Around The World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne

I picked this up off the shelf at my local library as it came in a nice edition and I'd always been intrigued by Jules Verne. As it turns out, the novel is really a caper. The main character, or star of the story is really the burgeoning industrial era technology that makes the trip around the world in eighty days possible. The main character, Phileas Fogg, is pointedly described as having no interest in his surroundings while he travels. Beautiful vistas, fascinating places, pass him by. For Phileas, the means to his end are all. This is a story about superior Western technology, not travel.

Hence, the great lands that Phileas travels through are given little description. These countries basically provide land for the Western railroad tracks that straddle the globe.

So I was a bit divided on this novel. If you like psychology and three dimensional characters, you won't find it here. But if you like numbers, technology and adventure, then you'll enjoy this smartly written book.

It didn't inspire me to rush out and read some of Verne's other novels. That's not to say it's a bad book, it's just not so much for me.

So What: The Life of Miles Davis, by John Szwed

I’m getting the impression that these jazz biographies written by academic jazz professors are less biography and more just a collection of authoritative musings. The last book of this type I read was a biography of Ella Fitzgerald, which was dry and a bit of a disappointment. This book comes close. You wonder if these writers on jazz experience any kind of ecstasy when listening to the music, because it doesn’t come out in their prose.

John Szwed, who is a professor at Yale University, writes well enough. And he is thorough in all the information he gives you about the recordings of Miles Davis, peppering the text with lots of fascinating bits and pieces of information. Yet the way it is all presented is rather lacklustre. Why not allow yourself some enthusiasm for what you write about?

Interspersed between the academic mini-biographies of Davis's albums, there are biographical details of Davis’s actual life: the women, drugs, health problems etc. Indeed, half way through the book there’s an unnumbered chapter (between chapters five and six) simply called Interlude where the author writes about Miles Davis’s personality, with no musical references whatsoever.

This is the odd thing about So What, and why I guess you walk away feeling that the book is lacking some human essence. So What for the greater part examines the discography of Miles Davis, but does it in a kind of quarantine from Miles Davis the man. To me it had always seemed that the biographer has the job of trying to explain the music by the life, and vice versa. Usually both intermingle in a pleasant way that provides meaning for the reader.

It’s not all bad though. Running to 400 pages, there has to be quite a bit of biographical detail, and for Davis nuts, you’re going to find lots of details that you probably didn’t know of. There are also some fascinating quotes from friends and colleagues of Davis, who do their bit to psychoanalyse him.

Needless to say, Miles Davis was an extraordinarily complex man. Someone who was very, very enigmatic and mysterious, even, I would dare venture, to himself. He was full of paradoxes and contradictions. Painfully shy, yet extroverted. Someone who abused women, but needed them to mother him. You get to the end of this biography and realise that you have to be satisfied with not knowing what really drove Miles Davis to make the music he did. Perhaps the only answer is to listen to the music to try and find the answer there.

This book was not so bad, it’s just that I would expect a book on Miles Davis, a major twentieth century artist, to be a page turner. Could you imagine Picasso or Hitchcock getting such a prim and rigid biography of their life and achievements?

Andrew Fisher, by David Day

A thoroughly enjoyable book from the always enjoyable David Day. This must be my fourth David Day book. None of them have disappointed so far. Day has an interest in Labor politicians and labor history.

Andrew Fisher is perhaps not a particularly well known Australian prime minister, but he should be. He headed the first majority Labor party in the world. He also introduced many social security measures that are still with us today. He was also ahead of his time when it came to being in favour of extending the vote to women.

Fisher was born in Scotland, had a meager education, and worked as a miner. Constantly agitating for improved pay and conditions, he was frequently fired and blacklisted. With grim future prospects in Scotland, he decided to emigrate to Australia. From there on the rest is history. He threw himself into Australian politics and eventually became prime minister.

If you want to learn about the early days of the Labor party, what it really meant to support and fight for Labor values, what motivated the people who worked for the Labor Party, then this book will give you a good education.

These days, with Rudd heading modern Labor, it's a real eye opener to read about the Labor Party's historical achievements. They were a grass roots political movement that made great advances against a conservative status quo that was frequently horrified at the idea of a government being formed by the working man to defend the rights of the working man.

