Culture

  • Uncooking the nuclear books

    Wings of Death: Nuclear Pollution and Human HealthBy Chris BusbyGreen Audit Books, Green Audit (Wales) Ltd, 1995340pp., £10.99Reviewed by Dot Tumney This book provides valuable ammunition for attacking the nuclear apologist on several fronts.

  • Varied program for NSW literary festival

    SYDNEY — The NSW Writers' Centre will host its annual literary festival, Spring Writing, on September 7-8. This year the festival will welcome international guests, Balmain writers, regional Australian writers, writers from non-English backgrounds

  • A warmly human look at family, race and class

    Secrets and LiesDirected and written by Mike LeighOpens nationally on September 5Reviewed by Peter Boyle Every family has its secrets and lies, but imagine the shock of Hortense, a young black optometrist, when she discovers that her biological

  • Portrait of a man addicted to battle

    Highways to a WarBy Christopher J. KochMinerva, 1995. 452 pp., $15.95Reviewed by Brendan Doyle Those who have read this Tasmanian writer's earlier novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta in 1965 and made into a successful film, will

  • Poem: Last Chance Australia Fair

    Last Chance Australia Fair Australians all let us lament For we are on the slide. We've soils of salt, our wealth's not ours, Our seas have nearly died. Our land abounds in drugs and crime, The Libs support the rich; In history's page

  • Project on lesbian domestic violence

    NEWCASTLE — "We used to have friends over for tea. I always loved and dreaded it too. Great to see friends, but inevitably I would say something 'wrong' — not that I saw it at the time — and she just stopped talking to me for days. Then there

  • Hip high priest of free-funk

    Message from HomePharoah SandersVerve through PolygramReviewed by Norm Dixon This album shows Pharoah Sanders — Coltrane's cosmic, Afrocentric fellow traveller — is at 57 as cool and relevant as ever. Message from Home places Sanders squarely in

  • Wollombi Folk Festival

    A fantastic line-up of artists with a diversity of talent will make this year's Wollombi Folk Festival "the best yet", organisers say. Some 100 artists will be performing over the weekend of August 30-September 1 in the scenic village of Wollombi,

  • Capitalism without work?

    The End of Work: The decline of the global labour force and the dawn of the post-market eraBy Jeremy Rifkin Tarcher/Putnam, June 1996350pp., $26.95Reviewed by Dick Nichols This is a fascinating and maddening book, chock-full of contradictions.

  • Censorship, pornography, feminism

    Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim FeminismEdited by Alison Assiter and Avedon CarolPluto Press, 1993. $32.95Reviewed by Patricia Brien Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures is a collection of essays by women about pornography. The essays

  • Poem: East Timorese

    East Timorese Kissing with their wounds the only protest left to them Denis Kevans

  • A lasting impression of life in Tehran

    The White BalloonDirected by Jafar PanahiScreenplay by Abbas KiarostamiOpening at Dendy cinemas August 29Reviewed by Jennifer Thompson The delight of this feature film from Tehran is the way it takes a very simple story — the trepidations of a