Category: Books
-
Silence is No Longer Golden
BOOK REVIEW: GODS AND DEMONS A foreign correspondent’s memoir | Deborah Cassrels It’s certainly not Scoop, and Deborah Cassrels is hardly Evelyn Waugh. But there are enough fanciful echoes of imagined distant drums in Cassrels’ book, and there’s sufficient colourful reportage, to prompt consideration of the demerits of figjamery. According to the book cover, it…
-
How High Can Everest Rise?
This appears in Quadrant magazine’s November 2019 issue, just out. The Dizzying Heights Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen ISBN No: 978-1-925736-30-4 Hybrid Publishing : Melbourne pp. 248, $24.99. Review by Richard Laidlaw It’s plainly very difficult being a political satirist these days, when the politicians seem to have cornered the market themselves and to have…
-
Statuary Declaration
HECTOR’S DIARY His regular diet of worms and other non-religious fare Candi Dasa, Bali Wednesday, Jun. 28, 2017 TEN days in the blissful zephyrs, beside the azure briny you get in the better parts of the archipelago, can do you a power of good. Such a break provides time to read books – or…
-
Dystopian Delights
HECTOR’S DIARY His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-religious experiences Bali Nov. 9, 2016 THERE were no visibly ruffled kebayas at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival session featuring American author Lionel Shriver on Oct. 29. No one loudly rattled their worry beads or furiously flounced out. This was in stark contrast to the…
-
Head for the Hills, Gabblers
HECTOR’S DIARY His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-religious experiences Bali Oct. 12, 2016 WELL, the Diary is ready for the feast. This will not be in Hotel California style. We’re not much into steely knives and we certainly don’t want to kill the beast. Not that what we’re talking about is a…
-
Shibboleths Revealed
HECTOR’S DIARY His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-religious experiences Bali, Aug. 31. 2016 Expatria, the spreading collection of dots that peppers the map of Bali like kibbutzim, as if it were the beginnings of an overbearing expropriation, had an unpleasant frisson of ferment recently over the tragic death of a policeman in an…
8degreesoflatitude 