Author aSense
Through an extremely curious series of circumstances, A Sense of Place Publishing encountered Michelle Desparquet, living on an island which he has specifically asked not be revealed. Now in his mid-80s, the author of Abduction to the 9th Planet remains remarkable, even if his first flush of fame has faded. He still displays an ebullent love of life, a fondness for Scotch and a good laugh, is a chess champion in his community, and amongst some of the islanders is regarded as a totem of good luck, someone to be touched or rubbed up against, so that the divinity or good luck which is so much part of him will rub off. He is a kind of living good luck charm. To this day he maintains that the story he told in Abduction to the Ninth Planet is entirely true. What makes a cult novel remains a mystery; time, circumstance, good luck, talent, and other elements intangible, or the world would be full of them. At one time Abduction to the Ninth Planet was outselling The Celestine Prophecy, a book which argued that humanity was gpoing through a fundamental shift in consciousness. Michelle Desparquet still maintins that the story he tells, of being abducted by advanced extra-terrestial beings, is simply a retelling of events which truly happened. With mankind’s knowledge of the universe expanding by the day, the claim that mankind is alone in the universe has come to seem increasingly bizarre.
Mark Latham is one of the greatest Prime Ministers Australia never had; unpredictable, brilliant, personable, closer to the electorate and the common aspirations of the Australian people than almost any prominent politician before or since. He was roundly defeated by conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2004, and left politics the following year, crushed both by the internal complexities, hypocrisies and multiple incompetencies of the Labor Party; and by his own sometimes difficult personality. Latham at Large is an entertaining, thought-provoking, sometimes scathing, often humorous collection from a man who is not afraid to speak his mind. There is no one else like Mark Latham in Australian public life.
The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities is a rivetting firsthand account of a young British civilian woman, Emma Sky, who volunteered to go to Iraq immediately after the invasion in 2003, and within weeks found herself in the role of Governor of Kirkuk – the most dangerous place on Earth. As a Brit, a woman and a liberal, Emma Sky’s presence and position in Iraq following the invasion in 2003 is the stuff of fiction. Shortly after the coalition troops went in, Sky, an Arabist, volunteered to go to assist the Coalition Provisional Authority in the occupation. Alone, she made her way to Baghdad, was told they had enough people, so travelled north, to Kirkuk. Within days she became the most senior civilian there, Kirkuk’s lady governor.
The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rainforest, by admired science journalist David Quammen, tells the real story how AIDS originated with a virus in a chimpanzee, jumped to one human, and then infected more than 60 million people in one of history’s most devastating pandemics. Described as a frightening and fascinating masterpiece, The Chimp and the River illustrates how the origin of AIDS is very different from what most of us think we know.
Model Citizens: Riding For A Fall is a romantic thriller about two models who blackmail their way to the top in Los Angeles. They’ve got it made, until the bad (boy) karma catches up with them. Overnight, France’s Angela Durand and blonde Californian Joanne Hart become Super Models and global celebrities. The LA high life is at their fingertips. Multi-million-dollar modelling contracts with fashion’s biggest names. Rich and famous lovers. Private jet travel. The best manager in the business. What could possibly go wrong?
