Culture

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.

In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary By Ngo Van AK Press, 2011 264 pages, $43.99 Australians know of the Vietnam War from the arrival of Australian troops in 1965 through to their withdrawal in 1973. People in the United States generally date it from the arrival of US advisors through to the inglorious departure of US helicopters in 1975. However, for the Vietnamese the struggle began long before that, from their colonisation by the French in the 19th Century.

When my wife and I were in the supermarket the other day, we got chatting to a kindly white stranger. After a few seconds, the woman asked my wife, "And how long have you been here?"

Aboriginal rapper Sky’High admits she can be difficult to work with. “I can come across a bit intimidating or ‘weird’,” she tells Green Left Weekly, laughing. “Some people can't handle that ― I’m unpredictable as fuck.”

When fist-raising 1968 Olympian Dr John Carlos and I wrote his memoir, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World, we didn't exactly expect the publishing date to coincide with a mass national protest movement for economic and social justice. I've now heard about 100 variations of the joke: "It was really smart of your publisher to plan this whole 'Occupy' movement with your book release." It's an obvious comment, given that Carlos and I have made sure to visit every Occupy encampment we can on our national book tour.

Ramy Essam has been featured on my Rebel Frequencies site before. The young folk-singer may best be described at "the troubadour of the Egyptian revolution". Essam performed at the initial rallies demanding dictator Hosni Mubarak step down, and was kidnapped and tortured as a result. And yet he still writes and performs. Furthermore, his own personal struggle to sing publicly demonstrates how much more work the revolution still has ahead of it.

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.

For a lighthearted look at some of the difficulties and frustrations with the democratic process of the Occupy movement, have a look at The Meeting: A Democratic Satire, by Kahtia Lontis. It is described as "a short satirical fiction piece based on the painful process of grassroots democracy". It is something anyone who has taken part in the movement could identify with.

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.

Inside Al-Qaeda and the TalibanM By Syed Saleem Shahzad Pluto Press, 2011 260 pp., $39.95 Deadly Waters, The Hidden World of Somalia’s Pirates By Jan Bahadur Scribe, 2011 300 pp., $29.95 The Interrogator, A CIA Agent’s True Story By Glenn Carle Sribe, 2011 321 pp., $32.95 The Wizard of Lies, Bernie Madoff & the Death of Trust By Diana B. Henriques Scribe, 2011 419 pp., $35.00

Tom Waits, the 61-year-old veteran musical maverick, released his first album of entirely new music in seven years on October 25.

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.