In our day, where Labor is led by the technocratic Kevin Rudd, the reason why the Labor party is called the Labor party is easily forgotten. They were once a ground breaking political movement.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia on the achievements of Fisher's second (1910-1913) government:

'Fisher carried out many reforms in defence, constitutional matters, finance, transport and communications, and social security, achieving the vast majority of his aims in his first government, such as establishing old-age and disability pensions, a maternity allowance and workers compensation, issuing Australia's first paper currency, forming the Royal Australian Navy, the commencement of construction for the Trans-Australian Railway, expanding the bench of the High Court of Australia, founding Canberra and establishing the government-owned Commonwealth Bank.[12]'

On the dark side of Labor party history, there was always the white Australia policy. When you read the openly racist speeches and proclamations of the times, they do make your jaw drop. Racial ideology - white supremacy really - was widespread. Australia, at the turn of the century, was to be only for the whites. It was commonly believed that the Aboriginal population was dieing out - natural selection was showing them the door to extinction. Whites would rule the world. (Ironically, there was also widespread worry in Australia, and by Fisher especially, about Australian male virility.) This was all normal at the time. These thoughts were published and proclaimed everywhere. No wonder it took until 1967 to even think about legislating specifically to help the Aboriginal population.

Fisher came to an unhappy end. He pledged unlimited support to Britain when the First World War broke out. Andrew Fisher's worker's paradise, his dreams for Australia, were lost. He sent thousands of Australians to their death at Gallipoli, in a travesty of a campaign. Nor did he, as Australia's prime minister, demand enough information about the campaign. Rather, we trusted blindly to the British. In the end, it all became too much for Fisher. The pressures of office during the war took a toll on his health. He resigned while still in office, then took a job as High Commissioner and moved to the United Kingdom.

This was bad for Australia, as the pugnacious and divisive Billy Hughes became prime minister, putting the country through a traumatic conscription debate and two referendums on the matter.

Fisher's story is one of innocence and experience, and by extension, one of Australian innocence and experience. Before the First World War, it seemed Australia would be the world's first worker's paradise. Then we were dragged into the most horrific global politics, and everything was changed forevermore.

French For Le Snob, by Yvette Reche

People who study the history of the English language know that it enjoyed a huge injection of French words after the Norman invasion of 1066. Little do we realise it, but when we speak our modern English, we also pepper it with all sorts of French loanwords.

French words to do with government and food were especially influential. Hence our politicians meet in parliament, a French word from the verb parler, to speak.

Author Yvette Reche has an interest in food, fashion, art and architecture, and so each of these subjects gets its own chapter. Yet I think she could have added another chapter on government loanwords from the French.

No matter. This is a fun and lively book which will have you constantly saying to yourself, ‘I never knew that word came from the French.’ Reche also offers lots of interesting little histories of various words. If you enjoy this sort of trivia, and like to know the provenance of the words you use, then you will very much enjoy this book.

I was surprised to learn that parmesan is a French word for the original Italian parmiggiano. Why do we use the French and not the Italian original? If I was Italian I’d be annoyed.
My favourite word in the book was claqueur, for some one who belonged to a claque, a group paid to applaud someone.

There are so many words listed in the book you of course will only remember a handful of them, yet it will certainly leave you with an overall ‘feel’ for the French language.

The Tall Man, by Chloe Hooper

Where to start with this amazing book? Chloe Hooper’s first book was a novel called A Child’s Book of True Crime, published in 2002. This was followed up six years later with not another novel but a non-fiction work about the death in custody on Palm Island, in Queensland’s north, of indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee.

The events surrounding Doomadgee are hard to fathom. He was picked up by policeman Chris Hurley for apparently using some bad language. Whilst being taken to the lock up both men tripped at the doorway and fell into the station. Chris Hurley maintained that he fell beside Doomadgee, not on top of him. Yet Doomadgee suffered the most horrific injuries. His liver was cleaved in two as it was pressed violently against his back bone. He died from these injuries. How did his liver come to be so violently cleaved in two? The court case never really looked into it, or made it a point of finding out.

A week after the death the Aboriginal community on Palm Island rioted and burnt down the courthouse, police station and police barracks. To all intents and purposes, this was pretty much a state of war. You can’t help but think of the footage you see on the news of the violence that happens in the Gaza strip in Palestine.

Chris Hurley eventually went on trial for Doomadgee’s death, but was found not guilty. The Aboriginal community felt that they never really did have a chance of securing a conviction. Like always, this would be another one of those sad death-in-custody cases.

You have to admire Chloe Hooper’s courage in travelling to Palm Island and other North Queensland remote Aboriginal communities in order to do on the ground investigative journalism that this sort of book requires. What she reports back from the whole terrible affair is how much we live in two distinct Australias. There is one Australia that is like a third world country, with its residents doomed to staggeringly poor health and next to no political or economic power. Then there is the well heeled mainstream, people like me.

