Past Programs
History - 2008
Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography
20/11/2008
Professor Jill Roe has produced a substantial biography of Stella Miles Franklin, the author of My Brilliant Career, who left a legacy that's remembered every year in the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Writing. It's the story of a feisty and smart young woman who had early literary success and who made a career in agitating for women's and workers' rights and in journalism. It's also a story of amazing application to the task of writing, whether the work was published or not, and it's a portait of the times in which she lived.
A thousand years of The Tale of Genji
13/11/2008
It's believed to be the world's first modern novel, penned a thousand years ago. The Tale of Gengi by Murasaki Shikibu starts when a woman of lower rank in the court gives birth to a son called Genji. He is favoured by the emperor because he's so beautiful, talented and likeable. He goes on to have many love affairs, which allows Murasaki Shikibu to explore ideas of love, court politics, friendship, life and death. Ten centuries on, the popularity and influence of this ancient text has not diminished and this year to honour the millenium of The Tale of Gengi, Japan is celebrating.
John Gascoigne on the enthralling Captain Cook
30/10/2008
The cultures of 18th century Pacific Islanders and Captain Cook aren't normally thought of as having many similarities. But John Gascoigne says when it came to the knowledge of navigation and its romance, these two cultures were closer than we think. Pacific Islanders knew 200 stars by name and both cultures shared an interest in all things nautical.
Professor John Gascoigne's book on Cook was short-listed for the 2008 NSW Premier's General History Prize. It's called Captain Cook: Voyager Between Worlds.
Nina Khrushcheva imagines Nabokov
29/10/2008
Nina Khrushcheva is a Russian writer and academic who proudly labels herself a foreigner.
She lives in New York City, from where she gazes at her country of birth, studying and writing about where it's been and where it's heading.
Nina Khrushcheva is well placed to have some views about Russia's past; she's the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
And Nina believes the man who holds a road map for Russia's future is another émigré writer who lived in America -- Vladimir Nabokov.
She's recently written a book called Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, in which she entwines the life and works of the renowned novelist with her own views and reactions to his words.
The ABC's Moscow correspondent Scott Bevan spoke with Nina Khrushcheva in her adopted city and she began by explaining that as she read Nabokov's books The Luzhin Defense, Lolita and particularly Speak, Memory she started to see how his writing could serve as a guide to how to be Russian in these changing times.
Melissa Lucashenko on survival
16/10/2008
In the second in this year's '3 Writers' Sydney PEN lecture series novelist and essayist Melissa Lucashenko looks at what we mean by survival, both historically and in the modern world. Is survival a sign of strength or is it just about hanging on?
Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant Read Transcript
01/10/2008
In her new novel The Lieutenant Kate Grenville once again visits the period of white Australian settlement to create her characters Daniel Rooke, a First Fleet soldier and astronomer, and Tagaran, a young Aboriginal girl he befriends. Daniel Rooke is taken up with his own interests, often going off to his makeshift observatory where he can be alone with his thoughts. His interest in languages takes over when he makes contact with Tagaran and between them they try to make sense of the place they find themselves in, between cultures.
Christina Thompson's New Zealand love story
25/09/2008
Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of a book called Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: An Unlikely Love Story.
She was for many years a postgraduate student and researcher in Australian universities and was also the editor of the Australian literary magazine Meanjin. 20 years ago she was on her way back to Australia after spending time with her family in Boston, and she went to New Zealand for a break. There she met a man called Seven, a Maori foundry worker, the seventh of ten children -- she married him and had three children.
Her book is an exploration of their life together, Pacific literature and an actual Pacific man. And it's also a meditation on colonialism and the essence of difference.
Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books
24/09/2008
The editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers, talks about Philip Roth's new novel Indignation. He also discusses the tragic story of scientist Nikolai Vavilov, persecuted in Stalinist Russia, and an essay by British travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron about Marco Polo's extraordinary 13th century journey east from Europe into the exotic lands of the Mongol Empire.
Kate Mosse in conversation at the Melbourne Writers' Festival Read Transcript
01/09/2008
Kate Mosse is the author of the blockbuster historical fantasies Labyrinth and Sepulchre, time slip novels in which contemporary characters find their lives entangled with figures from the past. Kate Mosse is also one of the founders of the Orange Prize for Fiction, a thirty thousand pound prize for a novel by a woman.
Who wrote Frankenstein? (repeat) Read Transcript
08/08/2008
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.
(First broadcast 26/10/2007)
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Inscriptions and marginalia - a tradition of annotations (repeat)
01/08/2008
How many of you feel comfortable about picking up a pen or pencil and writing inside a book that you might be reading? Although some people might consider this to be disrespectful of the work, there's a long tradition of inscribing thoughts around an existing text. A loose definition for these sorts of annotations is 'Marginalia'. Today on The Book Show we revisit a discussion about the function and value of these inscriptions over the centuries and what they can tell us about the journey a book has taken.
