Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Overview: October Reading

Books read in October: 23
Books read YTD: 204 (Goodread Reading Challenge completed. YAY!)

Fiction Titles: 
  • 21 (12 historical romance, 8 contemporary romance, 1 paranormal romance)

Non-Fiction Titles: 
  • 1 (Travel/History)

Noteworthy Novels

Noteworthy Non-Fiction

Noteworthy Settings

  • Starling by Virginia Taylor - enjoyed the historic South Australian setting, but you can read my thoughts about the rest of the book here. 
  • Midnight Feast by Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner - I am continually surprised by how Barry and Turner can make me buy the HEAs in this series, while at the same time showing the sexist and hypermasculine environment of the 60s. 

Kick-ass Characters

  • Take the Lead by Alexis Daria - Professional dancer Gina Morales is a heroine who has set her professional boundaries, and doesn't take kindly to people who think that these are negotiable. Inspiring. 
  • Hamilton's Battalion by Courtney Milan, Rose Lerner and Alyssa Cole
  •  - literally every main character in this anthology deserves a mention. Just read it. 
  • Bountiful by Sarina Bowen - small business owner and single mother Zara has to decide if she should take a risk and open her heart to the father of her child. 
  • Midnight Feast by Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner - I'm still in awe at the authors' nuanced portrayal of a marriage gone sour, particularly their ability to imbue both characters with completely relatable and reasonable struggles, and the way that silence can become so full and heavy with preconceptions, misunderstandings and everything left unsaid. 
  • An Unsuitable Heir by K J Charles - The love story and discussion about gender and sexual identity (sans 21st century terminology) between non-binary protagonist Pen and his partner, Mark were really something.

This Month on the Internet...

Please be aware that some of the links this month discuss abortion, sexual assault and rape. I have added content warnings to the articles that deal with these themes. 

Romance
Other Literature, Craft and the Publishing Industry

Other Media

Women, Sexism and Feminism

Weird, Wacky and Wonderful
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Thursday, 7 September 2017

Overview: July and August Reading

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Soo...what are the chances anyone would believe that I follow the pre-Julian Roman calendar, and that's why July didn't get its monthly overview, and absolutely nothing was posted during August? Because that sounds way better than 'I got really busy with real life and had to put the blog on the backburner'. Even as I apologise for that and tell you that I'm back now, the truth is that my blogging will probably continue to be sporadic over the next few months, as I face the unenviable but unavoidable task of finishing my thesis.

To avoid the last two months being completely lost, I'm combining their monthly round-ups here, in a slightly more abbreviated form than usual. On the upside, after months of reading relatively little, the vagaries of real life seem to have bolstered my reading, and I'm back on track for meeting my goal of 200 books in the Goodreads Reading Challenge. August also saw a lot of comfort re-reading, which is quicker than reading a book for the first time, making the total for that month is unusually high.

Books read in July: 26
Books read in August: 33
Books read YTD: 156

 Fiction Titles (July): 
  • 24 (17 contemporary romance, 3 historical romance, 1 fantasy romance, 2 romance anthologies)

Fiction Titles (August): 
  • 32 (18 historical romance, 13 contemporary romances, 1 steampunk romance)

Non-Fiction Titles (July): 
  • 2 (1 history, 1 urban studies)

Non-Fiction Titles (August): 
  • 1 (Mythography)

Noteworthy Novels

Contemporary

Historical

Noteworthy Non-Fiction

Noteworthy Settings & Sense of Place

  • Safe Passage by Carla Kelly - set in Mexico during the Revolution, although readers should be aware that it centres the experiences of white Mormon colonists.
  • Freedom to Love by Susanna Fraser - touching and sweeping romance between a British officer and a woman of the gens de couleur libres during the War of 1812.
  • Starlight by Carrie Lofty - Incredible sense of place in working-class Glasgow, where mill owner meets one of his factory workers.

