Past Programs
History - 2007
Rats of the air or heroes of war? The surprising history of pigeons Read Transcript
12/12/2007
Often referred to as rats of the air, pigeons are seen as dirty, smelly, disease spreading vermin. But their gentle cooing has won pigeons their fans, including Andrew Blechman, who's written a book about them called Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird.
Who wrote Frankenstein? Read Transcript
26/10/2007
Was Mary Shelley too young and uneducated to have written Frankenstein? The gothic classic, first published anonymously in 1818, has got the experts raging in a debate.
John Lauritsen, the author of The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, says that that man was Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley's husband and senior by five years.
And Lauritsen has his supporters. The scholar and social commentator Camille Paglia thinks Lauritsen is right, and has published a favourable review of his book on Salon.com. But in response Germaine Greer has written for The Guardian that the flawed prose in Frankenstein means it could only have been written by the 19-year-old Mary.
John Lauritsen discusses The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein with The Book Show's Ramona Koval. They are joined by two other Shelley experts: Charles Robinson, who compiled the Frankenstein Notebooks, and Neil Fraistat, who co-published Volumes I and II of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.
The history of virginity with Hanne Blank Read Transcript
22/10/2007
How do you define virginity? According to historian Hanne Blank, it's not as straightforward as you'd think. St Thomas Aquinas said that to be a virgin you had to be pure of body and mind. In Ancient Greek times the 'parthenios' were considered virgins and yet they often had children; and during the Renaissance the 'piss prophets' would study the urine of young women to test their virginity. It's the history of virginity on the Book Show -- it's not as simple as the birds and the bees.
Inscriptions and marginalia - a tradition of annotations
19/10/2007
How many of you feel comfortable about picking up a pen or pencil and writing inside a book that you might be reading? For example, to create a book program, which involves a great deal of reading with the purpose of a subsequent interview with an author, we have to work quickly and directly with the text to make sense of our thoughts. And this is only possible by making notes in the margins, a sort of shorthand that allows us to then construct a conversation.
And although some people might consider this to be disrespectful of the work, we're certainly working in a very long tradition of people inscribing their thoughts around an existing text. A loose definition for these sorts of annotations is 'Marginalia' - although today guests manage to fine-tune that definition quite substantially.
The history of Marginalia goes back a long way before the printing press, with early hand-drawn manuscripts and books being constantly added to and modified, to make sure that the text maintained its relevance to contemporary thinking.
So on The Book Show today we look at the function and value of these inscriptions over the centuries. And to help us with this, we've been joined by three people who have spent a great deal of time surrounded by books of all descriptions.
In Melbourne is Professor Margaret Manion, who is one of Australia's most eminent and valued Art Historians, and it's Margaret's deep understanding of Medieval and Renaissance books and manuscripts that we delve into today. Margaret is currently the guest curator for a wonderful exhibition, due early in 2008 at the State Library of Victoria, called The Medieval Imagination, which will bring together illuminated manuscripts from Cambridge, New Zealand and Australia. Many of these works have never been loaned before, so the access will be remarkable.
From Palmerston North in New Zealand we're also joined by Dr Nikki Hessell, who teaches in Communication and Journalism at Massey University. Prior to that though, Nikki worked closely with Professor Heather Jackson in Toronto, studying the Marginalia of the Romantic Period, and especially the prolific annotations by Samuel Coleridge - and together Nikki and Heather produced a book called Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia.
And our third guest is Kay Craddock, whose antiquarian bookshop is something of an institution in Melbourne. Kay and her parents have been dealing in rare and valuable works for a many decades and she brings a rich knowledge of the world of the book collector, and the importance of Marginalia in determining the provenance and the authenticity of books.
Not just a big nose - the real Cyrano de Bergerac
16/10/2007
The movie Roxanne with Steve Martin and Darryl Hannah is just one of the many movies inspired by the famous play by Edmund Rostand about a 17th century free thinker with a big nose -- Cyrano de Bergerac. Other than pride in a big nose, the similarities between the real man of French intellectual society and Rostand's character end there. In real life he wrote satirical plays and fiction and his works are considered a precursor to the science-fiction genre.
Margaret Sankey will be discussing, in French, the differences between Rostand and the real Cyrano at Alliance Francais in Sydney on Tuesday 16 October and she joins the Book Show to tell us about it in English.
Getting a handle on Henry: Henry Handel Richardson
08/10/2007
Henry Handel Richardson is one of the greats of early 20th century Australian literature. She wrote The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and The Getting of Wisdom as well as music, poems and short stories. After 13 years and 12 volumes the largest research project ever undertaken on an Australian author has just finished. Henry Handel Richardson's work has been reassessed in this Monash University project.
