 |
| BiP staff review by Christine |
Dead Wake: The Last Voyage of the Lusitania
Erik Larson
Apr 2015 | Scribe | $35pb
Erik Larson, author of In The Garden of Beasts and The Devil in the White City, has reminded us of another centenary in his excellent re-telling of the Lusitania sinking one hundred years ago on 7th May 1915. Larson has diligently researched his subject and presents it from various viewpoints: the American and British governments and their espionage activities; Winston Churchill and the Admiralty; Cunard, the ship’s owners; the ship’s captain William Turner and also vignettes on chosen passengers of interest. But by far the most interesting portraits Larson paints are of the German U-boat’s captain and crew who actually sank the hapless ship. I found Larson’s descriptions quite riveting. Naturally any decent disaster deserves, and usually gets, some good conspiracy theories attached to it and Larson provides plenty of ‘grist to the mill’. Dead Wake fleshed out my patchy knowledge of the Lusitania’s final voyage and I found it truly gripping and enthralling.
 |
| BiP staff review by Chris |
Inventing Her Own Weather: A Biography of Thea Astley
Karen Lamb
May 2015 | UQP | $32.95pb
Born in Brisbane in 1925, Thea Astley grew up in a family where her parents were not close. Karen Lamb describes how her strict Catholic upbringing and later work in remote locations as a teacher led Astley to see herself as ‘set apart’. She developed an engaging public personality as a prominent Australian author, yet kept her private life out of the public eye. Her books, however, were full of her experiences: ‘I work from life, as I know it, as I have known it’. Lamb puts in context Astley’s beginnings as a writer in an era when women writers were not regarded as equal to their male counterparts. Even though she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, Thea Astley felt that she was a writer who was ‘out of favour’. Karen Lamb has had considerable experience researching Australian literature. Inventing Her Own Weather is the first full literary biography of one of Australia’s best writers of the second half of the twentieth century. It is an important resource for students of Australian literature and an insight into the life of an author whose own existence was such a profound influence and source of inspiration for her writing.