Kick-ass Characters

  • Starlight by Carrie Lofty - Unionist, factory-worker heroine Polly is not here for your bourgeoisie shit. 
  • Saving Mr. Perfect by Tamara Morgan - ex-jewel thief Penelope at a loose end now that her husband has put the nix on her career, and watching her and Grant trying to grope towards a new, happy life together is surprisingly poignant, partly because they are both so kick-ass in their respective fields. 
  • Beauty Like the Night by Joanna Bourne - Sevie - sister of an infamous French spy, adopted daughter of an infamous English spy - was never not going to be awesome. See also: all of Joanna Bourne's other heroines. 
  • Rouge Desire Anthology - The heroes and heroines we need - but probably don't deserve - in these dark times. 
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Saturday, 3 June 2017

Overview: May Reading

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Five months in I'm really starting to see the value of tracking my reading like this. For example, I never realised before how, in the normal run of things, I read more contemporary than historical romance, but switch to pretty much 100% historicals  as soon as my stress levels start to go up. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that historical romance - obviously - bears less resemblance to me everyday life, and therefore is more escapist? Or is it because historical romance was my first love and gateway to the genre?

Books read in May: 14
Books read YTD: 76

Fiction Titles: 
  • 11 (8 historical romance, 3 contemporary romance)
Non-Fiction Titles: 
  • 3 (1 memoir/social history, 2 history)

Noteworthy Novels

Noteworthy Non-Fiction

Noteworthy Settings

Kick-ass Characters

  • Unseen Attraction by K J Charles - Neuroatypical hero & neurotypical hero unite to solve a crime threatening their home and businesses
  • Clean Breaks by Ruby Lang - heroine Sarah is feeling angry and threatened due to a melanoma diagnosis and the reappearance of the hero in her life, which brings up memories of a long-ago teenage scandal.

From the Internet this Month


Romance



Literature, Craft and the Publishing Industry


Other Media

Women & Feminism
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Tuesday, 30 May 2017

Non-Fiction Review: Bomber Girls by M J Foreman


This was a frustrating one. I picked Bomber Girls up to learn more about the Air Transport Auxillary in Britian during WWII, where civilian pilots - both female pilots and male pilots ineligble for service - shuttled planes across the country, and sometimes to the Continent, so that they would be where the RAF needed them, when they needed them. 

 With its plucky heroines battling against the Germans, their dangerous and unwieldy planes AND institutionalised prejudice, Bomber Girls had the raw ingredients of a ripper. But it wasn't, because it talks of the the women and their work in ways that are alternatingly patronising, sensationalist, and just plain dull, not to mention the dubious handling of the sexism the female pilots faced. 

 It is not until 16% of the way through the book that the institutionalised sexism the women faced is directly mentioned, with the use of the words "gender bias", which is then allowed to fall by the wayside again until 39%, when the same term is used again. Here are those two excerpts: 
Whilst forbidden to go into combat, and never required to drop bombs, the 166 women of the ATA flew right through the barriers of gender bias in such a noble way they couldn’t help but play a significant role in securing Britain’s eventual superiority in the air. Thanks to the political guile of Miss Gower they were also the first collective of women to earn the same salary as their male colleagues doing the same job. (16%) 
The fact that young women like Curtis got to fly at all, and got to pilot the RAF’s biggest aircraft, remains a miracle if we consider the disconcerting whiff of gender bias around at the time. (39%)
These excerpts capture the overall tone and framing of the book pretty well, in my opinion. Both dismiss the institutionalised sexism of the time in their phrasing, thus absolving the men, instutitions and hierarchies who did their utmost to prevent the creation of the female branch of the ATA, and, once it was created, to place as many roadblocks in their way as possible. In the first, Pauline Gower's relentless campaign for the inclusion of female pilots in the ATA, and, thereafter, for better working conditions for them, is dismissed as 'political guile'. Although this is perhaps not the most overt example, this is part of a broader pattern of presenting the female ATA pilots not as pilots, but as women (or 'girls' as Foreman often writes), 'socialites' or dilettantes. (I consider 'guile' here to be gendered language, because I cannot imagine that a man, in a comparative situation, would have a word with such a negative connotation attached to his behaviour, instead of a neutral one like 'skillful'). The use of the word 'miracle' in the second example is again agency-robbing and makes the institutionalised sexism perpetrator-less crime.

