The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World,

by Robert Kenny;

Scribe, 2007, $39.95.

This book is a study of the early days of white grazing occupation in the Wimmera district of north-western Victoria, especially using the experience of Nathanael Pepper, one of the early Aboriginal converts to Christianity and a hope for the emergence of a “native church”.

In the mid-1840s, the pioneer squatter Horatio Ellerman had shot the mother of another future convert dead. The limited record suggests it was probably a retaliatory raid on the Aborigines for taking sheep, with angry, boisterous squatters firing off guns, intending to frighten. Ellerman, presumably contrite, later adopted the lad, found religion himself and eventually gave up the fleece for the cloth to become a Presbyterian minister in the district.

The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi. Virgin Books, 2008, $32.95. Six hundred years ago, a little Franciscan friar wrote a book which contained the only phrase for which he is remembered: numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate. 

Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia by Ayesha Jalal. Harvard University Press, 2008, US$29.95.

Before killing thirteen Indian soldiers in his quest for eternal life, a young Islamic militant wrote:

We drink the wine of martyrdom, swaying in ecstasy;
This living is not living—we live by getting our heads cut off.
We love to receive the gifts of our religion;
When we bequeath gifts, it is of our lives.

Conservatism in America: Making Sense

of the American Right,

by Paul Edward Gottfried;

Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, US$39.95.

This book can be read as the tale of a tremendous irony—how a false notion that led a movement and a whole superpower astray became in the end the plain truth.

Author of many works on intellectual history, Professor Gottfried has taken part in the struggles he writes of here, and that fusion of scholarship and hard experience creates a compelling tone. He is a “paleo-conservative” but is far from pushing a mere factional line. Like most “paleos”, he is above all his own man.

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It by Tilar J. Mazzeo. In these days of global crisis and world change, what a good time to be reading about champagne, an industry which has weathered worse storms than this (heck, we’re not at war. Yet.)

Journey Without Arrival: The Life and Writing of Vincent Buckley by John McLaren. Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, $39.95. The Melbourne poet, critic and academic Vincent Buckley, who died in 1988, was a frequent contributor to Quadrant over the decades, with ten poems, fifteen articles (including one called “The Strange Personality of Christ”) and three book reviews. 

A Student’s Guide to Music History,

by R.J. Stove;

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007, US$8.

There ought to be a law against it: marketing a book titled Music History, with just 135 pages. Admittedly, that law could deferred, for the cover has the rest of the title in smaller print: A Student’s Guide to. Moreover, it is just one of fifteen tomes in a series issued by the resonantly named Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. And it is written by an Australian (born 1961 in Sydney) in Melbourne, R.J. Stove, who admits in a five-page preface that being invited to write it caused him “pleasure and terror indissolubly combined”.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,

by Margaret Atwood;

Bloomsbury, 2008, $29.95.

Margaret Atwood delivered the 2008 Massey Lectures last November, and they were published just as the current global financial crisis was unfolding, although her timely yet timeless subject would have been conceived long before the crisis.

Atwood has been at the vanguard for a long time now. She’s been writing since the 1950s. She’s always been good but the later part of her career has been dedicated to pushing the boundaries of her personal achievements. Once she got The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) out of her system, and put the female-as-victim theme behind her, she entered her literary maturity. Once she embraced the creative potential of the female-as-oppressor, with an equal claim on human evil as the male, she began turning out a body of fiction, coincident with her middle age, in which each new work was unlike any of its predecessors.