archytas's reviews
1670 reviews

I have struggled with how to review this. I have so many thoughts, and yet so many of many thoughts would spoil the experience of reading. So I settled on bullet points:
1. I didn't want to stop reading this book. Didn't want to put it down, didn't want it to end.
2. It captures so perfectly queer culture of the late 80s and 90s. The days when Oxford Street wasn't posh, and the Sleaze Ball was wild;
3. It also captures the sense of constant violence, abuse and attempted degradation. The way that AIDS education associated queerness with death. The casual acceptable homophobia of "only gays and drug users were affected"
4. Kelly pulls off a real trick here in telling a very contemporary story at the same time, about how quickly things can turn. This is a book to read for our moment.
5. It has been a recent preoccupation of mine thinking about how Australia's community-informed approach the HIV education changed so much. This is a very different angle to tackle it from, but worth it.
6. The book will reward you for close attention - it isn't necessary to enjoy it, but it will be satisfying :)

This is part memoir, part history, part fury as Hardisty recounts his experiences as CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Along the way, Hardisty clearly explains the threat of rising sea temperatures, the ways that clear science is obscured by politics, and the more complex issues around farm run offs. Someone primarily interested in those issues can probably find shorter form reads, however, and the real focus here is on the nitty gritty of managing science that becomes politicised. I did think the book would have benefiting from committing more explicitly to memoir - there is a brief reference to Hardisty's time in Ukraine which feels like it could have been a book - but I can see why the climate focus is too vital to shift too much away from.

This has an unusually languid pace for dystopian fiction, parallelling a personal unravelling with a social collapse, and a journey across now impermeable borders with a journey to some kind of self acceptance. There is a lot to love here - literary allusions abound, satire often stings deliciously sharp and the worlds - especially the aura surrounding a superstar musician - are wonderfully described.
I did struggle with the pacing, especially towards the end of the book, when I started to lose interest in the journeys. But I suspect this is going to be one of those books that never quite lets me go, even if it wasnt always absorbing to read.

"Pesando shakes his head when he remembers how Thomas fired him. “You’re not a team player,” Thomas said. Being a team player apparently meant following orders. When I asked Pesando if the criticism stung, he said no, absolutely not. “Because I wasn’t a team player, right? The team is committing Nazi war crimes. Do I want to be a team player? No.”"

"Part of what makes medical training so unnerving is how frequently you are thrust into new settings in which you don’t really know how to behave. Nothing in your previous life has prepared you to euthanize a dog in the physiology laboratory, or help deliver a round of electroconvulsive therapy on a nonconsenting patient, or attempt an episiotomy on a sixteen-year-old girl without anesthesia. Is this normal? Are we supposed to be doing this? Maybe, but maybe not. It’s hard to tell. Your gut reaction is often a combination of anxiety, revulsion, and social discomfort. Most people learn to suppress that reaction. A rare few learn from it."

This is a good book to read for our increasingly surreal times. Elliot here pursues the stories of whistleblowers as well as the gross medical abuses they exposed. His aim is to try to understand, what motivates whistleblowers, but also, underneath, the perennial question of how people could be otherwise. He is (at least seemingly) upfront with his interests: he became obsessed with exposing the death of a young man on his campus undergoing an experimental trial into a psychotropic drug the researchers had a financial interest in. And he wants to understand why he couldn't let it go and why stuff like this happens in the first place.
To do this, he tackles some of the most well-known scandals - the Tuskegee syphilis trials, the Willowbank hepatitis murders - and a few I was less familiar with, including a very hard-to-read Karolinska Institute scandal; the Protocol 126 bone marrow experiments in Seattle; Dunedin's 'unfortunate' experiment, and a 1960s military trial which drenched cancer patients in radiation.
I'm not sure how much I buy any of his theories in the end. He has this weird thing with honor which doesn't seem to have unpacked a bunch of his own cultural bias in coming at. But honestly, it doesn't matter. He comes across as refreshingly human, and one who, like the whistleblowers he documents, is more interested in making a difference than being heroic enough to admire.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is how, despite most of these whistleblowers being radically different in personality, background and, to some extent, politics (lefties* were over-represented), they all talked about their experience as if they had not had choices. Their motivations were about who they were, the oft-repeated ability to look at self in mirror, the sense that the choice, if it was that, was between self-annihilation or a rejection of this.
There are clues for how to make it easier for people to stand up to horrors. A big one is the role of a support system, the higher success rate for those working in a group as well as the need for solidarity in the face of the inevitable attacks. All of these whistleblowers suffered career losses of significance - many were outright fired. They lost friends, money, status and comforts. There is no Hollywood endings here (and remember, all of the cases covered were eventually exposed, the actions 'vindicated' - it is shuddering to think how bad things are for those who never bring what they are seeking to light).
There is also much to ponder in how we got here. Elliot covers some of the basics, including Milgram's experiments and what the conditions those showed were that helped people resist (he annoyingly states that Milgram went on to test this - actually, Milgram made his tests increasingly likely to comply, obsessed with proving most people were bastards. The tests with most quoted result were after more than a dozen rounds in which most people did not electrocute). These include having another person in the room, and not having the authority of an Ivy League logo to back up the study. It is not the motivations of the arseholes who designed these murderous studies that linger, however, but the legions who have all of the reasons not to do anything about it. There are so many characters here who, once the practices of, I dunno, inserting fake broken organs into people, or blasting them with lethal radiation, or interfering to stop their late-stage syphilis being treated, have been exposed and the practitioners discredited, then say the equivalent of "yes well, I did think that was a bit off really" while protesting that they wouldn't have been listened to. Which maybe they wouldn't have - but the glory of our protagonists is that they would point out, it isn't the point. It isn't about the difference you make outside, it is fundamentally about the difference you make to yourself.
And it is important to remind ourselves that there are lines not to cross. Elliot makes the point that medical training inculcates young doctors into a set of values - one that includes taking power away from patients, and assuming that it is important to fake expertise rather than withdraw. It is by these degrees, he shows, that we get used to things that should horrify us. With Willowbank, while the wrongdoing that got the place was that they deliberately infected patients, the reaction that hit the news was simply from the journalist seeing the conditions the children were living in, an environment of filth and violence, in which rape was so tacitly accepted it had a nickname.
The book never implies there are easy answers to any of this. And repeatedly points out that the obsessiveness of whistleblowers can make them difficult friends, lovers and even witnesses. But it is an assertion of humanity, of how much it matters to continue to value yourself and others, that kindness and respect matter as values. Because without them, we might all end up watching kids get tortured for profit.
*In one of those things I think I had forgotten, there is a direct line from the Young Lords to the exposure of the Willowbank scandal, as the young doctors that worked with them in running a NYC hospital move across to Willowbank...

