Phil Shannon

The life of woman who shot Mussolini

The Woman Who Shot Mussolini By Frances Stonor Saunders Faber and Faber, 2010 375 pages, $32.99 (pb) The Honourable Violet Gibson was not like the other women of the Anglo-Irish elite when it came to Benito Mussolini, the leader of Italy's fascists. While Lady Asquith (wife of the former prime minister) was delighted by Mussolini, and Clementine Churchill (wife of the future prime minister) was awestruck by “one of the most wonderful men of our times”, Violet Gibson aimed a revolver at the fascist dictator in Italy in April 1926 and shot him in the nose.

Three men of the left

All Along the Watchtower: Memoir of a Sixties Revolutionary By Michael Hyde The Vulgar Press, 2010 272 pages, $32.95 (pb) Red Silk: The Life of Elliott Johnston QC By Penelope Debelle Wakefield Press, 2011 212 pages, $32.95 (pb) Phillip Adams: The Ideas Man — A Life Revealed By Philip Luker JoJo Publishing, 2011 337 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Wake-up call for mobile users

Disconnect: The Truth About Mobile-Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It & How to Protect Your Family By Devra Davis Scribe, 2010 274 pages, $27.95 (pb) Meet SAM ― Standard Anthropomorphic Man. SAM is a big man and also the silent type who spends little time using his first-generation mobile phone held a safety-conscious half an inch from the ear. Safety standards for mobile phones have been based on SAM’s low exposure to mobile phone radio frequency radiation.

Three books take up Assange story

The Most Dangerous Man in the World By Andrew Fowler Melbourne University Press, 2011 271 pages, $32.99 (pb) Underground By Suelette Drefus & Julian Assange William Heinemann, 2011 479 pages, $24.95 (pb) WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy By David Leigh & Luke Harding Guardianbooks, 2011 340 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Memoir of meeting resistance fighter

Finding Santana By Jill Jolliffe Wakefield Press, 2010 177 pages, $24.95 (pb) Jill Jolliffe's encounter with the Komodo Dragon, a carnivorous, aggressive, pre-historic lizard, was "hair-raising". But even more threatening were the murderous agents from the Indonesian secret police, with their de facto uniform of "cropped hair, trim moustache, Rolex watch and Ray-Ban sunglasses".

Koestler — from anti-Stalinist to pro-capitalist

Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual By Michael Scammell Faber & Faber, 2011, 720 pages, $32.99 (pb) Arthur Koestler had a taste for political drama. As a communist, he spied against Franco's fascists in the Spanish civil war; as a Jew, he escaped from the Gestapo in France by joining the French Foreign Legion; he saw the inside of five jails; he wrote a famous novel of Stalin's show trials; he became a vociferous anti-communist; and he enjoyed a fashionable vogue for his 1970s books on parapsychology.

The criminal tale of Monsanto

The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Politics & Power Marie-Monique Robin Spinifex Press, 2010. 373 pages, $44.95 (pb) “What counts for us is making money,” said a Monsanto vice-president to a new employee at an induction session in 1998, reminding the idealistic novice that there is a simple, and crude, capitalist philosophy at the heart of the US chemical and biotechnology giant.

Tarzan, a colonial symbol of bigotry

Edgar Rice Burroughs & Tarzan: A Biography By Robert W. Fenton McFarland & Co., 2010, 212 pages, $49.95 (pb) Edgar Rice Burroughs was in illustrious company when his Tarzan books joined the works of Einstein, Freud, Marx, Zola, Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells and Jack London in the Nazi book-burning bonfire in front of the University of Berlin in 1933, writes Robert Fenton in his biography of the US author.

An honest observer of a popular revolution

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by ROLAND CHAMBERS Faber & Faber, 2010, $24.99 390 pages, (pb) Arthur Ransome was a popular children's author in England who counted the offspring of A. A. Milne and J. R. R. Tolkien among his millions of devoted young readers.

Griffin’s book still relevent

Black Like Me: How a White American Travelled Through the Segregated Deep South of the 1950s Disguised as a Black Man John Howard Griffin, Souvenir Press, 2009, 241 pages, $39.99 (pb) Review by Phil Shannon John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, was shocked in 1959 when he saw the face in the mirror, “the face and shoulders of a stranger — a fierce, bald, very dark Negro”, glaring back at him.

Dissenting look at militaristic myth

What’s Wrong With Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History By Marilyn Lake & Henry Reynolds UNSW Press, 2010, 183 pages, $29.95 (pb) On April 25 in Australia, it is humanly impossible to escape the slouch hats, the Dawn Service, the Last Post, the khaki uniforms and the military ceremonies endlessly recycled in the establishment media. The cult of Anzac Day is pervasive, the culture of war unavoidable.

ANZACs vs Bolsheviks

ANZACS in Arkhangel: The Untold Story of Australia and the Invasion of Russia 1918-19 By Michael Challinger Hardie Grant Books, 2010, 285 pages, $35 (pb) “The remedy for Bolshevism is bullets”, was the blunt message of the editorial in Britain’s establishment newspaper, The Times, in 1919 as military forces from 16 capitalist countries invaded Russia after the 1917 revolution. Among the invaders were about 150 Australian soldiers, as recounted in Michael Challinger’s history of the Australian role in the invasion.