Books

Orbital wins the Booker

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has won the 2024 Booker prize. What it so skilfully and ambitiously exposes is the human cost of space flight set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six astronauts and cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station. Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless. Orbital was written during lockdown when the meaning of home (for those lucky enough to have one) changed forever. There’s a sense in which Harvey’s six astronauts return us to that moment when our homes became prisons and we were forced to contemplate the global effects of a virus that had no respect for national boundaries. On the International Space Station, borders are only visible on the side of the Earth that is under night and only really as clusters of artificial light which shows cities. Rivers are “nonsensical scorings … like strands of long fallen hair” and “the other side of the world will arrive in 40 minutes” blurring it all. Russian cosmonaut Anton contemplates US astronaut Michael Collins’ iconic photograph of Apollo 11 leaving the surface of the Moon in 1969 with the Earth beyond. He thinks “no Russian mind should be steeped in these thoughts”, but he is captivated by where the people are in the photograph. Is Collins the only human not to appear in it? Or is he the only human presence we can be sure of? Shaun has a postcard of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, sent to him by his wife. The painting’s complex composition has been said to create a unique illusion of reality where it […]

The Chairman’s Lounge: The inside story of how Qantas sold us out

How power, money and influence work in Australia Before Covid, both Qantas and its CEO Alan Joyce were flying high, the darlings of customers, staff and investors. After Covid hit, only money mattered – in particular, the company’s share price and extraordinary executive bonuses. Illegally redundant workers, unethical flight credits, abysmal customer service, antique aircraft: these became Qantas’ new brand.How did things go so badly wrong? Why were customers at the end of the queue? And how did an increasingly autocratic Joyce constantly get his own way, with the Qantas board and with both Liberal and Labor governments, which handed out over billions in subsidies and protected lucrative flight routes from foreign competition? For the first time, The Chairman’s Lounge tells the full story of how one company banked the nation’s loyalty and then cashed in on it. In his celebrated Rear Window column for the Australian Financial Review , Joe Aston’s reporting of the ethical failings of Qantas spurred the early retirement of its CEO and the resignation of its chairman. With fresh interviews and revelations, written in Aston’s trademark swashbuckling style , The Chairman’s Lounge is the definitive account of how Qantas was brought to the ground and who did it. It is a parable of our times.

The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World

A globe shows the world we think we know: neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens’ rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only commodity: bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise—The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.

Small is the next big thing

When working for a large organization, weeks can pass before leadership makes important decisions that affect you and your team. Meanwhile, you’re on the hook to deliver products that don’t actually serve the customer-products you know you could improve, if given the opportunity. After years of consulting for Fortune 1000 companies, Brady Brim-DeForest understands the drawbacks of working in giant, siloed environments. His book, Smaller is Better, shows you how to use the small, empowered teams model to radically recharge your workplace, make better products, and deliver a phenomenal customer experience. All with better employee engagement and retention! Smaller is Better uses real-world examples of companies who have saved billions and shaved years off their development cycles through small teams. Discover how to form nimble, autonomous teams, optimize them for mission, and scale across your organization. Improve both innovation and delivery while amping up customer satisfaction. Best of all, learn ways to get full buy-in from company leaders-and how you can “start small” today, with or without C-suite support.

Rachel Kushner’s revolutionary spy novel reflects on our hurtle towards extinction

-Alex Howard,Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney Rachel Kushner ranks among the finest novelists working today. The recipient of several major literary awards and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Kushner, who has a background in political economy and United States foreign policy, uses her fiction to explore the historical and geopolitical pressures that bear down on and determine everyday life and patterns of social behaviour. “What is shaping people? What are the pressures that delineate how they think, act, speak?” These are some of the questions she poses in her body of work. Her new novel, Creation Lake (2024), is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and tackles the topic of ecological terrorism. Clearly inspired by influential spy and crime writers like John le Carré and Jean-Patrick Manchette, it subverts genre conventions and playfully challenges reader expectations. A touch more tonally measured than her previous novels, Creation Lake is by far Kushner’s most accomplished and engrossing work to date. We get a sense of the scale and depth of Kushner’s interests in her debut novel, Telex from Cuba (2008). Set in the years leading up to the Fidel Castro helmed revolution of 1959, the novel interrogates questions of gender and the brutalities of colonialism, and sheds fresh light on what now seems, somehow, to be a long-distant, half-forgotten historical moment. Kushner’s interest in explosions of revolutionary fervour and periods of social upheaval carries over into her geographically and temporally expansive second book, The Flamethrowers (2013), an exhilarating account of radicalism, motorcycle racing and avant-gardism that unfurls against the politically charged backdrop of 1970s Italy. After addressing the interwoven issues of inequality and mass incarceration in contemporary America with her third novel, The Mars Room (2018), set in a women’s prison, Kushner shifts her focus back to Europe in her audacious new page-turner. Taking part in troubled times “All my life […]

