Phil Shannon

The power of ordinary solidarity

< STRONG>Ordinary Courage: My Journey to Baghdad as a Human Shield By Donna Mulhearn Pier 9, 2010 254 pages, $32.95 (pb) STRONG>Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman who Helped to Hide the Frank Family By Miep Gies & Alison Leslie Gold Pocket Books, 2009 302 pages, $24.99 (pb)

The deadly chemistry of profit

Slow Death By Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health
By Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie
University of Queensland Press, 2009
323 pages, $34.95 (pb)

Time to fire up

Free to a Good Home, By Catherine Deveny, Black Inc., 2009, 213 pp, $24.95 (pb)

Death and voyeurism in reporting

Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence WarBy Mark DannerBlack Inc., 2009626 pp, $39.95 (pb)

Privatisation doesn't fly

The Men Who Killed Qantas: Greed, Lies and Crashes and How They Destroyed the Reputation of the World’s Safest Airline By Matthew Benns, William Heinemann, 2009, 307 pp, $34.95 (pb)

A comic of the tragedy of working life

Tony Hancock: The Definitive Biography By John Fisher HarperCollins, 2009 627 pages, $33 (pb)

Malalai Joya: her struggle is our struggle

Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out By Malalai Joya Macmillan, 2009 278 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Music, revolution and the '60s

There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars & the Rise and Fall of ‘60s Counter-Culture By Peter Doggett Canongate, 2008 598 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Class war in feudal England

Summer of Blood: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 By Dan Jones Harper Press, 2009 238 pages, $49.99 (hb)

Steaming along the tracks of revolution

When Artem Samsurov first came to Brisbane in 1911, the Russian exile noted that the poor did not eat horsemeat like they did in his native country and he wondered whether this did indeed make it true that Australia was a “working man’s paradise”? A diet that was no stranger, however, to rabbit, and bread and lard, suggested otherwise.

Hardie: the company that tried to get away with murder

In 1978, John Reid, chair of James Hardie Industries, boasted: “Every time you walk into an office building, a home, a factory; every time you put your foot on the brake, ride in a train … the chances are that a product from the James Hardie group of companies has a part in it”.

How the whaling industry was beaten

The Last Whale By Chris Pash Fremantle Press, 2008, 218 pp, $29.95 (pb)