 It's actually quite impressive the lengths to which Foreman has gone to avoid tackling the sexism systematically. One has to read between the lines in a lot of places to understand the links between what is being relayed and the instense misogyny the women faced. Similarly, stories from the women themselves that make the sexism overt are treated as humourous anecdotes.

 There is also a distinction in the way the female and male pilots are characterised. The female pilots come off as glib and vain, and are frequently saved by the actions of their male counterparts, who are presented as skilful and heroic. I have no doubt that many of the female pilots were glib and concerned with their outward appearance, as these are both mechanisms through which they could manage the sexism with which they were faced. But that doesn't excuse the way these narratives - which were also used by the media and other sources to paint the women as dilettantes - are reproduced in a 21st Century text.

 Foreman does make some genuine attempts to tackle the subject of sexism, just as there are stories that do not fit the pattern I've described above. However, in both cases, the instances to the contrary greatly outweigh those that do fit into these discourses, and are consistent enough to cancel out any such attempts. 

 Bomber Girls initally caught my interest because last year I read His Very Own Girl by Carrie Lofty, in which the heroine is an ATA pilot. Ultimately, I think that His Very Own Girl succeeds where Bomber Girls fails, as it shows the sexism of the time and the every day life of the female ATA pilots in excellent detail, as well as having a satisfying central romance. 
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Saturday, 8 April 2017

Overview: March Reading

The blog's been pretty quiet this last month, because I've been drowning in uni work. I've come up now for a quick breath of air, but I suspect I'll be pulled back down in a week or two. Apologies in advance for that.

 My uni commitments also meant this wasn't a very prolific reading month for me. Reading in English also seems to interfere with my ability to slip back into German when I step out my front door or put away my book at the end of a bus trip. Nonetheless, here is my reading for the month, in all its underwhelming glory:

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Books read in March: 14
Books read YTD: 49

 Fiction Titles: 13
  • 13 Romance (4 historical romance, 7 contemporary romance, 1 fantasy & 1 mixed anthology)
Non-Fiction Titles: 1
  • 1 Social History/Theology

Since I started this feature in January, I've been playing around with what I want it to look like. The previous months have focused heavily on setting, but I'm not sure that interests anyone as much as it interests me, so I've come up with something new and different this month that I think has better long-term potential (and is less time-consuming so maybe I'll actually get these posts up on time, even if I am busy). Also, if you have any opinions about what you would like to see in these posts, feel free to give me a shout.


Noteworthy Novels


Noteworthy Non-Fiction


Noteworthy Settings


Kick-ass Characters

  • Elle from An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole - Elle is a free woman with an eidetic memory, who goes undercover as a slave to pass information to the Union during the Civil War
  • James Hook from Peter Darling by Austin Chant - not all anti-heroes wear capes, but James probably would if you gave him the chance

From the Internet this Month
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Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Overview: February Reading

This month was a bit of a slower reading month than January, mostly because of a big personal change that happened in my life: I moved to Germany to study!

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Books read in February: 15
Books read YTD: 35

 Fiction Titles: 12
  • 11 Romance (2 historicals, 8 contemporaries, 1 historical fantasy)
  • 1 General Fiction
Non-Fiction Titles: 3
  • 2 History
  • 1 Sociology/Social History
I am currently reading Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, but I don't anticipate will be finished by the end of the day, so this will appear in March's stats. 

Setting Statistics

USA: 5


 UK: 4


 Australia: 1

  • Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss - this was my General Fiction read. Engaging and eye-opening story about a Japanese escapee from a POW camp in Cowra and the Wiradjuri family who shelter him. Romantic elements, but non-HEA warning!
Nigeria: 1

  • A Tailor-Made Romance by Oyindamola Affinnih - Cute romance where the conflict comes from the heroine's perception of a class difference between her and the hero. Had some trouble with her self-absorption, even though it makes sense in the context of the story.

