Tag: Pat
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Rugby’s league problem
Looking back, if I were an ordinary worker in Redfern or Glebe in 1910, I would almost certainly have sided with league.
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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.”
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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.
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My first Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart
There is simply no way for sex and love not to be messy. After all, have you ever seen somebody get shot without bleeding?
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William Stoner and the act of loving
“Love was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a matter of both as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or poem, it says simply, ‘Look! I am alive.'”
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Out of Ireland; getting to know Robert Devereux
Out of Ireland is a novel by Christopher Koch; it is a diary of an Irish political prisoner, Robert Devereux, and the story of his exile in 1849 to Van Diemen’s Land penal colony for the incitement of violent revolution in Ireland. I chose to read this book purely for the reason that it was on…
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Infinite Jest, my thoughts
Just last week, I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a book whose reputation preceded it, at least for me. As year 11 double major English students, my teacher, Mr. Bibbens, assigned us the novel to study for a whole semester, under the expectation that we didn’t have to finish it. This is an…
The Queanbeyan Review 