Joining the conversation are three people who have spent a great deal of time surrounded by books of all descriptions.
Professor Margaret Manion is one of Australia's most eminent and valued Art Historians, and brings a deep understanding of Medieval and Renaissance books and manuscripts.
Dr Nikki Hessell teaches Communication and Journalism at Massey University in New Zealand. Prior to that 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 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.
(First broadcast 19/10/2007)
Timbuktu manuscripts: Rodney Hall Read Transcript
21/07/2008
The Timbuktu manuscripts tell a history of African trade and scholarship. They include texts about astronomy, poetry, music, medicine, religion and women's rights. Because of their significance to African history there is a joint African movement to preserve them. Rodney Hall, one of our most eminent writers, has just been to Timbuktu and describes what he found.
Out of the East - spices and the medieval imagination Read Transcript
15/07/2008
The spice trade was a luxury trade which inspired all sorts of imperial missions that changed the course of world history. In his book Out of the East: spices and the medieval imagination Paul Freedman looks at the demand for spices in medieval times, how they were used, who they were used by and how they drove commerce and exploration.
Spurious and bogus Botany Bay literature
14/07/2008
Bogus stories about imaginary voyages to the Antipodes were popular in Britain in the 18th century.
And the most popular story from this time was A Voyage to New South Wales -- later just Voyage -- and its author was celebrity convict George Barrington, an elegantly dressed pickpocket who moved in exalted circles and who was sentenced to transportation to Australia in 1790.
Charles Dickens, Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe had heard of him, but he didn't actually write a word of these popular accounts of coming to Australia.
Nathan Garvey has been following the trail of where these bogus stories came from.
A bridge between orient and occident - Geert Mak Read Transcript
26/06/2008
Dutch writer, journalist and historian Geert Mak has written several books exploring particular places, including Amsterdam and Jorwerd: The death of The Village in Late Twentieth Century Europe. His latest book is called The Bridge and in it he focuses on one bridge in the city of Istanbul and the people who cross it, who work on it and who are drawn to it.
The future of the Miles Franklin Read Transcript
20/06/2008
Literary critic Geordie Williamson reflects on the impact of the Miles Franklin award on Australian literature in its 51-year history. He says that a part of Miles Franklin's dream for this award remains unrealised. In an article in The Australian he said he'd like to see the past winners reprinted before the close of the award's 51st year.
Queen of the Wits Read Transcript
19/06/2008
Who was Laetitia Pilkington? The 18th century satirist Jonathan Swift called her 'the most profligate whore in either Kingdom'. This was after he had once treated her as his protege. After such a public dumping, Mrs Pilkington had nothing to lose, and turned her own savage pen on her erstwhile mentor -- her memoir provides insights into Swift's strange behaviour. Norma Clarke has written a biography of the fascinating Mrs Pilkington called Queen of the Wits.
EW Cole and the Cole's Funny Picture Books Read Transcript
18/06/2008
A treasured reading memory for many Australians will be Cole's Funny Picture Books -- full of pictures and puzzles and limericks and optical illusions and strange, idealistic little blurbs about life, the universe, and everything. I suspect that, as children, we probably looked at the pictures and puzzles more than we read the text -- which by today's children's books standards is pretty dense. And at the time I certainly knew little about the books' creator, EW Cole.
Edward Cole was an extraordinarily skilled entrepreneur, though not to be confused with the storekeeper, businessman and philanthropist GJ Coles.
Edward Cole did not sell groceries, he sold books, and he was way ahead of his time understanding the value of publicity, advertising and branding. He drew huge crowds into his Bourke Street emporium, Cole's Book Arcade.
And Cole was also an idealist with a Utopian vision of how wonderful the world would be in the year 2000.
Lisa Lang has researched the story of the marvelous EW Cole and has written a book about him called Chasing the Rainbow.
Why writers choose anonymity Read Transcript
05/06/2008
Some writers have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent their names being associated with their published work. Seventy per cent of English novels published in the last three decades of the 18th century were anonymous. In the first three decades of the 19th century almost half were published either anonymously or under a pseudonym. Authors opting to keep their identities secret included Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott and Jane Austen, whose novels were orginally attributed to 'a lady'. In Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature John Mullan explores the reasons behind this wish by writers to keep their names from public view.
How did Winnie the Pooh get its name? Read Transcript
02/06/2008
How did those charming stories called Winnie the Pooh come to have this particular name?
In his collection Why Not Catch 21? Gary Dexter charts the stories behind the titles of many popular, controversial and important books.