It was tragic to read about so many Aboriginal people whose basic health was just terrible – diabetes, alcoholism, constant violence. Hooper also cites polls that find white Australians in the North of Queensland have a very low opinion of the indigenous population. And from all the descriptions in this book, you can sympathise. Here in leafy inner Melbourne you simply don’t see all the problems on a day to day basis.

The question is, why is the status of the Aboriginal population so bad, and can we honestly answer that question?

This book paints a very clear picture of two different countries within the one Australia. One is strong, rich and healthy, the other weak, in a constant state of sickness and completely dependent. Look at the body differences between Chris Hurley (115 kilo) and Cameron Doomadgee (75 kilo). This was reinforced in the book with the descriptions of the fit Queensland Police Force, who rallied to support their member Chris Hurley when it was announced he would go to trial. This in contrast to the alcoholic, sick, medicated and mentally befuddled Aboriginals who gave evidence at the trial.

In the end, the subtext of this book seems to be: black and white Australians may be in theory equal before the law, but the reality is white Australia is by far the more culturally, economically and politically powerful. No indigenous Australian has much of a chance of winning against such a powerful establishment of people. Better outcomes would occur, it seems, if the Aboriginal population was far more politically organised and could exploit the democratic system to get the best possible results in all situations. Yet this book showed, as I’ve already mentioned above several times, that the Aboriginal population are sick, weak, disenfranchised, addicted to alcohol, poorly organised, and with a long history of being completely downtrodden.

This is one of those books that you want all Australians to read.

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The cover blurb on this 2009 re-issue of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team Of Rivals (first published in 2005), raves that this is the ‘book that inspired Barack Obama’. That was enough for me to want to read this hefty tome on ‘The political genius of Abraham Lincoln’.

I know next to nothing about Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, so Team Of Rivals provided a bit of a crash course. I’m glad I started my course on the American Civil War with this book.

The great thing about Goodwin’s biography / history of Lincoln and all the other major players of his administration, including the influential women that provided counsel and advice to these men, is that it is so vividly brought to life. The author effortlessly weaves so many quotes into her narrative, and finely paints in so many small, day-to-day details, that you feel like you are physically there at all the important events described. This makes every page of this 750 page history compelling reading.

As for the character of Lincoln, he is almost like a ‘grown up’, trying to temper the vanities, ambitions and human foibles of the men who composed his cabinet into a working political machine. His political genius was not to harbour any grudges, and to be of a magnanimous character. The more you read of him in this book, the more and more you come to deeply respect this extraordinary figure.

The lesson Lincoln teaches is that everything is not always about you, and that you must put your vanity to one side, as there are human and historical events that are of more importance than your own ambitions.

I also liked how he said you must be patient, and wait for the times to be propitious. Lincoln never attempted anything without first having public sympathy on side.

The last chapter of the book, which details Lincoln’s last weeks before his assassination were absolutely riveting. I never knew a triple assassination was planned for the Secretary of State and Vice President as well.

The epilogue details what happened to the other major characters. I audibly gasped when I came to the last page, and discovered that poor Mrs Lincoln, after suffering so much grief at the loss of her son Willie, and then her husband, had to deal with losing another son, Tad, at the age of eighteen. It seemed incomprehensible to me that fate could be so cruel. Mary Lincoln virtually went mad in her final days, and ended her life a virtual recluse.

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd

I have just been reading through the list of author’s works provided in Peter Ackroyd’s ‘brief lives’ biography of Geoffrey Chaucer. I could certainly remember his enjoyable novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, but was certain I had read something else by him. Ah-hah. It was his biography of Charles Dickens. To tell the truth, it was a truncated version I read that ran to some 500 pages. The memory of those two enjoyable reads probably spurred me to pick this short biography up off the library shelf as a sort of ‘interlude read’, something to keep me busy whilst I had run out of things to read.

I’ve long been a fan of Chaucer, especially his amazing Wife of Bath. I agree with critic Harold Bloom that a lot of his characters are pre-Shakespearian in their three dimensionality (is ‘dimensionality’ a word? My spell check did not reject it so I’m keeping it.)

In this book the prolific author Peter Ackroyd marshals his considerable erudition on the subjects of London and poetry to give us a kind of essay, history, biography and all round appreciation of the life and work of Chaucer.