Philippines: 1



 Non-Fiction with a Setting: 3


Non-Fiction without a Setting: 0

As you can see, I'm still mucking around with the format for these monthly overviews. I liked the idea of highlighting books I read that took place outside the dominant settings of the US and UK, but I also don't want to focus on that at the exclusion of marginalised and/or ownvoices authors, and characters that are something other than the white, cishet able-bodied default. So we'll see what I end up feeling comfortable with; it may be that it continues to differ from month to month. 
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Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Overview: January Reading

This year, I thought it might be fun and enlightening to crunch some numbers at the end of each month. It'll give me - and you - and overview of what I've been reading, and help keep me on track with the resolutions I made at the end of last year: to be better at reviewing diverse fiction I enjoy, and to read and review more Australian and New Zealand literature.

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Books read: 20

 Fiction Titles: 17

  • 15 romance (5 historicals, 10 contemporaries)
  • 1 Literary Fiction
  • 1 Short Story Collection

Non-fiction Titles: 3

  • 2 Gender Studies/Feminist Theory
  • 1 History

Setting Statistics

USA: 9

 Canada: 1 


Australia: 1 


New Zealand: 2 


Philippines: 1 


Spain: 1 


Fictional setting: 2

Non-Fiction with a setting: 1 (New Zealand History)

 Non-Fiction without a setting: 2 (both Gender Studies/Feminist Theory)

 I'm interested in the statistics about setting because calssifying my reviews my setting a few months ago really drove home how much of the literature I read is set in the US. 

 I just did a quick tally, and of the 234 books I read last year, about 106 were fiction with a US setting (and that's excluding books only partially set in the US, or set in an alternate universe US). I thought that the UK wouldn't be far behind, given how many historical romances I read, but it's pulling a distant second with roughly 33 books. Even though I I've spoken about my disillusion with my Beyond a Single Story Challenge, I still think it's important to be aware of US (and British, and English-language) cultural hegemony in literature, and the effects that it can have.

 At this point, I'm not aiming to read less books set in the US this year. I just want to keep an eye on the statistics, rather than being hit with a fait accompli in December. As you can see, 9 out of 17 fiction books I read this month were set in the US; that's 53%. I've also listed the books with real-world non-US settings in case people are interested, and made notes of which ones I intend to review. Hopefully that make me feel accountable and those reviews will get past the draft stage!
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Friday, 6 January 2017

Non-Fiction Review: A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller


I picked up A Time to Dance, A Time to Die because I briefly studied the Strasbourg Dancing Plague of 1518 at university as a supposed example of emotional contagion, and, when I flicked through it in the shop, I saw that Waller also favoured psychological explanations. 

 His thesis is that the plague was a form of psychological mass hysteria stemming from the supernaturalism, helplessness and despair of late Middle-Age Strasbourg and its surroundings. Although it takes a while to establish convincingly, it ends up being a surprisingly compelling theory, especially since Waller links the 1518 epidemic to other similar dancing plagues that occurred elsewhere in Europe in the preceding centuries. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this means that the book's real strength is placing the plague within its social context: the poverty and hardship suffered by the third estate, the corruption and excess of the medieval Church and bourgeoisie, and the way this conflict manifested itself in not just the dancing plague, but anti-clericalism, the Bundschuch Movement and, a few years later, Luther and the beginning of the Reformation. 

 However, the focus on social factors meant that, for me, the exploration of the zeitgeist was more absorbing than some of the analysis of the plague itself, which could be a bit repetitive, and also seemed facile in some places and unnecessarily deep in others. 

The last chapter is where Waller really clinches his argument about the suggestibility and power of the subconscious mind, and the way that it can express psychological distress in pre-progammed ways specific to a society, its belief system, norms and stigmas. He draws in a wide ranges of other incidences as examples, such as the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, shell shock and tarantism, and explores the science behind these somatic expressions of pyschological distress. Although it makes sense for this to be the concluding chapter, in some ways I wish the discussion of neurosicence had come earlier, because it was essential to the whole thesis, and it is this context that makes the thesis so plausible. 

