Once we are warned of a nuclear attack, we prepare to launch,’ former secretary of defence William Perry tells us. ‘This is policy. We do not wait.’ Now, imagine that this is really happening. ‘Speaking in a normal tone, the president reads the nuclear launch codes out loud.’ As stated in the acknowledgments, ‘Nuclear war is insane’. It’s also a complex array of people and politics operating in a global system with a fascinating historical context.
Nuclear War is structured as a ‘bolt out of the blue’ story organised into well-paced, intriguing yet terrifying dramatic segments of 24 minutes; surreal space/time moments of narrative speculation and decisions as the minutes tick. It’s a compelling yet shocking moment-by-moment account of an intercontinental ballistic missile attack from launch, detection, response, impact, and aftermath. The confronting drama intersperses history and daily-life snapshots with detailed notes on protocols and procedures; bunkers and B-52 bombers.
This book is well paced, informative, and easy to read with regular juxtaposition of ideas and information to emphasise a horrific contrast between subjective, individual human experiences and objective indifference of broader political, military and scientific perspectives. Researching, reporting, and writing a book of this nature requires enormous insight from authoritative sources.
It’s reassuring and horrifying that this book features 75 pages of acknowledgments and notes. This is an important and enlightening book. Quite confronting and dismal. Prime yourself before reading. Maybe find a bunker.
Despite its breathless title, Vulture Capitalism provides a fairly succinct analysis of how the neo-liberal project has run off the rails. Blakeley has read her economists – from Ricardo to Hayek to Schumpeter to Keynes and does a good job of describing their various positions. Her central thesis is straight out of the young Marx – but instead of talking about ‘alienation’ she uses the easier to grasp concept of ‘freedom’. In a capitalist system we are unfree because we do not have the power to set the terms of our work and consumption. Free markets are not what they appear – impersonal and inevitable products of market forces – but are rather the result of capitalist planning.
Blakeley gives plenty of fun examples of the problem: Boeing embraces a culture of cost cutting and produces a jet that was designed to crash, the banking system generates the GFC but is too big to fail and must be salvaged with public money.
Having established that there is a problem Blakely gamely tries to sketch a solution and unfortunately this part of her book is less compelling – not because ‘solutions’ are hard to find but rather because as a self-described ‘Democratic Socialist’ she can’t bring herself to say a good word about the post-war Keynesian policy framework that preceded the neoliberal adventure that began with Thatcher and Reagan.
Instead, she advocates for ‘Democratic Planning’ and at this point one can’t help thinking – no doubt unfairly – of Monty Python’s ‘autonomous workers’ collectives’. As they say of Marx, ‘Right diagnosis, wrong cure’.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of several books, including ‘Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom’ – as well as ‘The Corona Crash: How the pandemic will change capitalism’ and ‘Stolen: How to save the world from financialisation’.
She is the former economics commentator for the New Statesman, and a former Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research. She appears frequently in UK and international media, including appearances on BBC Question Time, ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Talk TV’s Piers Morgan Uncensored and MTV News.
In 2022, a woman attending a concert in New York City, accompanied by her young daughter, was refused entry. Facial recognition technology had identified her as an attorney pursuing active litigation against the company that owned the venue. ‘Computer says no.’Even schools are using ‘smart cameras’ to monitor for potentially bored, distracted, or untrustworthy students.
Is this an acceptable use of AI? Who gets to decide? Would you like a say? Author Verity Harding believes that ‘you don’t need to be an AI expert to have an informed opinion about AI.’
AI is undoubtedly in the spirit of the age. I’ve been intrigued to read and review several recently published AI-related books. So, how is this one different? Apart from outlining AI’s potential and pitfalls, an intelligently disillusioned Harding explores humanity’s shadow self (greed, meanness, lust, power …) framed and supported by a few captivating history lessons.
