In Short Non-fiction

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 3, 2009

Reviews by Bruce Elder

FIGHTING FOR THE CROSS

By Norman Housley

Yale University Press, 356pp, $59.95

From the moment George Bush used the word "crusade" to describe the US response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the history of the original Crusades has been a backdrop and subtext to the current conflict between the US and Middle Eastern militants. Yet, beyond vague stories of knights going off to fight against Muslims to restore Jerusalem to Christian control, few people really have any idea what happened in the Middle East from 1095 to 1291.

This is the story of how Pope Urban II turned his back on the Christian notion of "non-resistance to evil" and exhorted Christians throughout Europe to liberate Jerusalem "in the name of God". He fundamentally altered the Christian attitude to war and unleashed a series of Crusades, which lasted for two centuries.

Norman Housley, head of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester, is recognised as a world authority on the Crusades. He is also a fine writer with a nose for stories that humanise these huge, dramatic events.

LEISUREVILLE

By Andrew D. Blechman

UQP, 244pp, $32.95

Just an hour north of Orlando airport in Florida there is a brave new world known simply as "The Villages". It spreads over 8000 hectares, has more than 160 kilometres of golf buggy tracks, is home to 75,000 people and has dozens of swimming pools, supermarkets, movie theatres and churches. It is the largest gated community in the world and caters exclusively for people over 55. No children are allowed.

It is a true "gerotopia". When his neighbours declared The Villages paradise on earth and moved from their small town in New England, Andrew D. Blechman felt he had stumbled upon a bizarre new manifestation of the baby boomer zeitgeist and headed off to spend a month with his journalistic pen and pad at the ready. The result is fascinating.

This is a true story with an uncanny resemblance to a combination of The Truman Show and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The Villages are pristine and picture-perfect. Life is bland and uncomplicated. Is this retirement heaven or hell?

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

By Kate Jennings

Quarterly Essay, 132pp, $15.95

Given the millions of words that have already been written about the rise of Barack Obama and the collapse of the US financial system, can anything new be written about these great issues of our time?

Kate Jennings, well-known Australian feminist, poet and writer, who emigrated to the US in the late 1970s, has the disinterested distance of an expatriate and she was once a speechwriter on Wall Street. She has seen inside the belly of the beast and she can write.

The result, an essay stretching over 90 pages, is part diary, part rumination on the remarkable Obama campaign and part analysis of the folly of Wall Street. Jennings was desperately hoping for an Obama victory. She writes that it was a time "when every day felt like a year and we became slightly crazed with worry but also mesmerised, unable to switch off the cable news stations".

This is a diary that captures the drama of the election campaign while offering sober insights into the madness behind the Wall Street financial collapse.

PICK OF THE WEEK

TRISHA: AS I AM

By Trisha Goddard

Macmillan, 305pp, $33

Those who remember Trisha Goddard as a Play School and 7.30 Report presenter may wonder whatever happened to Australia's "first black news anchorwoman". Well, she has become a kind of Oprah Winfrey of British television with a daytime talk show called, appropriately, Trisha. This is a straightforward, chronological autobiography - the kind "celebrities" write - that is remarkable for its unswerving frankness and its ability to record moments in a golden life that were, to put it mildly, very painful.

Goddard recalls the racism of a school in Norfolk where she and her siblings were the only black children. She analyses her relationship with her much-loved but violent father, describes in detail an attempted rape when she was 15, gives a blow-by-blow description of a violent boyfriend who beat her, describes her sister's schizophrenia and the tragedy of her suicide, and trots through the bewildering variety of jobs she had before she came to Australia, where she married a Liberal politician who was a control freak and who died from AIDS. The marriage led to Goddard's job as a current affairs reporter with SBS. A few months later she started with Play School and then she was appointed as the anchor for The 7.30 Report. Goddard describes, in disturbingly graphic detail,the racism that flowed from the appointment, including offensive comments from Ron Casey, regularly being called a "nigger" and having someone daub KKK on her door.

Perhaps the best section of the book is her description of her difficult six-year marriage to Mark Greive, a tape editor she met at SBS. Goddard describes the birth of her two daughters and the infidelity, indifference, coldness, ambition and ugliness that flowed through the marriage. In many ways Goddard's life has been a soap opera but it is hard to deny her ability to look at the highs and lows with honesty and even harder not to be seduced by the entirely appropriate, if predictable, happy ending to this drama-laden story.

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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