 Overall, this was a solid exploration of the Dancing Plague, which was very impressive when it came to explaining the social unrest of early 16th century Strasbourg. However, one thing that did annoy me was the lack of footnotes, made worse by the fact that the notes are acutally in the back of the book, just not referenced to anything in particular. Maybe it's because it's meant to be a popular history and so the publisher didn't want to make it seem intimidatingly academic, but there is nothing pretensious about making sure that people can access information easily. 
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Monday, 7 November 2016

Non-Fiction Review: Christchurch Ruptures by Katie Pickles


Christchurch Ruptures had some interesting content, but if I'd had to read the words 'rupture', 'ruptures', 'rupturing' or 'ruptured' one more time, I'd be writing to you from a hospital bed after a ruptured brain aneurysm. 

I suppose it's good Pickles kept relating everything back to her thesis, but I wish she'd been able to do so without such constant and overt reiteration of one word. To give you a taste, here's an excerpt from a page-and-a-half of text in the conclusion: 
The ruptures identified in this book indicate how the city might regroup and move on. Chapter 1, with its discussion of ruptured landscapes, warns of being ideologically trapped in the past. [2 sentences excluded]. The rupturing of Christchurch has shown that being open to continual change is the best way forward.  
The discussion of ruptured peoples and heritage in Chapter 2 suggests that respect for all peoples, regardless of race or ethnicity, and regardless of length of residency in the city, is the way to proceed. [5 sentences excluded]. 
Chapter 3 indicates the possibility of learning from the strengths of the past. The Canterbury earthquakes have ruptured 'the People's Republic of Christchurch', bringing that radical heritage into question. [3 sentences excluded].
Chapter 4 reveals that conformity and opposition to diversity is unproductive. Post-quake Christchurch has the chance to rise from a ruptured Gothic identity as a creative and inclusive place. (p. 169-170)
It goes on, but you get the picture. Now that I've got that out of my system, I can talk about the book itself. 

As you may be able to tell from the tagline, it's more focused on the history of Christchurch and how this has determined post-quake responses, rather than post-quake Christchurch itself. I didn't know that much about the history of Christchurch - apart from the whole pilgrim thing - so I found this to be valuable. I also found a lot of value in the way the town's history was framed in terms of tension and coexistence between social conservatism (originating in the 'God's own Paradise' attitude of the first Anglican settlers) and radicalism (expressed in the many social movements and prominent reformers centred in Christchurch, including Kate Shepherd and Norman Kirk). However, this did lead to many intriguing local personalities and movements being brought up and dismissed in short order, and these sometimes read like a laundry list. 

In fact, overall - and even excluding the whole 'rupture' thing - Pickle's writing could have been more engaging. Nonetheless, it was straight-forward and accessible, which is far preferable to over-intellectualism. 

Another reason I appreciated the historical focus is that I was already familiar with what is discussed when the focus did switch to the post-quake environment, particularly the debate surrounding the fate of the Cathedral, and I suspect many New Zealanders will find the same. But we do tend to have selective memory when it comes to Christchurch, invoking the 'Kia Kaha' spirit when convenient, and just as conveniently forgetting that their struggle is ongoing the rest of the time. Pickle highlights that this struggle isn't only related to the physical environment, but it also discursive in nature: how do Cantabrians re-constitute a city with a contested but highly mythologised history, and where different experiences have lead to a proliferation of opinions over what 're-building' looks like. It's a question that resonates much further than New Zealand, and touches deeply on identity. 

Pickle does draw some conclusions, as you can see from what I quoted above, but they're haphazardly thrown in right at the close of each chapter, and then at the end of the book, and they were cursory. Sometimes it also seemed as though they were only tangentially related to what she had been talking about. I'm sure that they were extremely relevant, but I think that the historical focus (with the exception of Chapter 5) and the short length of the concluding paragraphs meant that what she regarded as the modern-day implications or lessons to be learnt weren't drawn out quite as explicitly as I would have liked. 

