September 2016
From the Committee
Regarding the ‘New’ Library
Despite meetings, submissions and various reports there is, at this point, no clear indication as to the possible future of a new library. The committee shall continue to do everything possible to achieve a positive outcome.
Remembrance Day 2016
Remembrance Day will be held on Thursday 10th November at 2pm in the children’s area of the Library. Afternoon Tea will be served after the talks.
Final arrangements will be made during the October meeting and will be included in the next Newsletter. We hope to see many of you at the library on the day.
Help save the Australian Book Industry
If you enjoy reading Australia authors and publishers this is one petition you must sign. This petition asks the Government not to follow the Productivity Commission’s draft recommendation to lift restrictions on foreign book imports which will effectively flood the market drowning the thriving Australian Industry.
To find out more type: into your search engine or go direct to the petition at:
Book review
The Chosen
Kristina Ohlsson
This Swedish thriller is the fifth book in a series by author Kristina Ohlsson, and features detectives Fredrika Bergman and Alec Recht. In the middle of a freezing winter day, a pre-school teacher from the Solomon Jewish Community School in Stockholm is shot to death by a sniper. Later the same day, two ten year old boys from the same school go missing.
The plot of this complex novel involves happenings in various countries with Sweden’s Sapo, MI5 and Mossad all playing a part. Past events on the West Bank in Israel lead to a trail of murder and revenge. There is also an underlying theme of an old Israeli fable of a night time killer called “The Paper Boy”.
The novel is organized with fragments from the conclusion inserted at intervals throughout the main story. The characters in these segments are not named, and the reader has to work out who is involved. In this way, the reader is often privy to developments before the detectives investigating the case.
This is a suspenseful police procedural, which is very well written. It has a complicated plot, and keeps both the reader and the detectives guessing. The truth of the matter is available to the reader at the end but the detectives still have a mistaken view of events.
If you like crime novels, this book can be highly recommended as a good read.
Marnie French.
New in the Library
Helen O’Neill has released, in time for this wetter-than-average start to Spring, Daffodil: the biography of a flower. This is a lovely complement to Noel Kingsbury’s book on the same flower, already in our collection. Who knew that the plant provided an alkaloid used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s? Also for the garden, we have Kenneth Ashburner’s The genus betula: a taxonomic revision of birches, with photographs of these trees’ worldwide distribution. Jessie Sheeler has updated her 2003 guide to Little Sparta, the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay began writing poetry while working as a shepherd in the Orkneys, turned to concrete poems in the 1960s, then inscribed them into stone and distributed them in his garden near Edinburgh. Fredrik Sjoberg spends time indoors and out at his home on an island near Stockholm. The art of flight is the second volume of this entomologist’s autobiographical trilogy: in it he reveals that “once, when I was sixteen years old, I spent a whole night singing romantic songs in the top of a pine tree”. The New York Times, in reviewing The fly trap (his first volume – also in the Library) said, in praise
“Of course I could name a number of very good, very sensible reasons why a person ought to collect flies,” he writes, but “I’m no missionary.” Instead, he takes us on one of many brief excursions, into the dangerous pleasures of intoxication via Thomas De Quincey, which eventually leads to an extended and passionate defense of gardens, meadows, churchyards, ditches and the creatures that dwell there. “For me,” he says, these places “are wilder and richer and much more fun than nature undisturbed by human beings.” This is a characteristically unfettered moment, and it’s more than merely refreshing: Sjoberg’s forthright and unapologetic unpretentiousness is close to liberating in an age when nature writing is so often quasi-theological, veering routinely between awe and homily, sometimes even in the same sentence
The Guardian, too, wrote a beautiful review of this charming volume and its author.
Scandinavia has also entranced the Australian chef, Simon Bajada, and his book Nordic light: lighter everyday eating from a Scandinavian kitchen includes recipes such as Baked pointed cabbage, beluga lentils and smoked cheese. Rebecca Seal has also been in foreign kitchens, and sends Postcards from Greece containing recipes from across the Greek seas. Lucy O’Reilly stayed at home in Britain and still composed Posh eggs: over 70 recipes for wonderful eggy things.
Angus Stone, Australian musician, is cooking up a storm with his new project Dope Lemon, and their album Honey bones. Recorded near Byron Bay, it manages to combine strong impact themes with, as the Saturday Paper described, an “amiable collection of relaxed grooves”. Sam Bleakley’s book acts as a counterpoint here, showing that Britain in a warmer world can turn to Mindfulness and surfing: reflections for saltwater souls. Nik Cohn’s 1969 music classic, Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom, has been reprinted with a reflective new introduction. And even Radiohead, the quintessential English band of experimental angst, have reached a greater state of mid-tempo meditative melodic loveliness with their new work, A moon shaped pool.