By May of 2015 the security situation in Australia had deteriorated to an alarming extent. The authorities were scared witless another terror attack was imminent. For more than 12 months they had been putting out spot fires across the country, in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, along with other regional and state centres. The increasing radicalisation of the Muslim minority, fanned by the rise of the single most powerful religious movement in modern times, the Islamic State, posed a major threat to the safety of Australian citizens. And as any firefighter could tell you, there were only so many spot fires you could put out before the forest ignited. The dreadful security situation in Australia had been fanned by a lunatic decision by the government to once again join America, the Great Satan as the Islamic community regarded them, in invading Muslim lands aka Iraq. There was no reason to do so; no treaty obligation, no security situation which could justify the invasion of sovereign lands. The Muslim minority was incensed by the inhumane killing of mujaheddin by high-tech drones launched from Australian fighter jets. They were incensed by the Australian governments labeling of some of their members as un-Australian, when in many ways, their regular attendance at mosque, their faithfulness to their wives, the good care they took of their children, the fact they did not smoke, drink or take drugs and had strong ties with their communities, all marked them as far better citizens than many members of the decrepit society they saw around them. The mishandling of the situation by the Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who repeatedly ignored expert advice on how to deal with a religious minority with which he clearly had no affinity or understanding, had ramped the terror threat through the roof. The entire devolving security situation was set against a rapid collapse in Australian society, which had seen a once proud, optimistic, larrikin country become impoverished, dispirited, and broken, the streets of Sydney, its major city, more like walking through a Mad Max movie than a major city, the only difference being the black birds were replaced by squawking seagulls from the nearby beaches; just as eery, just as apocryphal in their mournful cries.
Algorithms can learn. Algorithms can acquire bias. In The Black Box Society: How Secret Algorithms Control Money and Information, eminent Law Professor Frank Pasquale exposes the invasive technology running our lives. In The Age of Terror these systems can be used to extend the control of dark agencies into every corner of our lives. Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior-silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed and invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so-and to set limits on how big data affects our lives.
The worst scandal in the annals of modern tourism, the daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, is exposed in Thailand: Deadly Destination.
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (also known simply as 13 Hours) is a 2016 American biographical war film directed and co-produced by Michael Bay and written by Chuck Hogan, based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s 2014 book 13 Hours. The film follows six members of a security team who fight to defend the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya after waves of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2012. 13 Hours in Benghazi sets the record straight on what happened during a night that has been shrouded in mystery and controversy. Written by New York Times bestselling author Mitchell Zuckoff, this riveting book takes readers into the action-packed story of heroes who laid their lives on the line for one another, for their countrymen, and for their country. You will also see, as some commentators have suggested, how bad the current administration really handles our foreign affairs and how inept they can be and how the foreign countries. Ever since the Benghazi attack that left four Americans dead questions have continued to arise over the role of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the attack.Ever since the September 11, 2012, attack of a United States outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans killed, questions have continued to arise over the role of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers. But there is something immutably heartening in the difference between the primitive hypotheses of myth, folklore and religion, which handed off such mysteries to various deities and the occasional white-bearded man, and the increasingly educated guesses of modern science. In the title essay of his excellent The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew which also gives us beautiful meditations on science and spirituality, Alan Lightman points to fine-tuning — the notion that the basic forces propelling our universe appear to be fine-tuned in such a way as to make the existence of life possible — as a centerpiece of how modern scientists have attempted to answer these age-old questions.
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at the elite liberal arts Kenyon College, the oldest private educational institution in Ohio, America, known for its rural setting and Gothic architecture. Demonstrating that wisdom can come from everywhere, is the sole possession of no individual, no single faith, no single creed, no single god, the schools motto is derived from the religious order of The Daughters of the King, associated with the Episcopal Church but now drawing members from across denominations: Mangnaminem Sustine Cruciter, meaning “With heart, mind and spirit uphold and bear the cross.” At the base of the cross are the letters “FHS”, meaning: “For His Sake”. To many Christ, in 2015, appeared to have departed the Earth scene as a tidal wave of Islamic fundamentalism swept the world. Three years later David Wallace was to commit suicide, becoming a cultural symbol for tortured genius. His address, published in the slim volume This Is Water, captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews its devotees with every reading. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion?
