Phil Shannon

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation Of Political Power By David McKnight Allen & Unwin, 2012 285 pages, $29.95 (pb) An adviser to the former New Labour government of Tony Blair in Britain called right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch the “24th member of cabinet”. The advisor said no big decision inside No. 10 was ever made without “taking into account the likely reaction” of Murdoch.

Fly & Be Damned: What Now For Aviation & Climate Change? By Peter Mcmanners Zed Books, 2012 182 pages, $26.95 (pb) In a future green world, will there be a place for aviation? In Fly And Be Damned, Peter McManners thinks there will be, but air transport will look quite different.

Struggle For Freedom: Aung San Suu Kyi By Jesper Bengtsson Fourth Estate, 2011, 308 pages, $35 (pb) Aung San Suu Kyi’s entry into political activism in Burma in 1988 quickly met the fate of so many other pro-democracy opponents of the Burmese military dictatorship — decades of arrest and harassment. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for 15 of the past 21 years. But, as Jesper Bengtsson’s biography of the 65-year-old Suu Kyi shows, her resistance and courage, like that of so many other Burmese, has not faltered.

Celebrity Inc. ― How Famous People Make Money By Jo Piazza Open Road, 2011 231 pages Celebrity is just like printing your own money, says Jo Piazza in Celebrity Inc. Two rich, spoilt, talentless celebrity brats ― Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian ― are experts at the fame game. Kickstarted by family wealth, and propelled to fame through a steamy sex tape and reality TV, Hilton “earns” around US$10 million a year. The Kardashian family franchise raked in $65 million last year.

Panic By David Marr Black Inc., 2011 262 pages, $29.95 (pb) Panic. “It’s so Australian,” says the dejected journalist, David Marr in his book of essays on the rise, decline and rise again of political panics in Australia. Panic over the Chinese was the “midwife of Federation”, and subsequent alarms about German spies in World War I, Wobblies and Reds in the 1920s, Communists in the Depression, and the Red Menace all over again after World War II have kept the scares coming.

Dirty Money: The True Cost of Australia’s Mineral Boom By Matthew Benns William Heinemann, 2011, 296 pages, $34.95 (pb) Australian mining companies hand over $10 million a year in political donations to state and federal political parties. They don’t expect to be bitten on the hand by those they are feeding, as the Rudd Labor government did with its proposed mining super profits tax. Time for the big stick of a fear-mongering $22 million campaign to remind the government who really rules in Australia.

Stop Signs: Cars & Capitalism ― On the Road to Economic, Social & Ecological Decay By Bianca Mugenyi & Yves Engler RED Publishing & Fernwood Publishing 2011, 259 pages, $27.95 (pb) The car, say Canadian authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler, who took a bus ride across the United States, is a doomed jalopy going nowhere. It fails, especially in the “home of the car”, on every green count. Cars are the single largest contributor to US noise pollution and 40,000 people in the US die from car accidents each year (one million across the globe).

Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life By Michael Moore Allen Lane, 2011 427 pages, $29.95 (pb) In 1968, the 14-year-old Michael Moore was expelled from the seminary where he was training to become a Catholic priest. His offense had been to ask awkward questions, like why can’t women become priests. As Moore had to be reminded by Church authorities, “you either have to accept things or not”. For Moore, accepting the status quo was not an option, so authority would always be having trouble with Moore.

The Man on Devil's Island: Alfred Dreyfus & the Affair that Divided France By Ruth Harris Allen Lane, 2011 542 pages, $26.95 (pb) The Dreyfus Affair in France a century ago shows how little has changed. “National security” was on the lips of politicians and military officers as an innocent man from a vilified group was framed for treason in a rigged military court and sent to rot in a prison hell-hole to serve political ends amid war hysteria. Make the name “Alfred Dreyfus” or “David Hicks” and the template fits.

Strong>The Short Goodbye: A Skewed History of the Last Boom and the Next Bust By Elisabeth Wynhausen Melbourne University Publishing, 2011 219 pages, $29.99 (pb) From writing stories about workers being sacked during the 2009 global financial crisis, Elisabeth Wynhausen, a journalist at Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, got a taste of the real thing when she was handed a pink slip of her own.

Inside Pine Gap: The Spy Who Came in from the Desert By David Rosenberg Hardie Grant Books, 2011 216 pages, $35 (pb) David Rosenberg found 1960s television show Mission Impossible “irresistible” with its patriotic tales of high-tech US government spies thwarting the “bad guys”. After an 18-year career as a US National Security Agency (NSA) electronic signals analyst at the CIA’s Pine Gap spy base in Australia’s remote interior, Rosenberg’s book, Inside Pine Gap, makes it clear that he has yet to grow up.

Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy By Lindsay Tanner Scribe, 2011 232 pages, $32.95 (pb) Lindsay Tanner, the former finance minister in the federal Labor government, laments in his book, Sideshow, the rotting core of democracy in Australia that plumbed its most dismal depths in the lacklustre, “non-of-the-above” elections of 2010. The commercial media, he says, have been responsible for dumbing down the quality of political debate and sapping the level of popular political engagement. There is much in Tanner’s critique that is accurate.