August 2014

From the CommitteeChristmas raffle This year we thought we would have a change from our Winter Warmer raffle and have a Christmas raffle instead. This enables a greater variety of goods to be included in the raffle and makes it easier for people to donate items. For example, Christmas tree decorations, bonbons for the Christmas table, Christmas foods and goodies ... The list could go on and on! We wish to put the raffle together by mid-September so any donations for our fabulous raffle may be left at the library for us to collect. The committee also donates items and we will be approaching local businesses for donations as usual.We will commence selling tickets by end of September and will sell tickets at the next three Sunday markets. Any friends who wish to help us would be welcomed with open arms.The raffle will be drawn early December at a Library function.

Christmas gathering The Committee is hoping to host a party at the Library to provide an opportunity for us to meet one another and hopefully encourage new people to join and become a Friend of the Library. There will be more information in following Newsletters.

Streetcar Named Desire The Friends of the Library have been given the opportunity to make the Gala opening of A Streetcar Named Desire into a fundraiser. We are hoping to encourage lots of people to attend. It will be held at the Hoskins Centre on Saturday 22 November 2014. Please come along and bring all your friends, family, relatives ...we would love to make this a successful fundraiser, in addition to being an enjoyable night out.

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

We will provide more details as the event draws closer.

Grant fundingThe State Government has created a new fund for Library Infrastructure works, which may be worthwhile competing for. Council will be watching for the guidelines to be released, to see if the total amount allowed per successful applicant makes the new Library project more viable.The State Government has also prefigured much larger amounts for widespread infrastructure improvements in regional NSW if they are returned to government at the next election and they are successful in selling the poles and wires of electricity distribution. There are many conditional phrases here. Council has already flagged that the Hospital and the Airport would top their list of eligible local projects for such money, and that the Library and/or the Precinct would need to demonstrate regional importance to the rest of the New England/ Northwest local government areas before it gained a higher ranking in the eligibility list Council has drafted so far.

Book review

The Good Doctor Damon Galgut

This novel is set in a run down hospital in the former capital of one of the Homelands in South Africa. For the narrator, Dr. Frank Eloff, it has been a refuge for seven years following the break up of his marriage. Denied the post of Head of the Hospital that he had been promised, he has become jaded and cynical about the situation. The hospital has very little equipment and few patients and Frank’s response to this is resignation and apathy.

Following a new law in South Africa requiring all new medical graduates to work in a remote area for a year, comes Dr. Laurence Waters, full of optimism and naivety. He is energetic, but fails to comprehend the local situation and the possible ramifications of his attempts to impose change. He and Frank are thrown together, even having to share a room in the hospital’s limited accommodation.

Against a background of political unrest and lack of government support, these two main characters play out their differing attitudes to the dilapidated hospital and the surrounding community. The novel gradually reveals Frank’s past experiences, including his military training, which have led to his current inactivity and pessimism. Everything about Laurence grates on him. When he has to leave for a few days to sign divorce papers at the request of his ex wife, he is glad to escape. On his arrival back, he finds the hospital situation has been destabilized by Laurence’s betrayal of his confidences, ultimately with tragic consequences.

The novel is powerfully written in clear, taut prose. There is a haunting quality to the work, which is thought provoking. The title The good doctor is ironic and makes the reader ponder on the qualities of the two main doctors in the story. The young enthusiastic Laurence appears at first to fit the profile but the reader is forced to revise this view.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

Appropriately, Francine Prose leads our list of new fiction authors this month, but don’t let the trap of nominative determinism fool you. Her Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is a novel of rare inventiveness set in a time of love, art and betrayal. Dan Kavanagh’s Duffy is a detective like no other: a bisexual ex-policeman with a phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware.Boy in the twilight by Yu Hua provides stories of the hidden China.

Buried angels is the eighth new psychological thriller featuring Detective Patrick Hedstrom and Erica Falck. Camilla Lackberg is now Sweden’s most popular author, translated into 33 languages. Edward St Aubyn has had a wonderful horrible life (described in this article http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/02/inheritance), and wrote it all out as fiction in a set of five Patrick Melrose novels: his emergence, as Patrick describes it, “to the feeling of utter helplessness and incoherence that he supposed he had spent his life trying to avoid,” is a revelation and a relief. The author has now gone on to write Lost for words, a novel for fun and mocking of the Man Booker literary prize (which he almost won in 2006). With some irony, Lost for words has now won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize (the United Kingdom's only literary award for comic literature – whose prize consists of a jeroboam of Champagne Bollinger Special Cuvée, 52 volumes of the Everyman Wodehouse edition, and the honour of a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig being named after the winning novel). Another British magician, Neil Gaiman, has just had The truth is a cave in the Black Mountains : a tale of travel and darkness with pictures of all kinds published as a separate work 4 years after its first appearance in a short story collection. It was also performed in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House to a sell-out crowd in the same year - Gaiman read his tale live as the artwork reproduced in this new book was presented, scene by scene, on large screens. Narrative and art were accompanied by live music composed and performed especially for the story by the FourPlay String Quartet.

