Posted in Australian Politics, Book Reviews on 26 January, 2008 | No Comments »
Today, on Australia Day, it seems appropriate to write about The Secret River, by Kate Grenville.
Australia Day commemorates the day in 1788 when the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove with a cargo of convicts from Britain. The first recorded time that Europeans settled in Australia. Many Aboriginal people call it Invasion Day, and hold [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Book Reviews, Civil Liberties, Economics on 8 January, 2008 | No Comments »
Today’s book review is Immigrants - Your Country needs them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London.
The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for fresh thinking about immigration”, and it [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Life, Work and life on 28 December, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Today’s book review is Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I first came across the concept of Flow in my previous job, where it was presented to us as a concept that will help you manage people better - that you should try and manage people so that they were in a [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Work and life on 18 December, 2007 | No Comments »
Today’s book review is Strategy and the Fat Smoker, by David Maister. First, a disclosure. In a first for me, I got this book as an advance copy for review on my blog. And given that David Maister has been one of my favourite business writers for a while (since I read his book Managing [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Economics, Life, environment on 23 November, 2007 | 2 Comments »
Today’s review is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs. This is a book I never would have read without my blogging habit. When she died last year, several of my favourite bloggers wrote about her.
The book is an indictment of pretty much everything about American cities (particularly New York) in [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Book Reviews on 19 October, 2007 | 1 Comment »
An alcoholic, manic-depressive, plagued with self doubt, he spent all but three years of his working life working for the unions before being elected to parliament. Alternatively, the man regarded by many as Australia’s greatest leader - wartime Prime Minister John Curtin.
After watching the miniseries Curtin six months ago, I realised how little I knew [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Life, Parenting on 6 May, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Unrelaxed Dad has created a new meme. It’s about time I wrote a new post, but I’m too tired to be creative tonight, and besides, it’s about time I blogged about children’s books. Basically the meme is to choose six books that you read to a toddler that both of you enjoy. A crucial caveat [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Life on 28 March, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Today’s book review is The Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson is one of my absolute favourite authors, mainly driven by two quite different books: Neither Here nor There (a story of backpacking around Europe) and Mother Tongue, which is his history of the English language.
So I had high expectations. But I was a [...]
Posted in Book Reviews on 9 January, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Today’s book review is The complete Polysyllabic Spree - the Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated But Ever Hopeful Reader, by Nick Hornby (interestingly only available on Amazon UK, not US). This is a collection of Nick Hornby’s monthly essays on the books he’s read that month, from Believer magazine (a US magazine which I had [...]
Posted in Australian Politics, Book Reviews, Education on 31 December, 2006 | 6 Comments »
Today I’m reviewing one of the Quarterly Essays - The History Question; Who owns the past? by Inga Clendinnen. Quarterly Essays are 20,000 words published quarterly, with responses generally in the next issue. I’ve previously reviewed Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers, which is a detailed deconstruction and pieceing together of the history of the first five years [...]
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