Book Review: Range by David Epstein

What is the best way to pursue excellence? Should you focus all your time, energy, and attention on a single pursuit? Or would it be wiser to dabble in several before committing to one? In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World — an instant New York Times bestseller — David Epstein digs into the evidence looking for answers. A former Sports Illustrated staffer, Epstein begins in familiar territory, comparing the stories of two elite athletes: Tiger Woods, the golf champion, and Roger Federer, the tennis star. Woods was practically born with a golf club in his hands and was encouraged by his parents to go all in when they recognised his precociousness; Federer tried out a number of sports — swimming, skiing, skateboarding — before committing to tennis. So which method is best, the Roger or the Tiger? Epstein makes a strong case for the Roger. Research shows that “it takes time — and often forgoing a head start — to develop personal and professional range, but it is worth it,” Epstein writes. Furthermore, “highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident — a dangerous combination.” In true generalist fashion, Epstein examines several disciplines to support his argument, highlighting exemplars from art, science, education, and business. For example, Nintendo’s all-time most influential video-game innovator, Gunpei Yokoi, had no specific life plans when he took the job. His advantage emerged from his experiences as a hobbyist, inventor, and tinkerer. Epstein also advocates for late bloomers, among them Vincent van Gogh, who only started painting in earnest at age thirty-three, and former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein, whose professional career began when she was in her mid-fifties. Though Epstein’s defense of dabbling is convincing, he also shows us that the approach doesn’t work equally […]

Book Review: Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

From the author of Mayflies, an irresistible, unputdownable, state-of-the-nation novel – the story of one man’s epic fall from grace. May 2021. London.Campbell Flynn – art historian and celebrity intellectual – is entering the empire of middle age. Fuelled by an appetite for admiration and the finer things, controversy and novelty, he doesn’t take people half as seriously as they take themselves. Which will prove the first of his huge mistakes. The second? Milo Manghasa, his beguiling and provocative student. Milo inhabits a more precarious world, has experiences and ideas which excite his teacher. He also has a plan.Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes and secrets and scandals will be revealed, and Campbell Flynn may not be able to protect himself from the shattering exposure of all his privilege really involves. But then, he always knew: when his life came tumbling down, it would occur in public. A brilliant state-of-the-nation novel that pulls down the facades of high society, and knocks over the ‘good liberal’ house-of-cards. O’Hagan is not only a peerless chronicler of our times, but has other gifts – of generosity, humour and tenderness.

An exposé of whatever-it-takes culture, Eric Beecher’s The Men Who Killed the News is an idealistic book for the times

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne Disclosure statement Denis Muller was a colleague of Eric Beecher’s at The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s. Eric Beecher is a rare beast: a combination of journalist, media owner and idealist. In 1984, aged 33, he became the youngest-ever editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and he has worked around the world as a journalist. He is currently chair and the largest shareholder in Private Media, owner of several Australian news websites, including Crikey. With The Men Who Killed the News, he has produced a book that is at once a cry of indignation at the media’s abuse of power and an attempt to chart a future for journalism. The cry of indignation comes first. In a pacey compression of press history going back to the late 19th century, Beecher vividly illustrates how newspaper moguls from William Randolph Hearst in the 1880s to Rupert Murdoch today have cynically debased the profession of journalism in pursuit of wealth and power. He draws on a wide range of histories, creating a kind of one-stop shop for the reader who wishes to understand how public trust in the media has eroded to the point where Donald Trump is able to make the “fake news” label stick. The men who killed the news belong to two technological ages. The first belong to the age of industrialisation, which enabled the rapid daily production of tens of thousands of newspapers and the creation of a vast monopoly on public access to news and information. These men include not just Hearst and Murdoch, but Joseph Pulitzer, Henry Luce and A.O. Sulzberger in the United States, and Lords Beaverbrook, Rothermere and Northcliffe in Britain. The second belong to the age of the digital revolution, which has created two behemoths whose power is greater by several orders of magnitude […]

Succession: Is a business plan important?

Maybe Aaron Sorkin should have written the Succession script…it might have made more sense! So…I finally got round to watching Succession, to see what it was all about and why so many people seemed to like it. Basing it on the Murdochs is a bit of a stretch, but a great idea if the show’s aim was to make mega-bucks and gain maximum attention. A great PR exercise. The Roy family is not the one to invite to a dinner party. They are so totally obsessed with themselves and I doubt they know what is going on in the (real) world. They dont do a skerric of work and I am yet to hear any conversations based on media at all – unless they are considering a takeover bid. No subject matter is discussed, and the reason their empire exists is non-existent. The Roy children – Shiv, Ronan and Keenan are not family friendly. Sure Keenan has children, but hardly engages with them. The other two self-important ones, Shiv and Ronan, are too pre-occupied with themselves to breed. The father, Logan Roy, doesn’t know what he is doing and doesn’t understand why his children can’t cope and why things aren’t going well. He tells the kids ‘you are not serious people’. Why does the agent provocateur mirror the image? Succession is a nightmare! At least with the Murdochs there is structure, business being done, some of it not pretty. Media companies can be in love with themselves. They dish up content they expect readers to pay for, because they see their message as important for the world to continue to go round in circles. As they make money. Maybe, just maybe, Eric Beecher’s new book, The Men Who Killed the News, can confirm or deny the above. -Doug Green

Review: The Men Who Killed The News

Crikey owner and ex-News Corp and Fairfax editor lifts the lid on the abuse of power by media moguls – from William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk – and on his own unique experience of working for (and being sued by) the Murdochs. What’s gone wrong with our media? The answer: its owners. From William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk, from the British press barons to colonial upstarts Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, media proprietors have manipulated the news to accumulate wealth and influence as they meddled with democracy. Eric Beecher knows the news business from bottom to top. He has been a journalist, editor and media proprietor (of Text Media and Crikey), with the rare distinction of having both worked for and been sued (unsuccessfully) by the Murdochs. This book reveals the distorted role of the media moguls of the past two centuries: their techniques, strategies, behind-closed-doors machinations, and indulgent lifestyles. It explains how they have exploited the shield of the freedom of the press to undermine journalism – and truth. In an era of fake news, AI and misinformation, this is democracy’s chillingly important story: how a small coterie of flawed and narcissistic moguls created a shadow of power that has contributed to making the media an agent of mistrust.

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