Your fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live forever? is a new novel by Dave Eggers, described by the Guardian reviewer as “a one-man essay in the value and virtue of a life in writing in the 21st century. This is his third published novel in three years. And yet his work never drops below a certain standard and the dude just keeps it coming”. In addition to these virtues he is also the founder of McSweeney's, co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia, and founder of ScholarMatch, a program that matches donors with students needing funds for college tuition. The Library has followed the energetic output of his McSweeney’s independent publishing house, having all fifteen of its quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin, and at least 25 issues of the quirky Quarterly Concern (the latest presents Latin American crime: thirteen stories). Ruth

Reichl, food writer, essays Delicious!: a novel from her usual raw material.

Alfonso, by Félix Calvino, is “a gentle yet searching exploration of a Spanish migrant's feelings and experiences in the country Australia used to be more than forty years ago” – a tribute to a life lived in Galicia, England and Australia, and an excellent addition to the Press On series of novels, commissioned by Michael Wilding from Australian authors and published by Arcadia in North Melbourne.The listener was originally written in Swedish in 1971: Tove Jansson, author of the Moomin series of books for children was turning to writing for adults, at first with these short stories. Javier Cercas, acclaimed for his non-fiction The anatomy of a moment (an attempted coup d’état in 1981 Spain), has turned to fiction with Outlaws: “One summer's day in Gerona a bespectacled, sixteen-year-old Ignacio Canas is working in an amusement arcade, when a charismatic teenager walks in with the most beautiful girl Canas has ever seen…”Youthful indiscretion is also explored in America by D. Foy in Made to break: a group of friends are on holiday at a remote cabin, when an accident leaves one of them dying, and bad weather traps them all – what else could go wrong?

In India, Jaspreet Singh engages in reflections on a wrongful death thirty years earlier with Helium: a novel. Lawrence Osborne follows a corrupt lawyer gambling in Hong Kong and Macau in The ballad of a small player. Tabish Tangye demonstrates How to fight Islamist terror from the missionary position: “a young Pakistani academic

relives his days sharing a cramped apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, with two unlikely bedfellows. They are Ravi, his incorrigible best friend and a wry observer of the human condition; and Karim, their fundamentalist Muslim landlord, whose apparent double life soon intrigues his tenants. While Ravi finds his jaded world outlook challenged when he falls for an unlikely Danish girl, and our narrator embarks upon a complicated love affair of his own, Karim's bizarre and secretive behaviour leads to creeping suspicions…”

As you can see by the cover of American innovations, Rivka Galchen conceives of things differently: the book reimagines the themes of famous short stories from the perspective of female characters, and includes the tale of a young woman whose furniture walks out on her. Autobiography of a corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky has been translated from Russian, and adds to the New York Review Books classics publication series – we also have The human comedy: selected stories (Honoré de Balzac), An Armenian sketchbook (Vasily Grossman), The gate (Natsume Soseki) and at least fourteen other volumes from this varied collection.Scott O'Connor reinterprets a range of American obsessions (CIA, brainwashing and the costs of the passage of time) in Half world: a novel.

Non-fiction titles can also highlight a country’s obsessions. Carlotta Gall posits that The wrong enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 forgot to concentrate on Pakistan and its (apparently) duplicitous government and intelligence forces. Kevin Foster, in Don't mention the war: the Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict demonstrates how Australia’s military public affairs personnel have taken over many of the roles traditionally performed by reporters and shows the restrictive effect of this on

media coverage. Ellen Boucher shines a light onto another country’s self-image with Empire's children: child emigration, welfare, and the decline of the British world, 1869-1967. Between those years, government-funded British charities sent nearly 100,000 British children to start new lives in the settler empire. This pioneering study tells the story of the “rise and fall of child emigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Rhodesia. In the mid-Victorian period, the concept of a global British race had a profound impact on the practice of charity work, the evolution of child welfare, and the experiences of poor children. During the twentieth century, however, rising nationalism in the dominions, alongside the emergence of new, psychological theories of child welfare, eroded faith in the 'British world' and brought child emigration into question. The book explores the powerful influence of empire on child-centred social policy, and also uncovers how the lives of ordinary children and families were forever transformed by imperial forces and settler nationalism”.

Dayo Olopade is not afraid to paint an unexpected picture, seeing Stanley and Livingstone’s dark continent as its obverse - The bright continent: breaking rules and making change in modern Africa, including a chapter on why Africa will feed, fuel, and shape the world. Rob Hornstra took his cameras into the Caucasus region as soon as Russia won the rights to stage the recent winter Olympics, and came out with a staggering visual and critical cornucopia, put together as The Sochi project: an atlas of war and tourism in the Caucasus. Lance Dodes, too, speaks out against commonly-held belief, showing in The sober truth: debunking the bad science behind 12-step programs and the rehab industry that AA has become so infused in our society that it is practically synonymous with addiction recovery - yet the evidence shows that AA has only a 5 to 10 percent success rate - hardly better than no treatment at all.

