Compelling and harrowing
An account of women who stood up to the Nazis is an extraordinary portrait.
In LES PARISIENNES: HOW THE WOMEN OF PARIS LIVED, LOVED AND DIED IN THE 1940s (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $39.99),
biographer/historian Anne Sebba uses diaries, memoirs, press records and survivor interviews to build an extraordinary portrait of women’s lives under the Nazis.
Stories of collaborators and the privileged who sat out the war in the Ritz sit side by side with harrowing accounts of Resistance workers and women taken to the death camps. War’s aftermath is also well covered: she asks why women who slept with Germans were harshly punished when the male collabos running businesses with Nazis got off scot-free.
The Guardian’s bureau chief in Moscow until his expulsion for investigating topics that embarrassed the Kremlin, Luke Harding continues to focus on important issues of freedom and secrecy. In
A VERY EXPENSIVE POISON: THE DEFINITIVE STORY OF THE MURDER OF LITVINENKO AND RUSSIA’S WAR WITH THE WEST (Faber, $32.99),
he takes a meticulous look at how and why Vladimir Putin’s critics have an uncanny habit of turning up dead – four in Britain alone – and the rare poisons, developed in a dedicated Russian lab, that killed them.
Oral cultures transmit all their learning
from memory: food sources, clothing and housing construction, tribal history, genealogy and traditions, where danger lies and much more. Australian science writer Lynne Kelly studied techniques used by non-literate cultures around the world to commit information to memory. In
THE MEMORY CODE (Allen & Unwin, $39.99),
she examines memory aids from various indigenous cultures, starting with aboriginal song lines and including those baffling ancient monuments that were built, she claims, as learning centres. Plausibly argued.
Fracking is humanity’s saviour, allowing us to extend our dependence on cheap oil.
Or it is a dangerous
environmental menace, polluting water tables and causing earth tremors. Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk takes the latter view in
SLICK WATER: FRACKING AND ONE INSIDER’S STAND AGAINST THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL INDUSTRY (Greystone Books, $42.99),
about Jessica Ernst’s struggle against undisclosed fracking around her home that made her well water flammable and the legal obstacles Big Oil put in her way. A careful but impassioned look at the wider effect of “industrial carpet bombing” in North America, and the corporate deceit and government abuse often surrounding it. How did a mild-mannered English teacher from Hangzhou end up as the founder and boss of one of the world’s biggest companies? Old China hand Duncan Clark relates the phenomenal rise of
ALIBABA: THE HOUSE THAT JACK MA BUILT (HarperCollins, $39.99).
An early adviser to Alibaba, Clark has known Ma long enough to surprise us with his strong Australian connections (an Aussie paid for Ma’s education) and a quip that he dances like Elaine from Seinfeld. Although it’s a complex business development story, Clark’s approachable style makes it painless.