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Aug 27, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | Miriam Cosic
By Miriam Cosic August 28, 2024 — 5.00am, register or subscribe to save articles for later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. CRIMEThe Lasting Harm: Witnessing the Trial of Ghislaine MaxwellLucia Osborne-CrowleyAllen & Unwin, $34.99The saying “15 minutes of fame” has had remarkable longevity since it surfaced in the 1960s. But who would have believed what it would become in the age of social media, the era when even scholars would admit to a diminishing attention span.
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Jul 31, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Miriam Cosic |Malcolm Knox |Jackson Ryan |Royce Kurmelovs
Roman Krznaric has a way with history. He outlines the familiar, while constantly inserting quirky extras that augment his argument.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Miriam Cosic
Ceridwen Dovey is a wonderful nonfiction writer, often – but not always – on scientific themes and increasingly on space. She has written repeatedly for The New Yorker, including a 2018 piece titled “Elon Musk and the Failure of Our Imagination in Space”. In 2021, she won the Bragg Prize for science writing, for the second consecutive year, with “Everlasting free-fall”, a long and gripping piece about the increasing number of satellites.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | Miriam Cosic
Save Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it MEMOIR The Friday Afternoon ClubGriffin Dunne, Allen & Unwin, $34.99 At 3am on Halloween in 1982, a tough Irish cop from the West Hollywood Homicide division rang the doorbell at the home of Griffin Dunne's mother.
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Jun 14, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Miriam Cosic
Anyone who has read Iain McCalman’s 2013 book The Reef: A Passionate History may recall pioneering conservationist John Büsst. Inspired by the Great Barrier Reef’s beauty and its environmental importance, Büsst fought hard to save it and the surrounding rainforests from destruction by powerful interests in the 1960s. He appeared in McCalman’s book in passing, but memorably enough that Mission Beach, where Büsst had lived, invited McCalman to visit.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
themonthly.com.au | Miriam Cosic |Marian Wilkinson |Lucia Osborne-Crowley
The novelist and essayist’s revelatory exploration of the ocean depths goes beyond science to offer historical, cultural and moral contexts There is something about a prose writer who can deliver a view of the world that is poetic, scientifically detailed and clear to the layman all at once. Something almost biblical. James Bradley is one of those writers, as a novelist, a poet, an essayist and a writer of nonfiction. His new book, Deep Water (Hamish Hamilton), is a revelation.
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Apr 19, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Miriam Cosic
As with all of Charmian Clift’s writing, The End of the Morning – published almost 55 years after her death – is a combination of mid-20th century charm and sharp-edged observation. Called a novel in the new book, it is more of a long fragment. A novella, perhaps. It sets up the childhood of Cressida Morley, Clift’s alter ego, who like the author was a thinker, constantly examining and questioning her unfolding world.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
smh.com.au | Miriam Cosic
SOCIETYWho's Afraid of Gender Judith ButlerAllen Lane, $55 Judith Butler is an American philosopher whose feminism is controversial, especially on gender. For Butler it is a fluid concept, mutating between the traditional division between two discrete sexes - the kind of thing that right-wing politicians like to bluster about. The broad church of feminist theorists itself is divided on the subject.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
plus61j.net.au | Miriam Cosic
The Lehman Trilogy, a morality tale about the Global Financial Crisis, opens this week in Sydney. MIRIAM COSIC gets a primer on the Jewish roots of a fallen giant. He had been dreaming of America. Three brothers, travellers, immigrants. They came with nothing. Not even a word of English. And they built an entire universe. – The Lehman TrilogyOne might think that the world of finance – all those dry terms and endless rolls of numbers – would be the last thing to make exciting theatre.
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Feb 16, 2024 | 
thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Miriam Cosic
It wasn’t uncommon for Jewish people to remain silent about their experiences of the horrors of World War II in Europe, something that contributed to the inherited trauma of their children and grandchildren. Indeed, it wasn’t unheard of for people who sought asylum in other countries to hide their lineage altogether as they encouraged their children to assimilate. Rachel Margol, the protagonist of Linda Margolin Royal’s first novel, The Star on the Grave, doesn’t know she is Jewish.
