April 2016From the committeeThe annual general meetingThis will be held in June, on Monday, 6th June in the Library at 10.30am. This will be followed by a Committee meeting. The current Committee members feel we have held the same positions for a number of years, and we think that new blood on the Committee would be very welcome. We feel sure there would be fresh ideas and enthusiasm in the area of fundraising and new membership. Please come to our AGM. You would be most welcome.

Winter raffleThe Committee has decided to run this raffle again this winter, but it will be a smaller raffle, containing only items donated by our Committee and the membership. Already, we have knitted woollen socks, gloves, scarves...all knitted by talented members of the Committee. We would be delighted if you wish to contribute and items could be left at the Library. Tickets will go on sale at the markets at the end of April, May and June and on Saturday mornings in the Library. If you wish to get some tickets to sell, just get in touch with Mary DeGabriele on mdegab@hotmail.com

Member's book reviewsWe would be delighted to use your book reviews in our Newsletter. They just have to be handed in at the Library for Ian Greenhalgh or sent to our efficient secretary, Bronwyn Meredith on meredithkeller@bigpond.com

We look forward to seeing you at our AGM.

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

Book Reviews

The Secret Chord Geraldine Brooks

This book tells the story of King David through the eyes of the prophet Natan. Despite the fact that David killed Natan's father and uncle for refusing to give him and his outlaw band supplies, Natan becomes David's close friend, confidante and adviser. Natan foresees that David will become ruler over a large empire and that his sons will be rulers after him.

David does achieve the words of the prophecy but only by means of robbery, violence, horrifying cruelty, deceit, rape, adultery and a selfishness which showed total disregard for anyone's welfare but his own. David was the last of eight sons and ignored by his father. He, therefore, lavished love and indulgence on his first four sons who then grew up in his own image of selfishness and cruelty; only Solomon, who spent much of his time with Natan, proved worthy of David's crown. Finally, David's acts were such that even Natan turned against him.

The book is well written and sticks closely to the story of David told in the Old Testament (Book of Samuel and Chronicles). Despite all of David's actions, the author finds much in him to admire; but I was not of the same mind and I found this an unpleasant book to read. I feel that the constant stream of atrocities of one kind or another left no room for a solid story. Admittedly, I have done no bible study since leaving high school (a long time ago!) but I have carried the image of David the slayer of Goliath, the writer of beautiful songs and a fine harpist. This book has radically changed my opinion.

Jean Jackson

The witches: Salem 1692 Stacey SchiffBefore reading The witches: Salem 1692 by Stacey Schiff I was vaguely familiar with the story of the 1692 witch-hunts in Salem near Boston. The events in Salem were simple but horrifying. Two hundred Salem citizens aged from six to eighty were accused of witchcraft, usually by an adolescent girl, charged, gaoled, tried, and returned to languish in gaol. Twenty were hanged and one died under torture. By 1693 the panic had run its course, the prosecutions ceased and some victims were compensated. Stacey Schiff has taken these bare facts and, through an adroit combination of extensive but unostentatious research, elegant use of source materials, high quality illustrations and writing which is novelistic in its vividness and clarity, has created a page-turning work of history.

I was completely engrossed in Schiff’s recreation of the world of seventeenth century Salem. She portrays a society tormented by almost constant anxiety, stumbling on the brink of starvation. Communities were threatened by ongoing attacks by thedispossessed Native Americans and daily subjected to harsh and grueling work. Their powerful belief in the literalism and inerrancy of the Bible created a society where fear of the Devil made it all too easy to believe that his agents roamed amongst them.

One of the most interesting features of the book for me was Schiff’s examination of the role of the group of the young female accusers. Their hysterical outbursts, seizures, mysterious wounds, body contortions, elaborate tales of flying and witches Sabbathsseem bizarre until she links it to the powerlessness of girls and women in Puritan society.The witches was one of those rare books which I resented finishing. There can be no greater praise for any book.

Bronwyn Meredith

An Afterword to the Review: The witches: Salem 1692

I think we all appreciate our Library and the work done by its staff. My experience of borrowing The witches certainly enhanced my appreciation.

I heard Stacey Schiff interviewed on Radio National and decided that I would like to read her book. Off I trotted to the Library, fully expecting that I would need to get it on an inter-library loan. On my way to search the catalogue I (somewhat lazily) asked Ian Greenhalgh, our Library manager, if Armidale Dumaresq had a copy. Within minutes the copy was in my hot little hand. Cheers for the committed and professional librarians who select the collection, serve the public and follow up our enquiries.

If you have a similar story about the library that you would like us to include in the newsletter, you can email it to Bronwyn Meredith meredithkeller@bigpond.com (Please let me know if you want your name included. No need to do so if you feel reticent).

