ISBN: 9780670918874

RRP: $32.95

Publisher: Penguin

If you were to read the title, jacket blurb or publicity material for Robert McCrum’s new book you could be excused for assuming that it dealt largely with a modern phenomenon. ‘Globish’ or Global English is, after all, a relatively modish expression. You may be surprised, then, that McCrum starts his enjoyable Globish story more than two thousand years ago in the tar pits of Denmark.

It takes McCrum roughly 200 pages of the 268-page book to reach the postcolonial ‘Globish’ speaking world of the recent past. The bulk of this material – the history of the English language – has been well covered elsewhere, including a number of times by McCrum himself. Nonetheless, Globish offers a lively, entertaining account at a brisk pace and on this basis alone is a worthy addition to the fold. McCrum offers all the usual elements, from the Norman Conquest to the Gettysburg Address, with humour and a journalistic gift for anecdote. But it was always through the prism of ‘Globish’ that this book was going to offer something different. Read more

War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times
Linda Polman
ISBN: 9780670918966
RRP: $32.95

First, a little story.

In 1854 Florence Nightingale responded to a request from the British War office for volunteers to help care for sick and wounded soldiers from the Crimean War. Her experience of the intolerable conditions and the disregard the War Office showed its own troops led Nightingale to a lifetime of lobbying legislative bodies to improve conditions for injured soldiers and civilians alike. Five years later in Italy Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solferino and saw the 38,000 wounded soldiers left on the field after the armies had withdrawn. Dunant’s experience led directly to his founding the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Dunant’s organisation was founded on humanitarian grounds – aid was to be distributed wherever it was needed; a strict model of neutrality, impartiality and independence was championed. Nightingale was appalled. It was her view, she expressed to Dunant in correspondence, that an organisation like the Red Cross alleviated the responsibilities of warring governments. By providing aid on humanitarian grounds, on a voluntary basis and funded by charity, it would actually make it easier for armies to carry on killing one another.

In War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times, Dutch journalist Linda Polman argues that the problems raised by Florence Nightingale in the nineteenth century are still central to humanitarian aid in the twenty-first.  In many cases the aid industry not only doesn’t help, it actually makes things worse.  If Polman is right then the implications are scary. Expressions such as ‘the pressing moral issues of our times’ are often bandied around – particularly by aid organisations and book reviewers – but in the case of humanitarian aid such hyperbole is not inappropriate. The idea that a human enterprise of the scale and moral certitude of the modern aid industry is failing on a massive, systematic level is surprising and shocking. Read more

European settlement of the new world is almost invariably portrayed as a purely human occupation or “conquest”. In ecological terms, however, the real conquerors of Australia were not humans.

Brian Coman, Tooth and Nail: The Story of the Rabbit in Australia

One of my earliest memories is helping my parents lay out poisoned carrots. I wasn’t allowed to handle the poison, but I like to imagine I provided some help finding the burrows. That was in the late 1980s, a few years before the RHD virus – or calicivirus – had its devastating effect on Australia’s rabbit population. By the time Brian Coman’s Tooth and Nail was originally published in 1999, RHD had all but wiped out the rabbit in much of the country. Poisoning rabbits was no longer a standard part of Australian childhood, and for any number of reasons – environmental, economic, animal welfare – this was a very good thing. The publication of a revised edition ten years on is timely; rabbit numbers in Australia are again are on the rise. Read more