Archived publication for August 2009
Recent publications
Sinking into debt
The past few months have shown just how fragile the perceived orthodoxy of government financial management has been. Seemingly gone are the days when Australians could rely on their governments to deliver budget surpluses without mortgaging the...
Personal tragedies under Stalin
Chris Berg reviews The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan Books, 2008, 740 pages) It has taken historians in both Russia and the West a long time to get their minds around Stalinism. Anne Applebaum's 2003...
The danger of forgetting again
Julie Novak reviews The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 2007, 480 pages) The quick deterioration in the economic fortunes of western countries seems to have taken many by surprise. The latest...
Pearson's long consistency
Richard Allsop reviews Up From The Mission: Selected Writings by Noel Pearson (Black Inc, 2009, 416 pages) On a personal level, Noel Pearson loses me on page 336. It is at this fairly late stage in this collection of his essays that he expresses a...
The third world's underground education economy
Brendan Duong reviews The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into how the World's Poorest People are Educating Themselves by James Tooley (Cato Institute, 2009, 268 pages) Are private schools for just for the rich? James Tooley is a professor of...
The (confused) Future of (a) Liberalism
Andrew Kemp reviews The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe (Random House, 2009, 352 pages) Delivering a paper to the University of Oxford in 1958, Isaiah Berlin talked of two concepts of freedom-‘negative' liberty, the absence of restraints,...
Senate as saviour
Julie Novak reviews Restraining Elective Dictatorship: The Upper House Solution? by Nicholas Aroney, Scott Prasser &, J.R. Nethercote (University of Western Australia Press , 2008, 301 pages) Over the past few decades, concerns have been...
The best known woman in Australia
Richard Allsop reviews Enid Lyons: Leading Lady to a Nation by Anne Henderson (Pluto Press, 2008, 356 pages) This is the biography of a woman who ‘was for many years the best known woman in Australia'. It says something for the fleetingness...