Amberlin Kwaymullina might be my favourite young adult author writing, and well, now she is writing again. There is a smart, thought provoking set of ideas weaving through this perfectly paced adventure, but you don't have to notice that if you just want to get swept up in a good story.
It is a bold move to center the idea of deception as survival skill, one that will resonate with many who move through a world that inherently threatens them. 
There is a lot that is innovative here, but  Kwaymullina centers a trope (how fast things become tropes!) of a test that pits young people from different social groups against other, which balances the more unfamiliar ideas.
This felt very wrapped up as a standalone, but is listed as a series, so will be interested in how it goes.

"bending and stretching
time and space around itself
even light cannot escape

its gravitational field
tenderly embracing stars and dust
only for the black hole to eat them alive"
In Refugia, Shiosaki explores what the learnings from the Webb telescope's first year of operation meant to her while continuing her exploration of archives. The poems bring together ideas about time and trauma, explosions and endurance, and how oberservation through documentation impacts the learner. It is on theme with Shiosaki's previous work, but takes it into a more philosophical direction with startling imagery.

"once you cross the event horizon
you can never go back
not even the light

we can never go back
to a time of not knowing"

While the topics tackled here are important ones, I had some misgivings about this novel set in a school in Flemington. The ambition is significant - Middleton has a sprawling cast of characters, many of whom have their own plotlines going on - and more than one overarching plot line to boot. The problem is less that this gets confusing as, confusingly, it tends to get boring, as few of these people and storylines have enough invested in them to make them stick. The main exceptions - a teacher spiralling into burnout and a cop who is nowhere near the nice guy he imagines himself as - are outsiders to the community Middleton is trying to center. The young character with most pagetime, Tyler, a skinhead too angry to survive, often feels more like an exemplar come to life than a rounded character. The tempo of the book also feels slightly off, with the book never quite delivering on the crescendo it promises earlier on. 
The book has its strengths. A couple of the kids, Walid a young man trying to get on with his life, and Ali, a young musician who can think through beats, have real promise but don't get the space on the page to breathe. A story involving radicalisation and exclusion kept grabbing my attention as it flitted across the page.
Melbourne needs more literature set amid communities in public housing - hell, Melbourne needs more literature set outside the student, artist and community activist enclaves. It feels unfair to be overly critical one of the few authors trying to tell these stories, but that this is trying to do so much is largely symptomatic of how much needs to be done before we have the diversity of stories on the page that we have in the communities.

This cover is obviously genius, and while the book doesn't quite live up to it - what book could - it is pretty great. Elkin covers his time working as Victoria's first dedicated LGBTQI+ outreach lawyer, while he shifts his gender presentation. The memoir covers the exhausting experience of doing community law work, with a focus both on unrealistic case loads and the risk of vicarious trauma and of the inanity of grant cycles and community infighting. And of course, it covers the experiences of transitioning, with the constant guessing game of whether the emotional roller coaster is hormones or prejudice. Elkin comes across as a sensitive young man, hesitating to call judgement without context or doubt, and tackles the worlds of transmasculinity and butch with care. The crochet penis is a surprisingly touching section of the book (not that kind of touching, very PG) and this could go some way to broadening understanding.
I do, however, need to stop reading so many books set in Melbourne, which keeps reminding me of everything I disliked about living there.