Gary Dexter says the background story of the title of AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh involves a real life bear in London Zoo during World War One, and a swan called Pooh.
How the novel 1984 got its name
28/05/2008
In his collection Why Not Catch 21 - The Stories Behind the Titles, Gary Dexter has compiled the stories of how our favourite works ended up with their names.
While George Orwell was writing what is now the classic 1984 his working title for the book was The Last Man in Europe?
Gary Dexter explains how Orwell settled on 1984 as the title.
Parallel universes - the politics and history of alien abduction Read Transcript
08/05/2008
Stories of alien abduction, that is, close encounters of the fourth kind, have been around since the 40s.
Bridget Brown has cast her anthropologist's eye over these accounts and says that the sorts of stories abductees tell have intriguing parallels with political events and social changes that define the 20th century - things like the cold war, the biological revolution and ecological destruction.
They tell a story not just of individual experience but of the collective psyche and are a reflection of our fear about war and scientific progress.
The literary Karl Marx Read Transcript
06/05/2008
Karl Marx became one of the most significant political scientists of his age and then of the 20th century, but during his college years he wasn't sure what path to take in life. At one stage he considered a literary future but wasn't sure if he should write poetry, plays or fiction. He burned much of his lyrical work after his political transformation but his fictional attempts are contained in a violet notebook that he sent to his father.
Travis Holland's The Archivist's Story Read Transcript
27/04/2008
The Archivist's Story dramatises the Stalinist era purges of writers like Isaac Babel and Mandelstam.
The novel is based on the fanciful idea that maybe unknown writings of these authors escaped the incinerator. And that maybe an archivist at the Lubyanka prison, where these writers were interrogated, hid the banished works of purged writers.
In his debut novel, Travis Holland imagines that an archivist, Pavel, in a moment of moral courage, has rescued a manuscript of Isaac Babel's. Pavel is charged with burning the works of great Russian writers out of favour with the regime. This is particularly painful for him, as he used to be a literature teacher at a prestigious school before he wrongly denounced a fellow teacher who then committed suicide. Out of favour with the school, he is given a lowly job at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, ordering the documents of confiscated works to make their destruction more efficient.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Travis Holland about his novel, The Archivist's Story.
Travis Holland's <i>The Archivist's Story</i> Read Transcript
22/04/2008
The Archivist's Story dramatises the Stalinist era purges of writers like Isaac Babel and Mandelstam.
The novel is based on the fanciful idea that maybe unknown writings of these authors escaped the incinerator. And that maybe an archivist at the Lubyanka prison, where these writers were interrogated, hid the banished works of purged writers.
In his debut novel, Travis Holland imagines that an archivist, Pavel, in a moment of moral courage, has rescued a manuscript of Isaac Babel's. Pavel is charged with burning the works of great Russian writers out of favour with the regime. This is particularly painful for him, as he used to be a literature teacher at a prestigious school before he wrongly denounced a fellow teacher who then committed suicide. Out of favour with the school, he is given a lowly job at Lubyanka prison in Moscow, ordering the documents of confiscated works to make their destruction more efficient.
The Book Show's Sarah L'Estrange spoke to Travis Holland about his novel, The Archivist's Story.
Lewis Lapham looks at past thinkers on money Read Transcript
17/04/2008
Lewis Lapham is the editor of Lapham's Quarterly. The second edition of this new enterprise focuses on the history of money and what people have said about it.
Restoring the Montefiascone Library
17/04/2008
One imagines that anyone working with rare books must harbour a private fantasy about one day stumbling upon a collection of books that has remained hidden, or at least unrecognised for its true historical value. And the grand fantasy must surely be the discovery of an entire library that has been forgotten, neglected or ignored.
Well, such a library did come to light about 20 years ago, in the central Italian hill town of Montefiascone, a village that straddles a crater rim overlooking one of the largest volcanic lakes in Europe - Lago Bolseno.
A Seminary was built on the crater's edge, in the late 17th Century, by Marcantonio Barbarigo - the Bishop of Montefiascone and Corneto - and the focus of the Seminary, for the Bishop, was a beautiful library with vaulted ceilings and trompe l'oeil paintings. Over time this library became a space, not just for theological study but also for secular learning.
The library sustained serious damage during the Napoleonic Wars and then again during the 2nd World War. But nothing was quite as devastating as the building of a shower block directly above the library, during the early 20th Century. Subsequent major leaks through the roof did terrible damage to the collection, turning the library into a damp, mouldy habitat for rats, birds, fleas and all manner of other ravenous beasties.