This book has left me with two conclusions. The first is that if look at the word 'rupture' too much, it looks as if it's spelled wrong. The second, more charitable one comes from reading both Christchurch Ruptures and the excellent The First Migration: Maori Origins 3000BC - AD 1450 and is that BWB Texts, the imprint who published these books, is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to educate themselves on New Zealand's past, present and future without breaking the bank. Their titles cover a wide range of interesting topics, spanning history, anthropology, economics, sociology, medicine and science, as well as memoir and many of the authors are well-known New Zealand academics and personalities, including Michael King, Atholl Anderson and Claudia Orange. I only wish that Australia had something similar (the closest thing I can think of is the Quarterly Essay), but I'm going back to New Zealand at Christmas so I'll stock up on more BWBs then. 
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Sunday, 14 August 2016

Non-Fiction Review: Kicking the Kremlin by Marc Bennetts


Kicking the Kremlin by Marc Bennetts covers Putin's rise to and consolidation of power, and dissidence against him. It was interesting and well constructed, but in many ways, I wish either that I'd picked a book with a slightly different focus, or that this book had been written later and, essentially, was a different book itself. 

 Bennetts raised several key points that I hadn't necessarily explicitly understood about Russia. The first is the importance of the 'good tsar, bad boyars' mentality that has persisted throughout the ages, which allows Russians to be dissatisfied with aspects of their lives, and yet still support the man in charge, because localise this dissatisfaction on their regional officials. 

 Related to this is the idea that Western-style democracy simply doesn't and won't work in Russia, justified by the great demographic and geographic spread of its people, and by historical example. 

 All politicians aim to create an 'us' and a 'them', but Putin has been very successful at this. I wasn't familiar with the situation surrounding Putin's rise to power, but it was interesting to see how the war in Chechnya created an Other and a sense of fear, and how he leveraged this to increase his popularity and demonstrate that he was the man for the job. There are obvious parallels here to the war in Ukraine and the current NATO/Russia tension but the book can't draw them out because it concludes its narrative in 2013 and was published a month before the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014. 

In the West, our picture of protest in Russia is one of Pussy Riot and mass demonstrations, but Bennetts draws out the lack of unity amongst dissenters. There's the far right, the far left, and many small groups in between, but there isn't - or maybe I should say wasn't, as of the end of the book - any mass movement that was universally appealing to people dissatisfied with Putin. Even people who were successful rallying points, like anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny, had trouble connecting with wider audiences and movements.   

 Bennetts also highlights the 'why now?' aspect of to the dissidence faced by Putin, who has been in power (including the time he spent as Prime Minister with his ally Medvedev as President) since the turn of the century. After the societal trauma of the collapse of the USSR and the tumult of the Yeltsin years, people liked Putin because he brought stability and economic security. They weren't so concerned with abstract political freedoms so long as there was bread on the table. Now, however, there is an younger generation who only remember these times as a child, if they remember them at all, and some do not feel that it should be an either/or scenario.

Overall, I'm not sure how relevant the book's conclusions, made in 2013, actually are. So much has happened in the interim - Crimea, Ukraine, M17, Sochi, Syria, just general tension between Russia and NATO/the US - that, in many ways, Kicking the Kremlin has more of a historical feel than a current affairs one. As a result, I've come away feeling like I don't have solid understanding of dissidence in Russia, despite reading a whole book on it. Essentially, for whatever is happening today, all that I've read is just the backstory, and I guess that's why it was in the bargain bin at the bookshop.

EDIT: It was been brought to my attention in the comments that Bennetts released an updated version of Kicking the Kremlin this year entitled I'm Going to Ruin Their Lives. I haven't read it (yet), but if he grapples with everything as well as he does in Kicking the Kremlin while discussing the current situation in Russia, I imagine it would be well worth the time.
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Friday, 8 July 2016

Non-Fiction Review: Freedom Ride by Ann Curthoys

Recommended

 While many Australians will recognise the famous image of Charlie Perkins and local Aboriginal children in the Moree baths on the cover of Ann Curthoys' Freedom Ride, I suppose I should probably explain something for the international audience: Australia had our own Freedom Ride, based on the more famous ones conducted in the American South, and it's this that Curthoys' title refers to. 

