Book Review - Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir by Gareth Evans

The political memoir, especially in Australia, can make for heavy reading: self-aggrandisement, ego-boosting, dubious justification and the settling of old scores and slights, real or imagined. 

But not so with the ebullient Gareth Evans, one of Australia's outstanding public figures of the modern age, whose latest book, his 12th, crackles with wit, self-deprecating humour and illuminating insights into both politics and the complexities of public policy. 

He has few, if any, regrets; his judgments, while acute, are generous. The title, Incorrigible Optimist, is most apposite.

Since entering the Senate in the late 1970s and serving with distinction in the Hawke and Keating governments, Evans went on to grace the international stage as head of the Brussels-based international Crisis Group before becoming the Australian National University's chancellor in 2010.

Evans has always been a good talker and an amusing raconteur; such qualities abound in this elegant, almost conversational memoir of a busy, rich, engaged and very examined life.

In the early 1990s, The Canberra Times sent me to talk to the then foreign minister to write a profile. He agreed to a 20-minute interview, but the allotted time came and went and, despite his staff's efforts to get him to stick to his schedule, he was happy to go on talking, embellishing a story here, adding a reflection there. He was expansive and exuberant.

On the way out after what seemed the best part of an hour, or perhaps even longer, a very senior official, who had been kept waiting, looked up at me, saying: "Oh, it was only you he was meeting. No doubt you engaged him on his favourite subject: Gareth Evans." It was, I thought, a needlessly waspish comment.

Anyway, as one might expect in a memoir, there is a lot of Evans here – and it is a far from unattractive or intrusive presence; rather, it is an absorbing and thoughtful meditation on events, issues and processes that Evans has been part of for four decades.

An early supporter of Bob Hawke, Evans looks back on Labor's most successful leader with undisguised admiration. 

Hawke, as leader, had four exceptional strengths, he writes: the ability to craft a grand narrative; a facility to connect with people; a readiness to operate collegiately; and – in contrast to the earlier larrikin persona – the maintenance of both personal and institutional discipline.

Hawke appointed Evans to the foreign ministry after Bill Hayden, the man Hawke deposed as Labor leader, vacated the post to become governor-general. But Evans writes he was not Hawke's first choice for the plum job. 

That was Kim Beazley, but Beazley's preference was to stay at defence. Evans had different views on some of those most closely held by Hawke, notably the United States alliance and the Middle East.

Evans notes wryly how Hawke later described him as "the best and most widely respected foreign minister in Australia's history", but not before taking out insurance by appointing an old friend, Richard Woolcott, as head of his department.

"It did not take me long to discover that his very explicit prime-ministerial brief was to curb my more adventurous instincts. This mission evidently gave my new secretary the impression that he should see himself as the lead policymaker in the enterprise, and feel free to make public statements accordingly." But after a testy start, the two crafted a sound working relationship.

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Original review on: http://www.canberratimes.com.au

REVOLUTION SONG A Story of American Freedom By Russell Shorto - Book Review

“There is properly no history, only biography,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Russell Shorto, in his new book “Revolution Song,” seems to be of similar mind. He writes about six people, all of whom lived in the Revolutionary era, but he does not roll them up into a single narrative or use their lives to bolster an overarching thesis.

Instead, he artfully weaves their stories together and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions. “I have tried not to preach or even teach,” Shorto writes in the preface — and it proves a decidedly refreshing approach.

Shorto has an eye for intriguing subjects (his previous books include “Amsterdam,” “Descartes’ Bones” and “The Island at the Center of the World”), and this book is no exception.

The Seneca chief Cornplanter (or Kayethwahkeh in Seneca) was a fine looking, philosophically minded man who was also, in Shorto’s words, “something of a killing machine.”

Allied with England during the Revolution, Cornplanter and his warriors slaughtered patriot soldiers and civilians, even children. In retaliation, George Washington sent an invasion force that destroyed crops and leveled village upon village, killing and scalping along the way.

