Category: Words

Anything to do with books and writing, but mainly book reviews

The Mapoon Story

Mapoon is a small community on the Western coast of Cape York Peninsula, 200 km South of Bamaga (which is almost on the tip) and 100 km North of Weipa.

This is the story of Mapoon according to the Aboriginal people of Mapoon as they wrote and recorded it in the Dry Season of 1974 and the Wet Season of early 1975.

There was at Mapoon at that time about six families, pioneering the rebuilding of their destroyed settlement…

So begins the Introduction to the first of this pair of books, published in Melbourne in 1975 by an activist organisation. The second volume, much longer, tells the story of the “Invaders” largely in their own words, quoting extensively from church and government records.

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Fantasy from the Dark Ages

The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.

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Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch

Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.

Charles Stross: The Laundry Files

A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.

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Breath

Breath by James Nestor - coverBreath, the new science of a lost art

James Nestor, Penguin 2020.

Nestor, a science writer, explains in the introduction to Breath that he was alerted to the possibilities of breath-based health therapies (conventional and not) when his doctor sent him to a yoga breathing class to fix up his own chronic poor health. It worked, and sent him on an intermittent quest  (he wrote another book along the way) to learn more.

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Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet coverZen and the Art of Saving the Planet

Thich Nhat Hanh

Rider, 2021 plumvillage.org/books

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is a very worthwhile book with a couple of odd aspects.

The general reader is likely to read it exactly as it is presented, as a book by Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay” to his many followers) with commentaries from one of his senior students. As such, it is wise, gentle and encouraging, like everything else of his that I know.

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