Other sincere cris de coeur come from Laura Bates (Everyday sexism), Dale Jamieson (Reason in a dark time: why the struggle against climate change failed and why our choices still matter) and David Blacker (The falling rate of learning and the neoliberal endgame – the Times Higher Education reviewer of this US book observed that “the usefulness for industry of universal public education, emerging hand-in-glove with industrial society and enfranchisement from the late 18th century, has gone. The rewards for state and business of cutting back on such education provision, in an age of austerity, are overwhelmingly appealing”).

We have new insights on sport (The big miss: my years coaching Tiger Woods by Hank Haney), flora (Plant conservation: why it matters and how it works by Timothy Walker) and medicine (Cancer virus: the story of Epstein-Barr virus; discovered in 1964 when the very idea of a virus underlying a cancer was revolutionary - cancer is, after all, not catching – the virus is fascinating for other reasons too: almost everyone carries it, yet it is only under certain circumstances that it produces disease. It has been associated with different, apparently unrelated, diseases in different populations: Burkitt's Lymphoma produces tumours of the jaw in African children; a nasal tumour in China; glandular fever in Europe and the USA; and the majority of cases of Hodgkin's Disease everywhere).

Emma Ayres, who you may remember addressing Friends of the ABC in Armidale a little while ago, has now written the book of her travels (cycling from England to Hong Kong with a violin she calls Aurelia strapped to her back) and wittily titled it Cadence. Christine Osborne, equally adventurous in the opposite direction, left Australia as a nurse and became a British-based travel writer of such places as the Gulf States, Oman, Jordan, Pakistan, Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan and Morocco (Travels with my hat: a lifetime on the road). David Mason was a French Foreign Legionnaire on the Ethiopian border before he came home for something a little less demanding - Walk across Australia: the first solo crossing.

David Evans’ The art of walking: a field guide is a unique look at walking as a mode of artistic practice. Walking art is fashionably displayed in Christian Louboutin, with John Malkovich writing the foreword stylishly. But the feet with the most luxury are the bare ones which enjoyed Sasanian and Sogdian woollen and silk carpets between the second and tenth centuries – here displayed in Friedrich Spuler’s Pre-Islamic carpets and textiles from eastern lands.

Senses are also stirred by Luke Nguyen (The food of Vietnam), Fanny Zanotti (Paris pastry club: a collection of cakes, tarts, pastries and other indulgent recipes), Ruth Gresser (Kitchen workshop pizza: hands-on cooking lessons for making amazing pizza at home) and Rossella Menegazzo (Wa: the essence of Japanese design, categorized by material).

Visual senses are engaged by Gauguin: metamorphoses (from a MoMA exhibition which only closed in June this year), Degenerate art: the attack on modern art in Nazi Germany, 1937 (from a Neue Galerie exhibition at the same time) and Paul Roberts’ richly illustrated Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Higher faculties may be stimulated by Antony Mason’s Spiritual places: the world's most sacred sites; reflect on Bernard Williams’ philosophical Essays and reviews, 1959-2002; hope for sustainable survival with Dan Barber (The third plate: field notes on the future of food); or dream of epic poetry’s relevance and survival in this modern age (Adam Nicholson’s The mighty dead: why Homer matters).

There are big histories to draw us in as well. Lincoln Paine takes, as he should, 744 pages to sail The sea and civilization: a maritime history of the world. Paula Fichtner ignores the big jaws in looking at

The Habsburgs: dynasty, culture and politics. Museums in Berlin, Copenhagen and London combined resources to produce the exhibition and book of Vikings: life and legend.

Re-examining the past can also reveal shame and incidents previously suppressed or overlooked. Burning the Reichstag: an investigation into the Third Reich's enduring mystery by Benjamin Hett reopens the arson case. Nor is Australia immune from these searches: Tom Lawson looks closely at The last man: a British genocide in Tasmania, and Mark Isaacs asks about The undesirables: inside Nauru (Australia's offshore asylum-seeker processing centre).

New biographies include Updike (Adam Begley), Paul Robeson: a watched man (Jordan Goodman), Charlie Chaplin (Peter Ackroyd) and a study of African American women and gender identities, The women by Hilton Als.

Finally, more than a nod to the dismal science: these authors are trying to work out aspects of how the world works (and doesn’t) with the hope of making things better as we go. First, Florian Schui with Austerity: the great failure (“Its defenders praise it as a panacea that will prepare the ground for future growth and stability. Critics insist it will precipitate a vicious cycle of economic decline”). It’s an

important enough title for the Library of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to have purchased a copy. Then Charles Calomiris constructs Fragile by design: the political origins of banking crises and scarce credit, with a first chapter entitled “If stable and efficient banks are such a good idea, why are they so rare?” Danny Dorling looks to shelter in Britain with All that is solid: the great housing disaster, but could well be describing aspects of Australia in the book. The Guardian reviewer observed that “what is the point of building new homes if only the well-off can buy them? You would never guess it but there isn't a housing shortage. Even London has more bedrooms than people. But the rich have gathered space and properties for themselves to enjoy or exploit. In 1981 the wealthiest 10th of households had three times as many rooms in their homes as the poorest 10th. By 2011 it had five times as many. We have seen nothing like it since the pre-Lloyd George Britain of 1901, Queen Victoria's last year.” And Joyce Kennedy gives advice in the Australian edition of Successful job interviews for dummies.