Moorhouse is a crackerjack travel writer and storyteller, and he has impeccable timing: Sydney will host the 27th Olympiad...
A keen tour of Sydney, Australia—streetwise and savvy, both culturally and historically—from Moorhouse (Sun Dancing, 1997, etc.).
The town named Sydney may have risen where the first convict ships from Britain hove into the glorious natural harbor, but the aboriginal population was there well ahead of them. Moorhouse begins his story with the Aborigines, by way of their Dreaming and artwork and their precarious survival, disavowing anything more than the briefest of introductions but delivering a respectful measure more. Taking the role of observer—though he is more than happy to sample the city’s food and beverages and skim the waters of Tank Stream and the harbor—Moorhouse’s sedate and ever-so melancholy voice moves on to touch all over Sydney’s history and landscape. He recounts the sorry years of the town as a penal colony, the joys of its Botanic Gardens; he delves into institutionalized racism and the bullying of the church in secular life. He takes readers on a slow ramble through the remnants of a gracefully proportioned cityscape that early learned to separate home and industry and put the emphasis on greenery, which only recently and with unfortunate results has “taken a back seat to the needs of capital” in the form of tacky high-rise financial buildings. He explains the importance of cricket and horse racing, the theater and opera and the public library. But most of all he sings the praises of the city’s fine, safe harbor. It is a waterscape that has smitten Moorhouse, a shimmering world that is the final reference point to the land that surrounds it, a working harbor that is still a valued presence when many cities have come to shun their watery origins.
Moorhouse is a crackerjack travel writer and storyteller, and he has impeccable timing: Sydney will host the 27th Olympiad this summer, which ought to spur plenty of interest in the city.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100601-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
A superficial, unreliable profile of the PLO's often articulate, photogenic spokesperson during part of the Intifada, and particularly during the Madrid and Washington negotiations with Israel (199193). Victor, a novelist as well as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, maintains near the beginning of her book that Hanan Ashrawi ``was the one person who had made possible [Yasir] Arafat's presence'' on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, when his famous ``handshake'' with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took place. Not only does she not make a case for this extraordinary claim, but Victor demonstrates how, throughout most of 1993, the PLO leader kept Ashrawi ``in the dark'' about the secret Oslo negotiations. Her book also is riddled with the kind of errors that make one question her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, Victor twice claims that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued in 1921; the second time, she asserts that it ``provided for two states, Israel and Palestine, to exist side by side.'' Nonsense: The declaration made no reference to any ``state,'' only to Great Britain supporting the establishment of a ``Jewish homeland'' in Palestine, which was soon to be a British mandate. Equally irritating are Victor's stylistic excesses, her use of the kind of hyperbolic prose found in ``puff'' pieces, such as her assertion that Ashrawi's ``razor-sharp responses captured world opinion every time that she faced a camera.'' Earlier this year, Ashrawi resigned from the PLO leadership to establish and head an independent Palestinian human rights monitoring group. It is this, not the media glitz she enjoyed as a PLO spokesperson, that may lend her career its real significance. Until we know whether and how Hanan Ashrawi will contribute to the humanitarian nature of a possible Palestinian state, any biography of her, particularly one as lacking in historical and biographical depth as Victor's, is premature.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-103968-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Not everything you wanted to know, and probably some you didn't (or didn't know you wanted to know, or were afraid to ask because someone might be offended, like ``What was so great about the Inca?''). But for people whose only link with Latino culture is the occasional enchilada, Cuban-born journalist and lecturer Novas lays it all out. From Montezuma to Tito Puente, from santer°a to bacalao, Novas offers a nifty (if glib) blend of history and pop culture (did you know that Desi Arnaz's ``Babaloo'' was a ``song to the Yoruba deity Babalu''?). Perhaps best of all, she offers help with the all-important question facing p.c. gringos (and if you are benighted enough not to know who they are, Novas will tell you that, too): Is it more correct to say ``Hispanic'' or ``Latino''?
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-452-27100-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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