Jacqueline Kent

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga' by Imre Salusinszky

December 2019, no. 417 • 26 November 2019

Since 9/11 and all its attendant horrors, the story of the bomb that exploded outside Sydney’s Hilton Hotel early on the morning of 13 February 1978, killing three people and injuring nine others, has largely been cast aside. However, it is considered the worst terrorist act perpetrated on Australian soil. It had wide ramifications at the time, and murky issues still surround it. ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Tim Costello: A lot with a little' by Tim Costello

October 2019, no. 415 • 25 September 2019

This autobiography by Tim Costello – Baptist minister, lawyer, anti-casino activist, CEO of World Vision Australia for thirteen years – is a clear and straightforward account of his life, free of obvious literary artifice. What Costello has tried to do, he says, is to understand and explain how his memories and experiences, especially of childhood and family life, have made him develop as an a ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Faber & Faber: The untold history of a great publishing house' by Toby Faber

June–July 2019, no. 412 • 23 May 2019

The ‘untold history’ of Faber & Faber should be a cause for celebration. For so many of us, possessing the unadorned, severe paperbacks with the lower-case ‘ff’ on the spine meant graduation to serious reading: coming of literary age by absorbing the words and thoughts of Beckett, Eliot, Larkin, Stoppard, Hughes, Plath, Miłosz, Golding, Ishiguro, Heaney, Carey, Golding, Barnes – Dju ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'The Blackburns: Private lives, public ambition' by Carolyn Rasmussen

April 2019, no. 410 • 25 March 2019

If you were young and energetic and a believer in a range of progressive causes, Melbourne in the first three decades of the twentieth century was an exciting place. It was even better if you were in love. Doris Hordern and Maurice Blackburn, the joint subjects of Carolyn Rasmussen’s deeply researched and absorbing new biography, understood each other’s dedication to radical politics from the ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'The Stalking of Julia Gillard: How the media and Team Rudd contrived to bring down the Prime Minister' by Kerry-Anne Walsh

September 2013, no. 354 • 22 August 2013

On 7 September 2010, seventeen days after the last federal election, the Australian Labor Party, led by Julia Gillard, just managed to crawl across the electoral line, thanks entirely to the support of independent MPs. In constitutional terms, the ALP had passed the only test needed to form government: a majority on the floor of the House of Representatives. But it soon became abundantly clear tha ... (read more)

Jacqueline Kent reviews 'Reg Grundy' by Reg Grundy

December 2010–January 2011, no. 327 • 01 December 2010

‘All I ever wanted to do was to entertain,’ declares Reg Grundy. Like most such apparently simple statements, this needs a bit of unpacking, and that’s what Grundy does in his autobiography. Not quite a rags to riches story, it is the tale of a young man with a thorough knowledge of his market, a sharp eye for business opportunities, and consummate talent as a salesman, and of his journey to ... (read more)