“The more capacity we have to do things in space, the more capacity we have for self-annihilation.”
This is a really excellent science book - it tackles a tightly defined subject (is space settlement viable soon) and matches that with tight organisation and a well-rounded set of topics. It is also funny, which is a big bonus, and comes with cartoons. The Weinersmiths are space enthusiasts, but of the sceptical sort. Here, they seek to move the discussion away from "can we build really good rockets to get to space and into the realms of biology, shelter, social organisation, conflict, waste disposal and resource sustainability.
What they find, and they tell us repeatedly they didn’t start out this pessimistic, is that we don’t know how humans who are not highly trained and extremely healthy would survive in space. We don’t know if fetuses and infants can survive in low gravity environments. We don’t have ways to support disability. And we have barely worked out how to deal with feces in ways that aren’t inefficient and unpleasant.
There is also, much to those who think Mars will provide refuge from climate change, no viable current way to have a settlement without draining enormous resources from Earth. There is no realistic prospect of a self-sustaining settlement. And there is also, for the record, no pathway where survival on either the Moon or Mars, or a custom-built space station (which still has unsurmountable physics problems in building) is easier than a severelly climate change impacted Earth.
But the frightening bit - why is there always a frightening bit - is that space does provide rich opportunities for warfare or terrorism. Turns out flinging large things around is both relatively easy to do and potentially extremely destructive. The Weinersmiths spend a lot of time discussing the social aspects of possible settlement, pointing out that an autocratic, undemocratic company town or government equivalent breeding anger and discontent could go very badly wrong. Combine that with a society which potentially can’t accommodate disability - and which may be inclined towards genetic manipulation in order to deal with the risks of a small population interbreeding - and, well they don’t the use the space facism phrase, but it does kind of hang in the air. They have a good third of the book looking at International Law, and what kind of Commons-based arrangements might work, even as those fall badly out of favour.
But the book itself is not upsetting. Somehow, the Weinersmiths combine their sceptism with such a passion for the science, and for exploration itself - for the act of trying to find out how things work - that they respect the scientists they are sometimes poking at, and they leave you with the feeling that this should be doable, and is worth doing right (and very, very slowly).

McKinnon cuts a romance set among Australians fighting in PNG, with the stories of key figures working on the Manhatten Project, and a tired Japanese family to weave a story of the war.
While the connections between the stories in Japan and Los Alamos do not need to be spelt out - we know where this is going, the sections set in PNG feel a bit like a different story altogether. This isn't exactly bad - I think these are among the strongest sections of the book and the choppy structure works to give a sense of time passing and dislocation - but I did want, perhaps, a clearer connection than just 'war'. Partly, I suppose, they may have been there to give voice to the horror that so many of the Mahatten Project scientists kidded themselves they were ending.
I am not, it must be said, in the mood for Oppenheimer. I read this one alongside Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's excellent non-fiction deconstructing the fantasy of Mars cities, a project funded by meglomaniacs with a thing for Oppenheimer, which possibly made this the abiding schtick. But it feels as if we have rotated around this story so many times, and it never fails to make me furiously sad or sadly furious. McKinnon is smart to set the story in 1945, a time when it was not arguable that the atom bomb was needed to stop Hitler, and by which stage stopping the project would come at a very high personal and professional cost. Her characters twist in the wind, debating whether to share the intelligence with the soviets, a way perhaps of minimising the danger of atomic power by sharing it. It is hard to have sympathy, I have always found, for such brilliant people, many of whom took brave stances for others facing discrimination, who somehow pretended to believe that you could develop a weapon of mass destruction for peace*. 
The PNG section, while filled with the misery of stalking pesitilence, terrified jungle warfare and sexual violence, feels like the slower burn of the stories, centered on a gentle love story between two people slowly falling apart in the horror and yet detirmined to hang on to humanity and each other. It isn't something new, but McKinnon does it well and it provides welcome moral simplicity from the agonising at dinner parties and scenic drives in New Mexico.
I didn't love that few of the characters of colour survive, especially in the PNG storyline. It does start to feel a tad as if they must die so that our heroic couple can have some moments of clarity. I do think there are dangers in white Australian writing about countries Australia has colonised in various ways, in avoiding perpetuating a view that their lives are background to Australian dilemmas. And while Hiroko and her family are drawn compellingly, it can feel as if this family exists to show the consequences of other characters' choices as well.
Overall though, an engaging read, which succeeds in exploring the enormity of war.

*In my recently read Playing with Reality by Kelly Clancy, she tells of how HG Wells produced a war game for children hoping that the horror of the calculated casualties would put them off war forever. One of its most fervent players was a young Winston Churchill, so you can see how that turned out.