Phil Shanon

  • Cure that’s worse than the disease

    How to Cool the Planet: Geo-engineering & the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate By Jeff Goodell Scribe, 2010 262 pages, $35 (pb) Grandiose schemes to launch sulphate particles into the stratosphere, to dump iron into the oceans and to brighten clouds in order to moderate global warming are, says Jeff Goodell in How to Cool the Planet, maturing from the dodgy geo-engineering dreams of mad scientists to mainstream policy options.

  • Don't mention the war

    10 Excellent Reasons not to Join the Military
    Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg (ed)
    The New Press, 2006
    157 pages, $24 (pb)

  • Alan Jones: The power of the parrot

    Almost anyone else found to have been cheating, lying and secretly on the take would have been the subject of a frothing rant over the airwaves by Sydney shock jock Alan Jones, but when Jones was caught being paid millions in commercial sponsorships over the past decade to present advertising as news, there was no public self-flagellation. As Chris Masters’ biography of Jones argues, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) hearings showed that “Jones was for sale”, despite Jones’s proclamations that his opinions are his alone.

  • The frontier revisited

    The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of AustraliaBy Henry ReynoldsUNSW Press, 2006245 pages, $29.95 (pb)