 In one of her opening chapters, she draws out several distinctions between the American understanding of Freedom Rides and their Australian counterpart. For a start, in Australia, we usually use the singular, referring to only one Freedom Ride, although there were several subsequent trips. The American Rides had the specific aim of challenging segregation on interstate buses and terminals. While thirteen Freedom Riders (seven black, six white) set out, many more spontaneously converged on Jackson, Mississippi when racist violence was encountered (Curthoys, p. 30). 

 In contrast, the Australian Freedom Ride was a bus trip planned, paid for and executed by a student organisation called Student Action for Aborigines, which was based at the University of Sydney. SAFA's aims with the Australian Freedom Rides were much broader: to raise awareness of and protest the racism, de facto segregation and poor conditions experienced by Aboriginal people living in or around rural New South Wales towns, while also conducting a survey on these experiences. The most famous Freedom Rider was Charles Perkins, an Arrernte man, who had been one of the first two Aboriginal students admitted to the University of Sydney. The other, Gary Williams, was also present for parts of the Ride, but the other 30-odd students were all non-Indigenous Australians. 

 At school, I learnt about the Freedom Ride in a very uncritical manner, and I bought this book largely out of a desire to revisit this chapter of Australian history through a new lens, given that I now have a very different awareness of the implications of an organisation, made up largely of white Australians, advocating for Aboriginal rights. 

On the whole, Freedom Ride was far deeper and more nuanced than I was expecting. The subtitle or tagline a Freedom Rider remembers gives the impression that it's more or less a memoir, but this is somewhat misleading. Curthoys reconstructs many things based on her diary entries and memories from the time, but many other people are interviewed and many different sources used in the course of the project. Furthermore, the book includes a great deal of analysis, evaluation and historiography that covers not only the Freedom Ride, but the Indigenous Rights Movement and the political environment of the 1960s as well.  

 Curthoys also regularly critiques the role, importance and impact of the Ride in the Indigenous Rights Movement. She raises questions surrounding Indigenous self-determination and the role of white and non-Indigenous Australians. Neither does she shy away from recognising the role of white saviour complex in SAFA's actions, although I don't think she ever uses that term. 

 When they entered a town, SAFA would ascertain if there was support amongst the local Aboriginal population for a protest. In some towns, they already had contacts, in some they established links with local leaders on entering a town, and in others they found that there was less desire to cooperate with their aims, for a number of complex reasons. 

At the time, there was external criticism that SAFA was shooting into a town, protesting for a short time and then leaving the local Aboriginal population to pick up the pieces and deal with the hostilities. While much of this criticism came from people who thought there was 'no racial problem' and SAFA was just 'stirring up trouble', there were also some activists who thought a more softly-softly approach was needed. Interestingly, Curthoys reveals that the group were also conflicted about this. After their charged protest at Moree elicited a promise that the baths would be desegregated and Charlie Perkins and a group of local children were allowed in to bathe (see the photo on the cover of the book), the Riders left the town, agreeing that a white ally would test the sincerity of the desegregation by taking more kids to the baths the next day. They were refused entry, and when the Riders found out, they held a heated meeting to decided whether or not to double back and lend their support once again, or to continue on as scheduled. Ultimately - and I think to their credit - they did return to Moree.

The desegregation of the Moree baths - and the violence surrounding the protest there - is one of the common points of focus when discussing the Freedom Ride. Others include the protest of the RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) at Walgett and the incident that occurred afterwards, when the bus was followed and eventually rammed and run off the road by angry white locals. 