New in the Library

Some melancholic reflections, perhaps expected in autumn, lead off this month’s selections. A little chaos follows Kate Winslet’s character into Louis XIVth’s Versailles, but also includes a last glimpse of Alan Rickman (who also directed the movie). Jenny Hocking reminds us of Gough Whitlam’s life with a two-volume definitive biography and of his political departure with the slim Dismissal dossier: everything you were never meant to know about November 1975. Sir Roy Strong celebrates his 80th birthday by dressing up: John Swannell has photographed him in multiple guises in Sir Portrait: thirty portraits of Roy Strong (“a work of playful connoisseurship”).

Michael Sexton recounts his life On the edges of history in a memoir of law, books and politics. Patrick McGilligan has dug deeply to expose The young Orson, revealing the years of luck and genius on the path to Citizen Kane – and the film has recently re-entered our collection as an import DVD.

Stuart Sim persuasively argues a Philosophy of pessimism, engaging with such chapter headings as “I think, therefore I expect the worst” and “The benefits of a

half-empty glass: pessimism as a lifestyle”. Eric Schlosser frightens the life out of us with Gods of metal, slimly reporting on a break-in at a Tennessee high-security weapons complex (“Sitting not far below my feet, there was a thermonuclear warhead about twenty times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, all set and ready to go. The only sound was the sound of the wind”). There are several wonderful volumes in the Braziller series of Australian poets brought in from the US: Robert Gray’s Daylight saving, Bronwyn Lea’s The deep north, Philip Hodgins’ First light and Judith Beveridge’s Hook and eye.

Vivian Gornick continues to write her attachment to New York with The odd woman and the city: a memoir (following the earlier Fierce attachments). Cintra Wilson praises the outlandish in Fear and clothing: unbuckling American style. And Mark Greif explores earlier manifestations of that country’s spirit in The age of the crisis of man: thought and fiction in America 1933-1973.

Other American manifestations are available in the fields of food (Savoring Gotham: a food lover’s companion to New York City), herbs (The new American herbal by Stephen Orr) and mixed martial arts fighting (Ronda Rousey’s My fight your fight).

There are also US stories about technological impacts (Television is the new television: the unexpected triumph of old media in the digital age and Exposed: desire and disobedience in the digital age) and the attractions of fame in that society (Golden years is a novel by Ali Eskandarian, an Iranian rock musician, written before his murder in 2013 and telling of “excess and spirited decadence” in the first decade of the 21st century in New York, Teheran and Dallas among a group of Iranian musicians in thrall to American beats with “visions of Ancient Assyrian Futurism”).

Meanwhile, our representations of the rest of the world range widely – from Australian agriculture and consumption (James Halliday’s Varietal wines: a guide to 130 varieties grown in Australia and their place in the international wine landscape), through central Asian building (Heritage of the Mughal world: the Aga Khan historic cities programme) to the art of Holland (Masters of the everyday: Dutch artists in the age of Vermeer).

From an Asian festival which attracts half a million visitors (Art place Japan: the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale and the vision to reconnect art and nature), through a

reflective Argentinian dialogue (Conversations between Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari) to an even quieter European consideration (Vincenzo Ferrone’s The enlightenment: history of an idea), this month covers lots of territory.

Gregor Hens meditates on his own addiction in Nicotine, translated from the German (and meets his match in an even more addicted and entertaining presenter, Will Self, in this conversation from the London Review Bookshop). Dominic Ziegler ventures on to the world’s ninth-longest stream, observing Russia and China from Black Dragon River: a journey down the Amur River at the borderlands of empires. And Carlo Rovelli offers an 83-page gem-like introduction to all the big questions (the theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind) with Seven brief lessons on physics, translated from Italian.

The Nobel Prize has garnered lots of translators for Frenchman, Patrick Modiano, and The black notebook: a novel becomes the eighth of his works in our Library from one of seven translators. Mikheil Javakhishvili, on the other hand, has, it seems, only one translator and one work translated in Australian libraries - Kvachi: a novel is from the Georgian, and in the vigorous sociability of that Caucasian country, its hero is a swindler, womanizer, cheat, perpetrator of insurance fraud, bank robber, associate of Rasputin, filmmaker, revolutionary, and pimp. Ben Judah interprets the new massively multicultural life of an English metropolis with This is London: life and death in the world city (“More than half of those who live in the UK's capital came from somewhere else - and most arrived in the last ten years”).

Christopher Tyerman also explores complex logistical matters in How to plan a crusade: reason and religious war in the high Middle Ages. Francois Bouguignon sweeps a wide economists’ net in The globalization of inequality. The Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates something with almost equally wide coverage: The fabric of India.

Finally, a rush of wonderful books on iconic figures of Western civilisation: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Goya: the portraits), Giovanni Bellini (In a new light: Giovanni Bellini’s “St Francis in the desert”), David Hume (an intellectual biography from James Harris) and Marcel Proust (Proust: the search by Benjamin Taylor and a fascinating graphic interpretation of Swann’s way by Stephane Heuet – your chance to more easily absorb at least the first volume of In search of lost time).