The war devastated the Senecas, and afterward Cornplanter counseled accommodation, urging his people to learn English and know something of white ways. But as the Senecas lost more territory, they grew increasingly hostile to white culture.

A message came to Cornplanter from the Creator, telling him to “remove from his house and sight every article of the workmanship or invention of the white man.” He destroyed mementos, including a sword that had been a gift from Washington, and gradually withdrew from the wider world.

Shorto concludes with the optimistic side of the Creator’s message, describing ancestral lands and ancient ways that Cornplanter, having thrown off white culture, could dream of once more. But the conclusion to Cornplanter’s story is actually very sad.

Although the United States government guaranteed in 1794 that the Seneca grant where Cornplanter was buried would never be taken, in 1964 it was. The Army Corps of Engineers moved his remains and those of hundreds of Senecas buried near him in order to construct a dam on the Allegheny River.

Another of Shorto’s subjects is Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, a dark-haired beauty who wrote a delightfully scandalous memoir. Some scholars have thought it a forgery, but Shorto argues that it is not, and without doubt it is a good read.

Coghlan’s father, a British officer assigned to the United States during the Revolution, forced her at age 14 to marry the British lieutenant John Coghlan, probably to put an end to her dalliance with Aaron Burr. She detested her husband, ran away and availed herself of an English lord, whereupon her father sent her to a nunnery. After she escaped, he disowned her.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

An American Tragedy By Ta-Nehisi Coates

There have always been black presidents of the United States. That’s true whether we’re talking about the work of the historian J. A. Rogers, who in 1965 published “The Five Negro Presidents: According to What White People Said They Were”;

or whether we mean the work of our finest comedians like Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle, whose sketches imagining a black president satirized not so much the man himself as the racism that had prevented the dream of one.

Then there’s the actor Morgan Freeman, who has portrayed not just the president but God with that lush voice of his. He maketh all things possible.

But even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as “black” could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. As Ta-Nehisi Coates charts over and over again in the essays found in “We Were Eight Years in Power,” the price of that ticket has been a steady and at times surprising backlash, resulting in what Coates ultimately and provocatively calls “America’s first white president” in Donald Trump.

If “the improbability of a black president had once been so strong that its most vivid representations were comedic,” now Coates means to give us what he calls “an American tragedy.” His account presides over not just a change in the nation but changing notions of citizenry, legitimacy and even hope. With some quarters seeing the 2008 election less as a promise than as a threat, Obama’s achievement proves to be both a milestone and a millstone.

The same might be said of Coates’s ascension as an important critic, if not the important critic, of our time. To his credit, Coates has sidestepped the old “one-at-a-time” trap used to pit black geniuses against one another, as well as the ever-present pressure to be the go-to expert on blackness after the runaway success of his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me.”

His reach has proved impressive: Coates, the son of a former Black Panther, went on to reinvent the comic book Black Panther, making him the envy of “blerds” everywhere.

But it is James Baldwin more than anyone who appears as a lodestone here. Coates even moved for a time to France, as Baldwin did, and Coates’s expatriate distance only sharpened his view of the goings-on at home. 

Of Baldwin, Coates writes powerfully: “Baldwin’s beauty — like all real beauty — is not style apart from substance but indivisible from it. It is not the icing on the cake but the eggs within it, giving it texture, color and shape.”

“Eight Years” could have settled for being the obligatory miscellany that too often follows a writer’s masterpiece; instead, the book provides a master class on the essay form. 

Structured as a call and response between eight of his most significant articles and briefer, more personal essays arranged by year, Coates gives us something between a mixtape and a Künstlerroman, demonstrating how he came to dominate the nonfiction genre.

Even without the framing of the lively if clipped “this is what I was doing that year” portions, we can see Coates’s growing power and prowess from the progression of the pieces themselves. 

Picking up steam with “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” from February 2012, Coates is in full command by the time we reach “Fear of a Black President,” an essay that captures the Obama that many are nostalgic for and others continue to rage against.

Read the original book review on: www.nytimes.com

The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World - Book Review

Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad

Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink?

Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.

In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.”

Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”

Read the original book review on: The Hindu