Limits of Location -- delving into the Mitchell Library collections
01/10/2007
The Mitchell library gave access to its extensive collection of its now huge collection of documents to l2 academics and writers from the Independent Scholars group - and from that comes The Limits of Location, edited by Gretchen Poiner and Sybil Jack.
Among the writers was Marie de Lepervanche, an anthropologist who has written before on Indian communities in Australia, and widow of George Munster. As an independent scholar, she found material in the library about a little realised part of Australian history -- the very early use of labour from India.
For the Book Show, Radio National's Kirsten Garrett talked first to Gretchen Poiner, about the purpose of the Independent Scholars group.
Nancy Huston's Fault Lines
28/08/2007
Nancy Huston is a Canadian born novelist and essayist who writes primarily in French and translates her own works into English. Winner of France's Prix Femina 2006, her latest novel Fault Lines is the tale of four generations of the one family. And it's told through the perspective of six-year-olds from each generation.
The story sweeps from 1945, where a young girl, Kristina, stolen as a baby from the Ukraine, is living with what she thinks is her real German family during the collapse of Germany; to Solomon, Kristina's great-grandson, a Californian of the 21st century, a precious Bush-admiring kid fascinated by grotesque images of dead Iraqis on the Internet.
From California to New York, from Haifa to Toronto and Munich, the novel unwinds back through time from a present haunted by the past, and examines how the decisions and political upheavals of one generation impact on the next.
Nancy is speaking from the studios of Radio France in Paris and she's talking to The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Banned books in Australia: from moral crusaders to national security Read Transcript
24/08/2007
From the moral conservatism that led to the banning of books like Lady Chatterley's Lover to the more recent banning of the book Defence of Muslim Lands, this panel discussion delves into the history of censorship in Australia.
Bound for Timbuktu
07/08/2007
Evidence of the West African renaissance of literature from the 1500s is turning up in wooden trunks, caves and boxes hidden in the sand in Timbuktu. Shahid Mathee from the University of Cape Town has been studying these Mali documents known as the Timbuktu manuscripts. Shahid Mathee joins the Book Show from South Africa and talks about some of the surprising finds in these manuscripts, like advice on how to improve romantic liaisons for men.
JM Ledgard's Giraffe Read Transcript
06/08/2007
JM Ledgard, author and journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, speaks about his novel Giraffe, a meditation on captivity, the failures of Communism, the strangeness of these gentle, towering, vertical creatures.
Giraffe tells the story of the slaughter of the world's largest captive herd at the Dvur Králové zoo in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on April 3, 1975. The herd, forty-nine in all, had been captured in Africa two years earlier and brought to the Europe with the joint aim of creating a new Czech subspecies, the Camelopardais Bohemica, and to entertain the workers.
When it was discovered the giraffes were suffering from a deadly virus, the authorities feared infection of the local animal population, and so on the night of the May Day celebrations the whole herd was ordered to be slaughtered. The incident was to remain a tightly guarded state secret; that is, until now...
Jonathan Ledgard is speaking today to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown from the BBC studio in Nairobi, Kenya.
Science writing about the occult with Deborah Blum
19/07/2007
Mixing science and writing and the supernatural doesn't always make science fiction. In this case, Pulitzer prize winning science writer, Deborah Blum has written a factual book called Ghost Hunters: The Victorians and the Hunt for Proof of Life After Death.
Deborah Blum won the Pulitzer Prize for science writing in 1992; she sits on boards of several international science writing organisations; and she is professor of Science Journalism at the University of Wisconsin and president elect of the National Association of Science Writers in America.
Here, interviewed by Kirsten Garrett, Deborah Blum (in Wisconsin) sets out the background for the intense interest in the occult in Victorian Times - but notes that the idea of ghosts was around long before then.
The story of Penguin Classics
04/07/2007
In the year when classic literature topped sales, we meet classics publisher at Penguin Books, Adam Freudenheim. This world-famous series consists of over 1,200 titles ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Bartholomew Roberts: King of the Caribbean Read Transcript
02/07/2007
Pet parrots, excessive drinking, skull and cross-bone flags -- these are all things we associate with pirates but, did you know that in the 18th century when you became a pirate, you had to sign up to special pirate rules, or that there's a tradition of homosexuality within the ranks of pirating?