 Both for my generation, who learnt it at school, and my parents' and grandparents' generations, who remember it, the tendency has always been to focus on those few flashpoints, or the Ride as a backdrop for Perkins as a personality or an example of university activism. So while much of the content will be familiar to an Australian audience, there was also great amount of new information for me, not to mention the analysis of it all. 

 One aspect that features prominently, and which was a complete surprise to me, was the communist affiliation of many of the students; they joined SAFA from University communist societies such as the Eureka Youth League. In the middle of the Cold War, only three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Perkins tried to keep this quiet and prevent the Communist organisations from being publicly associated with SAFA, because he knew that this had the potential to alienate the media and a lot of people who might otherwise support them, such as the churches. 

 However, I don't think Freedom Ride should be restricted to an Australian audience. For international readers I think it would be very interesting to see how the toxic cocktail of racism, imperialism and economic interest, amongst other things, were - and are - applied in the Australian context. It's also interesting to note how SAFA, the Freedom Ride and wider public awareness about Aboriginal and TSI rights interconnect with the international happenings. SAFA was formed after student protests supporting the US Civil Rights Movement led to charges of hypocrisy; students were happy to be arrested protesting rights for people more than 15,000 kilometres away, but what where they doing for those being denied their rights in their own backyard? 

 As many people will be aware, one of Charlie Perkins' daughters is today the well-known filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Her first film, entitled Blood Brothers, was a documentary about her father and the Freedom Ride. Some excerpts can be found on the Screen Australia site, and I found them eye-opening, particularly the contemporaneous film footage and Charlie's reminiscences. Just while I'm on the subject, Perkins also has another documentary which I would highly recommend. It's called Black Panther Woman and it's a poignant and sensitive portrait of activist Marlene Cummins, who was part of the Australian Black Panther Party. It is not only one of the best docos I've ever seen, but it also been one of the most profound and thought-provoking works on the intersection of race and gender I've ever seen or read or consumed in any way, and I think about it often with relation to white feminism vs. intersectional feminism and good allyship. So, I leave you, on a tangent, with the trailer for Black Panther Woman:
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Thursday, 2 June 2016

Non-Fiction Review: The Long March Remembered by Edward Stourton


 The Long March Remembered was very short and very basic introduction to Communist China's founding myth, the Long March. The information provided was good, but it almost felt like the author was constrained by a word count or something. He'd touch on something really interesting for a page, and then flit on to the next thing. Nonetheless, starting with a base knowledge of a) the Long March happened and b) it had something to do with the Communist Party and the Civil War, this book helped fill in the blanks. 

Nominally, The Long March Remembered looks at the differences between the official, founding myth of Communist China, the historical record (what little there is of it) and oral and physical sources. It throws up some interesting contradictions in the process, but they are only dealt with very superficially. 

 Another focus of Stourton's is how the historical representation of the Long March has been constructed from the top down, with the focus on its significance for Mao Zedong, the Party and the brewing Civil War, rather than centralising the experience of the everyday men and women in the Red Army. 

 He relates some personal stories that are heart-rending: the female soldiers who were left barren because of the toll the March took on their bodies, families who never found out the fate of their loved ones, marchers who were so hungry that they would search through faeces for pieces of undigested grain. However, once again, he doesn't really delve into these stories very deeply, almost as though they are incidental to his main point (although his main point is supposedly how the Average Joe is forgotten in The Long March mythology, so that's a bit of a problem). 

Supposedly, the reason so little personal history is included is due to a lack of sources, since the Marchers were mostly illiterate, and are now almost all deceased. But one of the most interesting parts of the whole book was Stourton's discussion with the child of two veterans of the March, who retells her parents' experiences. I would have liked to see more of this intergenerational reminescence and memory, especially to see how these families reconcile the 'official' version of the March with what they have heard from their parents or other family members. Or, if their parents didn't speak about it, as many people don't after such things, to what extent the spectre of the March was present in their upbringing anyway. 

 Ultimately, I think The Long March Remembered was trying to do too many things in too little space. But, because it glancingly covers so many disparate aspects of the March and the Civil War, it is useful as a primer.
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