The author parallels other complex technological advancements (1960s space race, 1970s test-tube babies, 1990s/2000s internet) and their fundamental and profound impact on humanity. Commercial, political, and/or ideological factors are often in the mix, and the human factor is sometimes forgotten in the rush.
AI Needs You concludes with a 1964 speech from Dr Martin Luther King: ‘We are learning to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.’
AI Needs You emphasises the timely responses needed to guide this established, yet still rapidly emerging, technology. AI is a complex technology requiring global trust, governance, and cooperation. It’s a long way from ChatGPT!
Reviewed by Mark Parry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Politics and public policy. Verity Harding is Founder of Formation Advisory Ltd, a bespoke technology consultancy firm, and Director of the AI & Geopolitics Project at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
Her debut book ‘AI Needs You’ was published in March 2024.
Sima Samar was born into a polygamous family, with her father having two wives. She quickly came to understand the inferior status that girls and women have in Afghanistan and came to dedicate her life to educate and motivate women for a better life.
In her memoir, Outspoken, she tells us of her life growing up, becoming a doctor and activist, of her work on peace negotiations and helping to educate around the unjust and difficult lives of all women living in Afghanistan, and it is also enlightening from a political aspect. Samar writes of her hopes and dilemmas in the continuous climate of politics and war. Her work and interests are community medical care and education entangled with the efforts to block progress by the men in power.
Outspoken expanded my understanding of the daily challenges faced by a woman living under a fundamentalist, repressive regime. Samar details how control has changed many times over 30 odd years. The Taliban, who are once again in power, are undoing all the progress in their quest to deny other tribes all personal freedoms in the name of Islam, or at least, their version of it. Once again all women are prevented from leading a life of freedom and equality.
I read this book over a couple of weeks and found it thought provoking and informative. For such a heavy and often disturbing account of the struggles of women and desire for freedom it is easy to read. It reminded me how grateful I am to live in free and democratic Australia. Samar is an inspiration to keep fighting for what you believe in and to never give up.
Reviewed by Kay Benson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sima Samar is a doctor for the poor, an educator of the marginalised and a human rights defender from Afghanistan. She has established and nurtured the Shuhada Organization that, in 2012, operated more than 100 schools. At the time, Shuhada also ran 15 clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing education and healthcare, particularly focusing on women and girls.
Samar served in the Interim Administration of Afghanistan and established the first-ever Ministry of Women’s Affairs. From 2004-2019, she chaired the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission that holds human rights violators accountable, a commitment that has put her own life at great risk.
In December 2019, Sima Samar was appointed as a member of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement. She is also a member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation.
Here’s a vicarious way to enjoy four weeks, mostly on foot, travelling 344 km to trace the course of the Brisbane River in Queensland.
Readers will take every step of the way with Simon Cleary, novelist and walker. He spent 18 months beforehand contacting landholders along the river, determining his route each day and organising camping spots.
This memoir is more than an account of his river travels. It is also a meditation on the river itself, the history, people and industries associated with it, and the plants and animals on its banks.
Cleary planned his journey after the February 2022 flood, setting out in May that year from a gully high on a range north-west of the city of Brisbane. He and individual companions for legs of the journey had to contend with the wettest autumn for years, so wet clothes, tents, packs and boots became the norm.
Cleary joined a canoeist friend to skirt around prisons on the riverbanks near Wacol, and travelled the final leg from the Brisbane CBD to Moreton Bay on a friend’s boat.
In the severe weather, Cleary and his companions at times were grateful to landowners who allowed them to use buildings, or even offered hospitality in their homes. The extreme weather meant that Wivenhoe Dam filled, so Cleary witnessed the release of floodwater through the spillway, with subsequent downstream torrents of water, debris and flooded banks, making detours necessary.
This is a beguiling book, not only taking the reader along that river, and sometimes onto roads and rail trails, but also into Cleary’s mind as he charts his progress, slipping in pieces of historical research, opinions and musings about rivers around the world, and their place in people’s lives.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simon Cleary is the author of Everything is Water(June 2024) and three previous novels: The War Artist (2019), Closer to Stone (2012) and The Comfort of Figs (2008).