Well, Bartholomew Roberts raided 400 boats in his short career as a pirate in the Atlantic from 1719-1722 but, unlike the classic image we have of pirates, he didn't drink, gamble or carouse with women. Richard Sanders is a pirate historian and he's written about this disciplinarian pirate in his book If A Pirate I Must Be: The True Story of Bartholomew Roberts, King of the Caribbean.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Richard Sanders about the allure of pirating for the common man.
Andrei Makine's The Woman Who Waited Read Transcript
13/06/2007
The Woman Who Waited tells the story of a woman's 30-year wait for the man she loves to return from the front during WW2, a wait that seems impossible and inhuman in the eyes of the book's narrator -- a callow, 26-year-old writer from Leningrad who has travelled to a remote northern village of the Soviet Union to record the local customs.
Andrei Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 but sought asylum in France in 1987. With his fourth novel, Le Testament Francais, he became the first author to win two of France's most important literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.
Andrei Makine was a guest of the recent Sydney Writers' Festival, where he talked with The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Mike Davis's history of car bombs
28/05/2007
Mike Davis is an urban theorist and is professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He first shot to fame in the early 90s with an analysis of the urban politics of Los Angeles in his book, City of Quartz. He has since written many books that build on the theme of cities, urban decay, surveillance and ecological disaster.
His latest book is all about the car bomb and it's called Buda's Wagon: A Short History of the Car Bomb. In it he chronicles the devastating impact of the car bomb from Saigon to Lebanon, trying to come to terms with how this low-tech weapon has brought established armies to their knees. The first known case of a car bomb was on Wall Street, New York in 1920 and the culprit was – most likely – the Italian anarchist Mario Buda.
For Mike Davis, the proliferation of the car bomb goes hand-in-hand with what he calls the militarisation of public space. In classic Davis doomsday language, he calls the car bomb the 'poor man's airforce'.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
13/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
Publishing Gallipoli
11/05/2007
We take a look at a publishing phenomenon: why every year around April it seems Australian bookshops are brimming with books on one particular subject, Gallipoli. Anzac Day in the new millennium is bigger than ever, there's an avid readership out there, and Australian publishers are cashing in.
But what do we get out of telling and re-telling the story? How has the story changed across the generations? What's the contemporary meaning of the Anzac story? And why are young people turning out in droves at Dawn Services and making the pilgrimage to Anzac Cove in Turkey?
Are we grasping icons of nationalism against the tide of globalisation; a kind of identity reaction to the fear that we will lose cultural distinction as the world becomes homogenised?
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
09/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
More than just recipes - Claudia Roden and the food and culture of the Middle East
29/04/2007
"When I was a child in Egypt", Claudia Roden writes in her latest book, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, "Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, and the mountain resorts of Lebanon were our Switzerland. People went there to recuperate." In this enchanting book, Claudia Roden returns to the countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco in search of new and old recipes and to find out how cooking has evolved since she first introduced us to these cuisines in the 1960s. The result is a tribute to the different culinary histories and contemporary food of these fascinating countries, from the mezze dishes of Turkey and the sweet pastries of Lebanon to the unmistakable flavours and spices of Morocco. Claudia's books are more than collections of recipes: they are evocative books full of stories and memories, histories of the people and cultures she meets along the way.
Roden, who describes herself as "both Arab and Jew", was born to a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Cairo, where she grew up eating - and questioning the origin of - food from all over the Middle East. She began by collating recipes at a young age from everybody she met, from family members to virtual strangers. "Food was," she explains, "a way of re-connecting with my culture - my lost heritage. And the discovery of a 13th century manuscript in the British Library eventually led to my interest in food sociology and anthropology."
Today we hear Claudia Roden recorded at the last Edinburgh International Book Festival.
More than just recipes: Claudia Roden and the food and culture of the Middle East
27/04/2007
'When I was a child in Egypt', Claudia Roden writes in her latest book, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, 'Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, and the mountain resorts of Lebanon were our Switzerland. People went there to recuperate.'
In this enchanting book, Claudia Roden returns to the countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco in search of new and old recipes and to find out how cooking has evolved since she first introduced us to these cuisines in the 1960s. The result is a tribute to the different culinary histories and contemporary food of these fascinating countries, from the mezze dishes of Turkey and the sweet pastries of Lebanon to the unmistakable flavours and spices of Morocco. Claudia's books are more than collections of recipes: they are evocative books full of stories and memories, histories of the people and cultures she meets along the way.
Roden, who describes herself as 'both Arab and Jew', was born to a cosmopolitan Jewish family in Cairo, where she grew up eating – and questioning the origin of – food from all over the Middle East. She began by collating recipes at a young age from everybody she met, from family members to virtual strangers. 'Food was,' she explains, 'a way of re-connecting with my culture – my lost heritage. And the discovery of a 13th century manuscript in the British Library eventually led to my interest in food sociology and anthropology.'