It’s all good as far as it goes, but I found there was something a little bit missing. Ackroyd goes from one topic to the next, from England in the fourteenth century to critical discussions of Chaucer's poetry, and in the deft skips the author took from one biographical aspect to another, I found myself falling through the cracks.

I should perhaps here admit that my attention did waver, and so the fault may lie more with this reader than the writer. I guess what I’m saying is that I found some parts of the book a bit obtuse, like they’d been written with a more specialist audience in mind.

My favourite parts were the descriptions of England in Chaucer’s day, which I found fascinating.

If anything, it’s made me want to read his biography of London.

This book however, I’m sorry to say, I found a little dull.

The Henson Case, by David Marr

What started with a bang, and soon blew many gales of sound and fury, could only really end in a whimper. The drama of the Henson photos showed Australia was capable of considerable moral outrage, yet didn’t have the energy or inclination or ability to follow through on its convictions.

Bill Henson was never going to be found guilty of making kiddie porn. He’s been making these types of photos for the past 30 years. His photos have been collected by politicians, galleries and parliament buildings, for heaven's sake. Henson couldn’t be found guilty of such a charge, because if he was, the whole culture would have gone down with him.

That was my initial response. The whole thing was a storm in a teacup that could not possibly have gone anywhere. Then when I studied the legal case, that seemed impossible too. How would we make it illegal for people to take naked pictures of children? Could parents become child pornographers merely be taking a happy snap of their kid in the bath? And what would it mean for the culture at large if our attitude to child nudity was to immediately associate it with having sex with children. This is a perverse idea, and completely unworkable.

David Marr I find quite a shrill from time to time. (When Fran Kelly of ABC Breakfast interviewed Marr on the Henson case he was horribly condescending to her. She deserves more respect than this.) When Marr is giving opinion he can become histrionic and over the top. This is in curious contrast to his work as a journalist, which shows a sharp, forensic intelligence.

As you’d expect, this book is pretty – very – sympathetic to Henson. Marr doesn’t try to look at things from the angle of concerned community opinion. If he does skirt close to this, he seems to say the internet has warped perceptions and created a more heightened environment. Too much stuff is available on the net, a lot of it we don't need.

To me this seems the most obvious subject here: the social taboo on candidly portraying a naked girl entering puberty. Why doesn’t Marr explore this? And why doesn’t he take a more nuanced look at community outrage?

This is a story really of two worlds. One, what Marr calls the ‘citadel of art’, involves a cloistered community of artists and supporters. They seem oblivious to the rabble of commoners all around them, outraged at their behaviour.

Most bizarrely, in interviews with Henson in the book, the photographer says he never, ever took any notice of similar art controversies, involving the photographing of young people, that had happened overseas. How can you be involved in this type of work and pointedly never consider the impact your work could have on the community at large? This is wilful ignorance, coming from someone who is supposed to have deep aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sensibilities. It makes you wonder.

This is the real problem. Henson deals in a photographic language that the suburban hoi-polloi don’t at all understand, brought up as they are on an aesthetic of American cinema and Australian soapies.

For my money, Henson’s art is not that successful. The twilight time between youth and adulthood that he is trying to capture doesn’t work for me. His images are self-indulgent and obvious. He’s not a pornographer, but nor is he a particularly good artist. Why do people go into raptures over his work?

Despite all I’ve written above, Marr’s book The Henson Case is a valuable contribution to the controversy of the Henson photos. It goes into much detail of what actually happened, describing political and judicial responses, plus contains interview material with Henson himself.

Yet this book will not build a bridge to ‘the citadel of art’, and most of the country’s simple commoners, lacking that artistic world’s sophistication, will remain locked out.

Maybe they are crude minded peasants, or perhaps they are simply responding to a deep seated cultural taboo. That question I leave up in the air.

Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson

I didn’t find this book as engaging as Melvyn Bragg’s history of English The Adventure of English. Perhaps I should correct that. Mother Tongue is not so much a history as a biography of the language. It covers such interesting subjects (if that’s your bag) as pronunciation, spelling, the origin of names etc. etc. As you’d expect, there are lots of interesting facts and bits of trivia along the way. Bryson is a good natured enough guide, but sometimes I find his bonhomie and sense of humour a bit too cute. He’s smart, and has a good reserve of knowledge up his sleeve, but frequently I found myself thinking, so what?

Perhaps I have read too much on this subject (not really, only two or three other books).

Mother Tongue left me feeling a bit dissatisfied. The book has a thin, frivolous feel about it. I think I still prefer the Bragg book.