UK-based Australian book conservator Cheryl Porter, was approached in 1987 to give advice on how best to approach the formidable job of trying to stop the damage and start the slow job of restoring the library to its former glory. Cheryl enlisted the help of one of Britain's most experienced rare book specialists - Nicolas Barker - who was, for many years, Deputy Keeper at the British Library, responsible for Conservation and Special Materials. Over the next 20 years, Nicolas and Cheryl organised volunteer groups of conservation specialists to visit the library annually, and in 1992 The Book Show's Michael Shirrefs joined one of these conservation teams. When he recently caught up again with Cheryl Porter and Nicolas Barker to find out how the project's progressing, he asked Cheryl about her first visit to the library, 21 years ago.
Linda Grant and the humanity of monsters Read Transcript
14/04/2008
In her new book The Clothes on their Backs British novelist and journalist Linda Grant explores the humanity of people cast as monsters, like her character Sandor Kovacs. He was brutalised by the Nazis in Hungary, but when he went to England he became a social pariah for being a slum landlord with an army of thugs.
Peter Cochrane: Colonial Ambition Read Transcript
07/04/2008
The story of Burke and Wills, and Ned Kelly -- these are the familiar characters in Australian history that re-surface in the popular imagination.
But why do we always return to these stories? Is it because, unlike America, we didn't have a war of independence, that our civil rights movement was overshadowed by what was happening on the international stage, that we formed government through consensus?
Is it because our colonial history is considered fusty and, well, a little dull?
Peter Cochrane thinks it doesn't need to be this way. He says that if historians used the toolbox of the novelist, Australian history would come to life.
Peter Cochrane is the author of Colonial Ambition, which won The Age Book Of The Year Award and was joint winner of the first Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History.
Colonial Ambition focuses on the character William Wentworth, and Peter wrote an article about this man's place in the human drama of our early colony in an article in the recent Griffith Review. The essay's called 'Stories From The Dustbin', and Peter joins Ramona Koval from the ABC's Sydney studios.
Advancing towards World War II
06/04/2008
In his latest book Human Smoke American writer Nicholson Baker questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid World War II at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler. Citing a wide range of documentation, newspaper and magazine articles, radio broadcasts, memoirs and diaries, he examines the motives of the United States and Britain for going to war.
Advancing towards World War II Read Transcript
01/04/2008
In his latest book Human Smoke American writer Nicholson Baker questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid World War II at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler. Citing a wide range of documentation, newspaper and magazine articles, radio broadcasts, memoirs and diaries, he examines the motives of the United States and Britain for going to war.
Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book Read Transcript
30/03/2008
In Geraldine Brooks's new novel People of the Book a young Australian book conservator travels to Bosnia to begin restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. In trying to discover the story of its miraculous survival, Hanna Heath sets in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect her life.
Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book Read Transcript
20/03/2008
In Geraldine Brooks's new novel People of the Book a young Australian book conservator travels to Bosnia to begin restoring the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. In trying to discover the story of its miraculous survival, Hanna Heath sets in motion a series of events that will profoundly affect her life.
Historian Jonathan Richards Read Transcript
11/03/2008
Jonathan Richards' new book The Secret War: A True History of Queensland's Native Police is the result of ten years research into the world of this group of armed men who operated on the state's frontier in the 19th century. More paramilitary organisation than police force, the native police was made up of mounted Aboriginal troopers under the command of white officers, who usually had a background in the British Army. Their role was to 'disperse' troublesome groups of Aborigines. Jonathan Richards tells Peter Mares what he discovered about the real meaning of 'dispersal'.
Chinese memoirs
29/02/2008
The publication of Jung Chang's Wild Swans in 1992 kick-started a full-blown autobiographical genre involving first-person narratives, mostly written in English by Chinese women, about their own or their families' suffering during the Cultural Revolution. Today The Book Show examines the rise of what some critics have called the 'Nightmares of the Cultural Revolution' genre and asks whether it has been influenced by western expections.
Dancing in the Streets with Barbara Ehrenreich Read Transcript
17/02/2008
In her latest book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, acclaimed US writer and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich traces the connections between communal dance parties (like Berlin's Love Parade) and the collective atmosphere of sporting events with the ancient Greek cult of Dionysus, early Christian ecstatic dance, the European carnivale and tribal rituals.
Dancing in the Streets with Barbara Ehrenreich Read Transcript
29/01/2008
In her latest book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, acclaimed US writer and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich traces the connections between communal dance parties (like Berlin's Love Parade) and the collective atmosphere of sporting events with the ancient Greek cult of Dionysus, early Christian ecstatic dance, the European carnivale and tribal rituals.
Bartholomew Roberts: King of the Caribbean Read Transcript
15/01/2008
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
03/01/2008
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 2007 Sydney Writers' Festival, where he talked with The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
01/01/2008
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.