Today we hear Claudia Roden recorded at the last Edinburgh International Book Festival.
James Barr on T.E. Lawrence in Arabia
24/04/2007
James Barr graduated from Oxford with a first in Modern History, went on to write leaders for the Daily Telegraph and now works in London. Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18 is his first book. Here he is speaking at last year's Edinburgh Festival.
Sarah Dunant's In the Company of the Courtesan Read Transcript
15/04/2007
The setting for Sarah Dunant's new novel In the Company of the Courtesan is 16th century Venice. It opens with the violent sack of Rome in 1527 by Spanish and German armies, and there we meet Bucino Teodoldi, a protective and clever dwarf employed by Fiammetta Bianchini, Rome's most celebrated courtesan, all of 21 years old.
Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant trained as a historian at Cambridge. She is known for her crime novels featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe, and more recently for her historical novels, the first of which was The Birth of Venus.
Sarah Dunant joined the Book Show from London and starts with a reading from In the Company of the Courtesan.
Felipe Fernández-Arnesto: the Idea of 'Nation'
30/03/2007
Today we talk about nations – sociologists call them 'vertical communities', which is an interesting image. But what do you think the concept 'nation' means? How does one go about thinking of a description? Are nations something testable and measurable – like the patch of land we inhabit and make our life on, within its designated borders? Or are nations more of an idea, an emotional or even mystical notion, to which we attach and derive our sense of belonging? And if that's the case what's happening to the concept of nations in our increasingly globalised world?
Some meaty questions there, and who better to explore the idea of nations and where they might be heading in the future than a historian? One who might look at past trends to determine where we might be heading in the future.
Felipe Fernández-Arnesto is a British/Spanish historian, and he is a man who moves with startling ease across large intellectual landscapes. By day, he is the Professor of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary University of London, and since 2005 has been Principe de Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University; and is a member of the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford.
He is a British historian on a truly grand scale, impressive not only for the volume, but the range of his output; including the books Millenium: A history of the Last 1000 Years, A History of Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, and Civilisations. He has also written a history of food, and a history of the world. And in his most recent book he's explored the idea of discovery – of how civilisations converge and diverge.
Filipe rejects the idea of progressive history. He says he wants history to be scientifically informed and generously defined. He's not a relativist or a postmodernist but a man who believes in objective historical reality, which is, in itself, quite a bold stance these days.
He has described the future as 'the past we have not experienced yet', and today he's going to explain why, according to the normal rules of futurology, nations should disappear from the 21st century lexicon ... and why they wont!
Here's the flamboyant Felipe Fernández-Arnesto recorded last August addressing an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Imagining alternative Australian histories Read Transcript
28/03/2007
Historians seem to enjoy imagining history as it might have been, and it's this 'what if' theme that is taken up by prominent Australian historians, in a collection of counterfactual histories edited by Sean Scalmer and Stuart McIntyre. It's called What if: Australian History as it might have been.
Kevin Murray is the director of Craft Victoria and he has developed a number of counterfactual art exhibitions himself. He enjoyed reading the book and reviews it for the Book Show.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen
25/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
In Becoming Jane, director Julian Jarrold has presented Jane Austen, played by the very becoming Anne Hathaway, as a girl with the same lusts and drives as any young women, but who is restrained by the etiquette of the age.
The film concentrates on a small part of Jane's life, when she was 21 years old and living with her family at Steventon in Hampshire. There she fell in love with handsome Irishman Tom Lefroy (played by James McAvoy), who could not afford to marry. We know through Jane's letters to her sister Cassandra that the pair danced together at balls, flirted, and then parted forever. Because little biographical record survives, that's all we know for sure.
However Jon Spence, American-Australian writer and author of 2003's Becoming Jane Austen—the biography on which the film is heavily based—has turned to the novels for insight. He says that there is no doubt that Tom was the love of Jane's life, and that the passionate heights and quick demise of that love fuelled and inspired all six of Jane's great romantic novels—from the young and lusty Pride and prejudice through to the darker and more mature Persuasion.
He says another figure to loom large in Jane's writerly imagination was her glamorous and flirtatious cousin Eliza de Feuillide, whose hot pursuit of Jane's dandyish brother Henry Austen occupied the writer's thoughts for years.
Jon Spence is speaking today from Sydney to The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Becoming Jane's will be released on 29 March 2007.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen Read Transcript
22/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
