Book Notes: "Surrealism" edited by Patrick Waldberg

Surrealism by Patrick Waldberg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


At first I thought this book was an old high school art text. But after a while, it was obvious that the book is a collection of original works by Ernst, Dali, and in particular, Andre Breton, written for a number of surrealist magazines over several decades. The references to Rimbaud made me think of Bob Dylan, and the fascination with Freud, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels, and many other great thinkers threw me. The development of surrealism from the early 1920s well into the 1960s was also a surprising discovery. The fascination with automatic writing makes me wonder to what extent Jack Kerouac was influenced by surrealism. There are many colour and black and white photos of the artists and their work, and the notes and biographical details are helpfully comprehensive. I must admit that I knew little of surrealism beyond Dali, and it is interesting for a movement that, to some extent, was a revolution against academe, was so very much academic despite its reputation.



View all my reviews

Gunning Library Community Workshop Report: University of Canberra Monitor

UC lecturer helps community dig out treasure Trove - University of Canberra https://t.co/6ff9dgNFAu via @UniCanberra #gunninghistory

— Michael de Percy (@madepercy) October 27, 2016

A version of this article also appeared in PS News.

Book Notes: "The Subjection of Women" by John Stuart Mill

The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


If it were not for archaic words such as "burthen" (burden) and "rainment (clothing)"; the necessity to counteract arguments from phrenology; and the use of the figurative "Mrs Grundy" (an archaic Mrs Bucket); one might be reading a contemporary argument for diversity and greater opportunities for women. Mill exerts his authority by challenging then-dominant ideas (such as phrenology and assumptions about biology then-untested) and then reconciles this absurdity for the modern reader by suggesting that while such things are unknown, and he has little time for these, he can still argue away their objections to his central thesis. Mill was far ahead of his time and his arguments took some time to materialise in universal suffrage and equality of opportunity for women, but the central message, then radical, is now part of political discourse. I intend to focus on James Fitzjames Stephen now to see how Stephen deals with Mill's authoritative works on liberty.



View all my reviews

Video: The Week in Politics with Michelle Grattan

Michelle Grattan on Malcolm Turnbull's trouble with marriage equality

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra and Michael de Percy, University of Canberra



Now that Labor has shot down the government’s proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage, the issue of marriage equality threatens to haunt Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership.

Michelle Grattan tells University of Canberra senior lecturer in political science Michael de Percy that Turnbull is under pressure from Labor and same-sex marriage advocates to allow a free parliamentary vote.

“But the Liberal conservatives are making this really a bottom line issue. They will not tolerate a free vote letting the change to the law go through parliament and it would really blow the party up if Malcolm Turnbull did move to that position,” Grattan says.

“At the moment, the issue just simmers away there and maybe nothing will happen until the next election. Then of course the parties will have to put forward election policies and it’s really pretty untenable for the Liberal Party to go again to a poll with a plebiscite, which has become, although initially popular with the community, more unpopular as time has passed.

"So it’s just one of those real burrs under the saddle for Malcolm Turnbull.”



Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra and Michael de Percy, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Gunning Community Workshop: Article on the Trove Blog

Trove champion Dr Michael de Percy teaches people to use Trove. Read all about his experiences. https://t.co/6MEDrzJtgR pic.twitter.com/tQUiPdT2yM

— Trove (@TroveAustralia) October 13, 2016

Book Notes: "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It is hard not to like this book. I have read this a few times before and re-read it as I thought I should revisit some of the classics in leadership. I was surprised to find, with the benefit of education, that Carnegie touches upon many of the known leadership theories without ever explicitly stating so- which of course was his aim in making practical skills available to the lay person more or less immediately. I was a little disappointed that this was not the original edition, even though that is what I thought I was purchasing. Some of the examples have been updated and include what appear to be 1950s events and technologies. Not that this takes away from the central purpose of the book, but I do enjoy re-discovering events of the past through such reading. Alas, I will have to search for the first edition some more. But it does prove my point: a good deal of contemporary knowledge is simply re-packaged in more academic language and using more up-to-date examples. Yet the style stems from what Hilkey (1997) refers to as the "Gilded Age", beginning in the 1870s in the United States and developing elsewhere through Arnold Bennett (1911) and then, in my view at least, into the Carnegie format that is still adopted by authors such as Ryan Holiday today. While Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography might qualify, I tend to agree with Hilkey's thesis about the cultural elements of the success manual genre and have found interesting parallels with the philosophical works of J.S. Mill and James Fitzjames Stephen with the rise of the market economy. Still worth a read, still one of the best, but my personal experiences suggest that the leadership theories that have been developed since Carnegie, particular Fiedler's contingency theory and the work of Hersey and Blanchard, bring in the environmental factors that Carnegie's work, like many other works of the time, tend to ignore.



View all my reviews