Eric Clapton remains consistent in his devotion to the blues, saying I still do. From a new US generation, Joe Bonamassa has played with Eric and prefers UK interpretations of the blues but his new album cover, Blues of desperation, looks entirely homegrown. More contemporary, 23 year old Will Toledo, aka Car Seat Headrest, has two indy rocking goes at teenage expression: Teens of style and Teens of denial.
Nor have we neglected the classics. Bertrand Chamayou plays Ravel’s Complete works for solo piano in a manner praised by the Gramophone reviewer: “No one who loves French music or exquisite piano-playing will want to miss this”. Jordi Savall’s 1982 recording of Battaglie e lamenti is now released on CD for the first time. From sixteenth century Europe to Steve Reich’s American twentieth century minimal composition - Four organs: phase patterns retains traces of the western classical tradition.
Mid-twentieth century experimentation also features in Alexander Trocchi’s 1960 autobiographical novel Cain’s book; Art Tatum’s Harlem sessions from 1940-41, God is in the house; and Sabahattin Ali’s 1943 Turkish novel set in Germany, Madonna in a fur coat. The ghoulish connection of celebrities with automobiles throughout the century is brought to a point of impact by Stephen Bayley in Death drive: there are no accidents. The liner notes put it this way: “More emotions are involved in cars and car design than in any other product: vanity, cupidity, greed, social competitiveness and cultural modelling. But when all this perverse promise ends in catastrophe, these same talismanic qualities acquire an extra dimension”.
Richard Copping looks back at the Volkswagen Beetle with nostalgia in one of Shire Publications’ glorious little evocations of earlier times (see also, for instance, British sheep breeds, Fashion in the time of Jane Austen and Gloves and glove-making on our shelves). Also for the mobile, Philippe Daverio takes us to Lombardy, describing 127 destinations for discovering art, history and beauty with hand-drawn illustrations of each destination. Nearby, Marie-Jose Gransard presents Venice: a literary guide for travellers and, across the Adriatic, Gillian Gloyer describes Albania for Bradt Travel Guides.
Monocle magazine has higher ambitions than description. Its editors have previously published books on better living, cosy homes and good business (all in the Library) – now they propose How to make a nation, hoping for one “that feels like a cohesive community, knows what to value, and goes out into the world to gently get its way with soft power, fine ambassadors, and compelling cultural offerings”. Azeem Ibrahim, meanwhile, writes of more urgent realities for the Rohingyas: inside Myanmar’s hidden genocide. The complexities of history and place are also explored in monumental depth by Christian Marek In the land of a thousand gods: a history of Asia Minor in the Ancient World. Peter Oborne tries to untangle the complexities of a much more recent series of events with Not the Chilcot Report. In anticipation of long delays in the publication of Sir John Chilcot’s report into the 2003 Iraq War (a six year enquiry running to some two million words), Oborne has written “careful, brilliantly-argued summary of what should be in [the] report” – a story of “terrible foreign policy choices, of exaggerated dangers, legal manipulation and outright lies”.
The Middle East also features strongly in other new works this month: George Manginis writes of Mount Sinai: a history of travellers and pilgrims; the catalogue for another great New York Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition illustrates Court and cosmos: the great age of the Seljuqs; Sergei Paradjanov’s 1968 film, The colour of pomegranates, features the life of an Armenian troubadour and poet; and Theo Angelopoulos’ The weeping meadow follows the shattering effects of twentieth century conflict on a Greek family fleeing from Odessa and Thessaloniki.
Another family saga is available for the first time in English: The Zelmenyaners, one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century, was written in Yiddish in the Soviet Union (present-day Belarus) by Moshe Kulbak and published serially bewtween 1929 and 1935. Bryan Brown and Noni Hazlehurst brought the Australian saga of The Shiralee to life in 1987, and now the full 190 minute version is available on a DVD. Stefan Hertmans recreates his grandfather’s life in War and turpentine (“As artfully rendered as a Renaissance fresco, [this novel] paints an extraordinary portrait of one man's life and reveals how that life echoed down through the generations”). Chitra Ramaswamy has also brought something very touching to life in her account of Expecting, exploring the inner life of pregnancy in a memoir of “intimate, strange, wild and lyrical essays”.
Putuparri and the rainmakers show heartfelt connection to place at Fitzroy Crossing and in the Great Sandy Desert. Many Australian speeches fill the pages of Not just for this life: Gough Whitlam remembered. But while we are in this life, why not consider how it is with Marc Wittmann - contemplating Felt time: the psychology of how we perceive time; or, indeed, why not maintain ourselves under the guidance of Moshe Feldenkrais’ Awareness through movement: easy-to-do health exercises to improve your posture, vision, imagination and personal awareness, first published in 1977 and still going strong.