A sweeping and dramatic history of the last half century of conflict in the Middle East from an award-winning journalist who has covered the region for over thirty years, The Great War for Civilisation unflinchingly chronicles the tragedy of the region from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution; from the American hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War; from the 1991 Gulf War to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A book of searing drama as well as lucid, incisive analysis, The Great War for Civilisation is a work of major importance for today’s world. The history of the Middle East is an epic story of tragedy, betrayal and world-shaking events. It is a story that Robert Fisk has been reporting for over thirty years. His masterful narrative spans the most volatile regions of the Middle East, chronicling with both rage and compassion the death by deceit of tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews. In a recent piece on the fall of Palmyra, Fisk asks: The biggest military defeat that Isis has suffered in more than two years — the recapture of Palmyra, the Roman city of the Empress Zenobia — and we are silent. Yes, folks, the bad guys won, didn’t they? Otherwise, we would all be celebrating, wouldn’t we? As the black masters of execution fled Palmyra this weekend, Messrs Obama and Cameron were as silent as the grave to which Isis has dispatched so many of their victims.
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Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff Peta Credlin played it harder and rougher than anybody else to get where they wanted to be, running the country. But they proved incapable of managing their own office, much less the government. Then, when it was over, when it was crystal-clear to everyone that they had failed, when everyone else could see why they had failed, she played the gender card while he played the victim. In The Road to Ruin, prominent political commentator, author, and columnist for The Australian Niki Savva reveals the ruinous behaviour of Abbott and Credlin. Based on her unrivalled access to their colleagues, and devastating first-person accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Savva paints an unforgettable picture of a unique duo who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.
Leading Australian writer Helen Garner, who became instantly famous with the publication of her first novel in 1977, Monkey Grip, has made the Stella longlist for her book House of Grief. The book explores in compelling style one of the worst cases of patricide in Australian history.
We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry and when dead tired. We went there when happy, to celebrate and when sad to sulk. We went there after weddings and funerals for something to settle our nerves and always for a shot of courage just before. We went there when we didn’t know what we needed, hoping someone might tell us. We went there when looking for love or sex or trouble or for someone who had gone missing because sooner or later everyong turned up there. Most of all we went there when we needed to be found.
Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, one of America’s most enduring literary classics, has died aged 89. Lee only wrote one other book besides To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman, which was published in July 2015. To Kill a Mockingbird was voted the most loved book of the last 60 years by The Times readers in October 2009. The 50th Anniversary Edition of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a must for all lovers of the book and the movie, a must for collectors of fine editions of modern classics, and a must for those looking to encourage a young reader to read one the best and most beautiful books written in the 20th Century.
The ever brilliant Maria Popova writes in her newsletter Brainpickings: Every successful technology of thought, be it science or philosophy, is a time machine — it peers into the past in order to disassemble the building blocks of how we got to the present, then reassembles them into a sensemaking mechanism for where the future might take us. That’s what Harvard particle physicist and cosmologist Lisa Randall accomplishes in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe (public library), which I recently reviewed for The New York Times — an intellectually thrilling exploration of how the universe evolved, what made our very existence possible, and how dark matter illuminates our planet’s relationship to its cosmic environment across past, present, and future. Randall starts with a fascinating speculative theory, linking dark matter to the extinction of the dinosaurs — an event that took place in the outermost reaches of the Solar System sixty-six million years ago catalyzed an earthly catastrophe without which we wouldn’t have come to exist. What makes her theory so striking is that it contrasts the most invisible aspects of the universe with the most dramatic events of our world while linking the two in a causal dance, reminding us just how limited our perception of reality really is — we are, after all, sensorial creatures blinded by our inability to detect the myriad complex and fascinating processes that play out behind the doors of perception.
A new Australian murder mystery now available in paperback mixes excitement and humour in a colourful and corrupt colonial setting.
Our relationship with nature has changed, radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable. Diane Ackerman, best known for her book A Natural History of the Senses, is one of the most lyrical, insightful and compelling writers on the natural world, and The Human Age is a landmark book. Humans have subdued 75 per cent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial, medical and technological marvels, strung lights across the darkness. We now collect the DNA of vanishing species in a ‘frozen ark’, equip orang-utans with iPads, create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might soon outsmart us. But the world remains as overwhelmingly beautiful as it ever was. In a darkening age, it is writers such as Diane Ackerman who are civilisation’s greatest treasures.
