Tag Archives: Australia

Book Review:  Memorial Days: A Memoir by Geraldine Brooks

On May 27, 2019, Memorial Day, Australian writer Geraldine Brooks received a phone call telling her that her sixty-year-old husband, Tony Horwitz, who was away on a book tour, suddenly collapsed on a sidewalk in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and died. … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer

This book is well-written and takes us to fascinating places, but it is suffused with irony. Iyer tours locations that for one reason or another have been considered forms of paradise, but most of them are fraught with violence, and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part Two

“The horror… The horror…” we hear Marlon Brando as Kurtz say at the end of the film Apocalypse Now. Such a somber chant would suit the mood of much of The Fatal Shore. It is almost unbelievable that humans could … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part One

This is a massive, complex history about how the transportation of convicts from England to Australia gave birth to a new nation. It is also a devastatingly horrific story, so much so that I almost gave up reading it after … Continue reading

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