her more acerbic jokes. It had never entered the comedian’s mind that some in the public might have misconstrued her humour as an all out attack on her parents.

This revelation knocked her for six. ‘No, I really loved them,’ she informed the relative. ‘Who doesn’t love their parents?’

Reading The Lucy Family Alphabet though, you get the sense that Lucy has been subconsciously writing this book for years. The bad case of joke indigestion experienced by a relative was just a good excuse to start writing a detailed a-z of her parents’ nuttiness.

Lucy’s Family Alphabet, as the title suggests, is a lucky dip into the obsessions, oddities, pathologies, and eccentricities of Ann and Tony Lucy. The Lucy family portrait is not painted with big-picture strokes, but it rather built up by show casing an array of strange family curios and relics.

There are passages on bad taste, hypochondria, Neil Diamond and Val Doonican (of the latter, Lucy notes ‘If I were Irish I’d be pretty quick to handball this cardigan-wearing no talent to Wales or maybe Indonesia’), bizarre diets, lousy holidays, psychologically disturbed pets, embarrassing fashion ensembles, useless cars, inadequate sex education, the obsessive use of gladwrap, and of course, the tales of drinking until you pass out.

Many readers will recognise in these pages a familiar suburban Australia. That is one of the book’s great strengths, and makes it, in its funny way, a book about Australian culture and social mores. The people and behaviour, the bad Christmases, boring holidays and excesses of alcohol. You either knew people like this, had them as neighbours, or worse, suffered them in your own family. It's ironic that so many of those ‘normal’ suburban houses we grew up in were really hotbeds of eccentricity.

It’s common to talk these days of ‘Australian values’, but you have to wonder what the Lucy household would have made of such an idea.

Despite this family alphabet being ostensibly a gag a page funny book, there are some very poignant moments. In one section Lucy describes as an adolescent bursting into tears while out shopping with her mother.

‘It was hard to miss how unhappy she was,' Lucy writes of her mother. 'I remember one occasion, shortly before adolescence hit, when my mother and I went shopping and in the middle of trying on some burnt orange corduroy culottes (probably), I burst into tears. Not, as you might expect, from trying on such an attractive article of clothing (hopefully I’d teamed it with a poncho), but from a feeling I didn’t fully understand at the time. When Mum asked me what was wrong there was nothing I could say, because the answer was her. Everything about her life made me sad, but I didn’t know how to help. We had no connection whatsoever.’

For those who grew up in a complex battle with their parents, for whom life in suburbia was full of loneliness, frustration and alienation, in short, for many who grew up in suburban Australia, you will consume each page of this book for the truth that it speaks so plainly.

Judith Lucy’s Family Alphabet comes close to poetry in describing the suburban condition. I laughed a lot, recognised people I’d grown up with and known, and appreciated her wanting to tell the story of her parents.