In the tradition of Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood, One of Us by Asne Seierstad is a powerful depiction of a terrorist massacre in Norway and its aftermath. On 22 July 2011 Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 of his fellow Norwegians in a terrorist atrocity that shocked the world. Many were teenagers, just beginning their adult lives. In the devastating aftermath, the inevitable questions began. How could this happen? Why did it happen? And who was Anders Breivik?
The single biggest literary event of 2015 has been the discovery and publication of a sequel to of the most loved books of all time Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Go Set A Watchman is set 20 years after the events in the first book; but the book was actually written first. Her editor suggested the childhood scenes in Go Set A Watchman were powerful enough to make a book on their own, and thus was born a classic, with sales of Mockingbird in the millions. In an era crowded with shameless self promoters, author Harper Lee was infamous for her quiet, reclusive ways.
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The single most contentious segment of the forthcoming book Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost by the veteran journalist John Stapleton is the section known as Soldiers of God. The name is a play on the fact that Jesuits are known as Soldiers of God. There is now a Jesuit Pope in Rome and Australia has a Jesuit trained Prime Minister, Tony Abbott. There has been down through the centuries considerable debate over whether Christians worship the same God as Muslims. While Jesus Christ is a revered prophet in Islam, Muhammad is not regarded as a prophet by the Christians. The diabolically complex situation in the Middle East, the wildly counterproductive interference of the West, the conflation of the Islam and Christianity, the religious beliefs of the world’s major leaders, they have all come together to create a circumstance without historical precedence. Here is Section Four: Soldiers of God in its entirety.
Kate Atkinson’s dazzling Life After Life, the bestselling adult book this year in the UK, explored the possibility of infinite chances, as Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins, Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s beloved younger brother Teddy – would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. Kate Atkinson’s legions of fans have greeted this latest offering with rapturous applause.
Here is an extract from David Kilcullen’s Blood Year: The Failures of the War on Terror: As I write, Western countries (several, particularly the US, now with severely reduced international credibility) face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region, with a far higher level of geopolitical competition, and a much more severe risk of great-power conflict, than at any time since 9/11. It isn’t just Islamic State; al-Qa’ida has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria, Somalia and Yemen. We’re dealing with not one but two global terrorist organisations, each with regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home, and a flow of foreign terrorist fighters 10 to 12 times the size of anything seen before. Likewise, last year’s Taliban resurgence shows that as bad as things seem now, they can get much worse if the Afghan drawdown creates the same opportunity for Islamic State next year as the Iraqi drawdown did in 2012.
Since 9/11, some 300 Americans–born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere–have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Some have taken the fight abroad: Americans were among those who planned the attacks in Mumbai, and more recently a dozen US citizens have sought to join ISIS. Others have acted entirely on American soil. What motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our aggressive efforts to track them? Paced like a detective story, United States of Jihad tells the entwined stories of the key actors on the American front. Among the perpetrators are Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born radical cleric who became the first American citizen killed by a CIA drone and who mentored the Charlie Hebdo shooters; Samir Khan, whose Inspire webzine has rallied terrorists around the world, including the Tsarnaev brothers; and Omar Hammami, an Alabama native and hip hop fan who became a fixture in al Shabaab’s propaganda videos until fatally displeasing his superiors. Drawing on his extensive network of intelligence contacts, from the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI to the NYPD, journalist and security expert Peter Bergen also offers an inside look at the sometimes controversial tactics of the agencies tracking potential terrorists–from infiltrating mosques to massive surveillance; as well as at the bias experienced by innocent observant Muslims at the hands of law enforcement and at the critics and defenders of US policies on terrorism.
“The man who many considered the peace candidate in the last election was transformed into a war president,” writes bestselling author and Yale Professor of Law Stephen Carter. The Violence of Peace is a snapshot of the early unfolding moral dilemmas of a President who, through his use of drones and other controversial tools of warfare, is leaving America with a blood stained legacy which will impact on the security of the nation for decades to come. The world is now a far less safe place in 2016 than it was in 2008. First released in 2011, The Violence of Peace is a book about “just war” theory, a concept first advanced in the earliest years of Christianity and now playing out as a 21st Century nightmare.
Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, by veteran journalist John Stapleton, is a sidewinding missile into the heart of Australian hypocrisy. It becomes available this week.The book is a beautifully written snapshot of a pivotal turning point in the history of the so-called Lucky Country. In 2015 there were well attended Reclaim
Australia demonstrations in every major capital city, all protesting what the demonstrators saw as the growing Islamisation of Australia, along with countering anti-racism demonstrations. There were frequent violent clashes, hundreds of police were forced to form lines separating the demonstrators in Sydney and Melbourne, there were a significant number of arrests and injuries, and dozens of people were treated for the effects of capsicum spray. The terror alert was at its highest level in history, the country was engaged in an unpopular and discredited war in Iraq and Syria, and relations between the government and an increasingly radicalised Muslim minority had broken down.
America’s Destruction of Iraq fills in the gaps of how America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq created the ultimate breeding ground for the Islamic State. Here is the link to a television interview on the program Washington Journal the with the author of America’s Destruction of Iraq.
Barack Obama promised change from George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism. But the Obama administration used drones to kill suspected militants and vacuumed data on Americans’ phone calls. Obama criticized Bush’s unilateralism and secrecy, but launched wars without going to Congress and presided over an unprecedented crackdown on leaks. As the New York Times New York Times book reviewer Gideon Rose wrote of Power Wars: Inside the Post 9/11 Obama Presidency by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Charlie Savage explores how and why Obama and his legal team, an elite, liberal group who vowed to restore the rule of law, end up accused of entrenching the sweeping powers of the post-9/11 security state. If legitimate, the accusation stands to change the legacy of Obama’s entire presidency.
The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailand’s multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade to 2014. The world might not have come to the hometowns of the many visitors fascinated by Thailand, but it certainly came to the Land of Smiles.
Signs and portents are everywhere, disturbance everywhere. With post-apocalyptic imagery now entrenched in popular culture, and all the major faiths prophesying that mankind has reached “The End of Days”, fantastical theories abound on the origins of the internet; that it was an advanced technology gifted across time and space in order to save an emerging race known as humans from an impending apocalypse by allowing the cleverest minds on the planet to aggregate. Whatever the pure truth, perhaps only the Gods will ever know. But there is no doubt the Rise of Islamic State has been paralleled by the Rise of the Network Society. The single most brilliant philosopher and anthropologist in the field has been Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells. His book The Rise of the Network Society was the first in a string of books documenting the economic and social dynamics of the information age.
Perhaps the single most successful book of 2015, “a soaring triumph” as the critics have described it, H is for Hawke is an absolute must read. Every now and then something breaks through the zeitgeist. Author Helen MacDonald wrote in one of the opening riffs: “Forty-five minutes north-east of Cambridge is a landscape I’ve come to love very much indeed. It’s where wet fen gives way to parched sand. It’s a land of twisted pine trees, burnt-out cars, shotgun-peppered road signs and US Air Force bases. There are ghosts here: houses crumble inside numbered blocks of pine forestry. There are spaces built for air-delivered nukes inside grassy tumuli behind 12ft fences, tattoo parlours and US Air Force golf courses. In spring it’s a riot of noise: constant plane traffic, gas-guns over pea fields, woodlarks and jet engines. It’s called the Brecklands – the broken lands – and it’s where I ended up that morning, seven years ago, in early spring, on a trip I hadn’t planned at all. At five in the morning I’d been staring, sleepless, at a square of streetlight on the ceiling. Nnngh. Must get out, I thought, throwing back the covers. Out! I pulled on jeans, boots and a jumper, scalded my mouth with burnt coffee, and it was only when my frozen, ancient Volkswagen and I were halfway down the A14 that I worked out where I was going, and why. Out there, beyond the foggy windscreen and white lines, was the forest. The broken forest. That’s where I was headed. To see goshawks.”