Michael P. Foley’s Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Fridays: The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything has some distinct similarities in tone and content to Thomas Woods’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation. It is the good news and (with the odd minor exception) only the good news about Catholicism and being Catholic. It is ( Read more... )

Nicolas Rothwell gave me an autographed copy of his Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A journey into the heart of Australia because he enjoys my book reviews on this LJ. It has been sitting, accusingly, among the to-be-read books at the foot of my bed.

I had very much enjoyed Nicolas’s later book on Australia Another Country. Coming to the end of my burst ( Read more... )

I first met Robert Murray’s writing with his book The Split: Labor in the Fifties a wonderful history of the Labor split.

His latest book is 150 Years of Spring St: Victorian Government: 1850s to 21st Century, a highly readable, informative and sensible history of Victorian government and politics. Bob takes us from the beginnings of the ( Read more... )

Ronald Long’s Men, Homosexuality and the Gods: An exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective is really a book about arguments in the contemporary US, particularly religious arguments, over homosexuality.

Hence the berdache of Amerindian tradition (Holy Effeminancy: The Native American Berdache As Living ( Read more... )

When I Knew is a charming coffee table book of various gays and lesbians recounting when they/their parents/other folk first realised that they were that sort of person. Most are short and pithy, many are very funny, some are poignant.

I knew I was gay when the most exciting part of my Bar Mitzah was meeting with the party planner ( Read more... )

Picked up in Readings (or it might have been Borders) a few weeks ago A Manual of Hadith by Maulana Muhammad Ali, originally published in Lahore in 1941 (the Empire is treated as matter-of-fact background reality) and reprinted in 2001. The manual is somewhat abbreviated because of wartime paper shortages ( Read more... )

It is an old saw that journalism is the first draft of history. The best thing I have read on al-Qaeda is New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a brilliant “first draft” of history based on many interviews and wide reading ( Read more... )

My Life As A Traitor by young Iranian exile Zarah Ghahramani, assisted by Oz writer Robert Hillman, is another book about how crap it is to be a woman under the rule of the mullahs. So it has obvious resonances with Reading Lolita in Teheran, resonances all the greater since Zarah also experiences literature as a liberation. But Zarah is much ( Read more... )

Tariq Ramadan’s The Messenger: the Meanings of Muhammad, is a prolonged meditation on the life of Muhammad, seeking meanings therein for our time (a long tradition in Islam: in some ways, the very basis of Islam). Reading The Messenger allows one to better appreciate how different Islamic religious tradition is from Christian (or Jewish) religious ( Read more... )

Went to a book launch tonight. On the way there, ran into Kerry Greenwood, pruning her front hedge (wormwood: you can make absinthe out of wormwood--she has some spare wormwood). She had left Phryne Fisher in a room full of murderers--or, at least, she thinks they're murderers. She invited me in for a cup of tea, but I felt obliged to make it to ( Read more... )