Simon grew up in Toowoomba before studying literature and law at the University of Queensland. His first novel, The Comfort of Figs, set in his adopted home of Brisbane, explores the changes to landscape that come with the creation of cities.
After graduating from university he spent six months hitch-hiking across the Sahara into West Africa. His experiences in Algeria when civil war broke out there informed his second novel, Closer to Stone, which deals with the effects of extreme beliefs.
His third novel, The War Artist– a love story – interrogates the human cost of war and violence.
In addition to his books, Simon’s published work includes shorter fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His piece All Around Us Creatures Graze featured in the Museum of Brisbane’s “The Storytellers” Exhibition as a collaboration with artist Todd Fuller.
His novel The War Artist is currently in creative development for an immersive multi-artist project having previously been adapted into a moving school musical experience.
Simon has been a guest panellist at literary festivals, moderated panels, delivered presentations including How Works of Fiction Become Words for Change, delivered writing workshops and keynote speeches, and been a regular judge of literary awards.
It was indeed a secret… and grisly … trade conducted between the ‘gentleman collectors’ of Tasmania and equally gentlemanly recipients in England in the 1800s.
Pybus, a noted Tasmanian historian, has spent several years researching the trade in Aboriginal skulls, skeletons and bones to England, the US and Europe.
With unknown human remains in private collections, she estimated that in public collections there were 72 skulls in Britain, 21 in Europe, only two in the US and 66 in Australia, as well as seven complete skeletons.
Pybus has read letters, museum articles, Royal Society of Tasmania papers, family papers and those lodged with state libraries. In the UK, Ireland and Europe she followed the paper trail of those gentlemen who requested remains from counterparts in Tasmania and other colonies of New Holland in the 1800s, and even into the 20th century.
Notable botanist Sir Joseph Banks was one man who requested, and even seemed to demand, skulls of natives from the new colony of New South Wales. He made his desires known to naturalists, appointed to the colony on Banks’ recommendation, as well as vice-regal figures such as Governor Arthur Phillip and Governor King.
One woman who features large in Pybus’ account of this trade was Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the governor of Van Dieman’s Land from 1837 to 1843, Sir John Franklin.
In modern parlance, she would be termed ‘a piece of work’, and the colonists soon started referring to her as the She-Governor. She surrounded herself with younger men who were all avid naturalists and she herself collected Aboriginal skulls, even giving one to a longtime female companion.
It was not just Tasmania of the 1800s where Aboriginal graves were robbed, and surgeons decapitated corpses to provide collectors with what they desired. Between 1920 and 1950, a grazier and amateur ethnologist in Victoria ransacked about 1800 burial sites beside the Murray River, providing more than 800 skeletons for institutions in South Australia and Melbourne.
‘The great Australian silence’ is how anthropologist Bill Stanner in 1968 characterised the history of colonisation and settlement. Pybus has broken that silence to reveal an appalling truth.
Cassandra Pybus is ARC Research Professor at the University of Sydney.
Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is author of 12 books and has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King’s College London.
She is descended from the colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini’s traditional country of Bruny Island.
Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of several books, including ‘Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom’ – as well as ‘The Corona Crash: How the pandemic will change capitalism’ and ‘Stolen: How to save the world from financialisation’.
Politics and public policy. Verity Harding is Founder of Formation Advisory Ltd, a bespoke technology consultancy firm, and Director of the AI & Geopolitics Project at Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
Sima Samar is a doctor for the poor, an educator of the marginalised and a human rights defender from Afghanistan. She has established and nurtured the Shuhada Organization that, in 2012, operated more than 100 schools. At the time, Shuhada also ran 15 clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing education and healthcare, particularly focusing on women and girls.
Simon Cleary is the author of 
Cassandra Pybus is ARC Research Professor at the University of Sydney.