Category: Featured
-
Travelling Earthsea with Ursula Le Guin
Pat reads Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy classic. “If ever you want to delve into a world that is utterly fanatistical, but explore the lives of the people within whose struggles are so strikingly like our own, Earthsea is surely for you.”
-
The Value of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, mathematician, and political activist who lived from 1872-1970. His magnum opus is generally considered to be the Principia Mathematica which is a three-volume work establishing the foundations of mathematics using logical axioms and symbolic logic. Russell then proceeded to venture into the field of epistemology. I started my recent…
-
The Light in the Eye of the Sheep
Once again, I come to you with a novel recommended to me by a dear friend. It seems to be a good way to choose literature, by having someone else determine whether it’s worth reading or not beforehand. The novel in question, The Eye of the Sheep by Sofie Laguna, was mentioned during a discussion…
-
What I love about Seinfeld: The Marine Biologist
Sure, funny has an energy, but it’s the structure of funny that gives that energy life. In the height of the show’s success, The Marine Biologist took to the screens for the first time, and to me it typifies the character of the Seinfeld project.
-
The God of Small Things
The friend who gifted me this book described it as her second or third favourite book. She had found a copy of it in one of those street libraries – the kind where you swap one book for another – and picked it up for me hoping that I would read it and write a…
-
Congo’s incredible history
The success Van Reybrouck achieves here is not only by documenting a wonderful history of the Congo. What makes Congo a masterpiece is the way he weaves it together with the history of the world, bringing to light the enormous importance and influence of a nation that before reading this book, I knew not a…
-
Lessons in Leadership: JFK
A Thousand Days paints a picture of Kennedy the way just one person saw him, but that person describes a lucid decision maker, principled problem solver, and a man deeply interested in international progress. In terms of global leadership, he was certainly not out of his depth. By any interpretation of this recount, it’s clear…
-
Understanding the bomb: Command and Control
Simultaneously an excellent Cold War history and a gripping tale of the human experience, steeped in great research and excellent storytelling, Command and Control offers profound perspective and insight on nuclear war and proliferation that I am unlikely to forget any time soon.
-
From Here To Eternity: An Intimate Death
Several weeks ago I attended a presentation that my sister had given at the National Gallery of Australia. She had participated in the ArtMed program in 2016 whilst studying medicine. For the program, she had conducted a research project into how death is presented in the artwork of the Sumatran culture and compared it to…
-
J R: A Humble Cello Piece
None of William Gaddis’s books continue to be published in Australia. I had to order my copies of J R and The Recognitions from the US, ironically paying a premium for these pieces of art because, I suppose, that’s what America’s all about. It is truly tragic that Gaddis, arguably the person responsible for kickstarting…
The Queanbeyan Review 