AFA5 Are We Asian Yet?

AFA5 Are We Asian Yet?
Author: Jonathan Pearlman
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2019-02-18
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1743820739

“One of Australia’s defining characteristics is the belief that the nation is headed for an Asian future. Destiny allows little room for choice.” DAVID WALKER The fifth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s struggle to define its place in Asia as it balances its historic ties to the West with its geography. Are We Asian Yet? explores Australia’s changing population, outlook and identity as it adjusts to the Asian Century. David Walker examines Australia’s fears, hopes and anxieties about its place and future in Asia. Linda Jaivin analyses art, politics and propaganda in the cultural dance between Australia and China. George Megalogenis discusses how Australia’s ousting of PMs affects the nation’s reputation in Asia. Sarah Teo explores Asian perceptions of Australia and asks whether it can truly be part of the region. Sam Roggeveen proposes that Australia should foster a larger Indonesian diaspora. Christos Tsiolkas reflects on the complexities of identity politics. Aarti Betigeri examines the rise of India’s ambitious middle class. Peter Fray contemplates the imperilled future of truth in politics. PLUS Correspondence from Alison Broinowski, Jim Molan, Michael Shoebridge and Paul Bracken.

Quarterly Essay 72 Net Loss

Quarterly Essay 72 Net Loss
Author: Sebastian Smee
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1743820690

We live in an age of constant distraction. Is there a price to pay for this? In this superb essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee explores the fate of the inner life in the age of the internet. Throughout history, artists and thinkers have cultivated the deep self, and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, with social media, wall-to-wall marketing and the agitation of modern life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of instant connectivity. It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still to stay with it. Without nostalgia or pessimism, Sebastian Smee evokes what is valuable and worth cultivating: he guides us from the apparent fullness of the app-filled world towards a more complex sense of self, and the inner life. If we lose this, Smee asks, what do we lose of ourselves? “Every day I spend hours and hours on my phone ... We are all doing it, aren’t we? It has come to feel completely normal. Even when I put my device aside and attach it to a charger, it pulses away in my mind, like the throat of a toad, full of blind, amphibian appetite.”––Sebastian Smee, Net Loss

Our Sphere of Influence

Our Sphere of Influence
Author: Jonathan Pearlman
Publisher: Australian Foreign Affairs
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2019-07-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1743820941

“The uncomfortable reality is that preserving an exclusive sphere of influence in the South Pacific is not going to be possible against a regional power that is far stronger than any we have ever confronted, or even contemplated.” HUGH WHITE The sixth issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s struggle to retain influence among its Pacific island neighbours as foreign powers play a greater role and as small nations brace for the impacts of climate change. Our Sphere of Influence explores the security challenges facing nations in the southern Pacific and whether Australia will need new approaches to secure its relations and interests. Hugh White argues that Australia will be unable to keep China out of the Pacific and must urgently renew its defences. Jenny Hayward-Jones examines whether Scott Morrison’s Pacific “step-up” can reverse Canberra’s declining diplomatic influence. Katerina Teaiwa explores how Australia’s climate change policy undermines ties with its island neighbours. Sean Dorney reports from inside the forgotten Australian colony of Papua New Guinea. Euan Graham proposes how to address Australia’s knowledge gaps about the Chinese leadership and military. Elizabeth Becker reflects on the unique challenges for female foreign correspondents. PLUS Correspondence on AFA5: Are We Asian Yet? from Clive Hamilton, Barry Li and Linda Jaivin.

AFA14 The Taiwan Choice

AFA14 The Taiwan Choice
Author: Jonathan Pearlman
Publisher: Black Inc.
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2022-02-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1743822162

The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the rising tensions over the future of Taiwan as China’s pursuit of ‘unification’ pits it against the United States and US allies such as Australia. The Taiwan Choice looks at the growing risk of a catastrophic war and the outlook for Australia as it faces a strategic choice that could reshape its future in Asia. Hugh White on why war over Taiwan is the gravest danger Australia might be facing Lead essays exploring Australia’s military capacity to enter a war over Taiwan; the significance of the strategic choice that lies ahead for Australia; and the view from Taiwan Award-winning writer Richard Cooke on foreign policy jargon PLUS correspondence on AFA13: India Rising? Australian Foreign Affairs is published three times a year and seeks to explore – and encourage – debate on Australia’s place in the world and global outlook.

Identity

Identity
Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-09-05
Genre: Dignity
ISBN: 9781781259818

Currently in Bill Gates's bookbag and FT Books of 2018Increasingly, the demands of identity direct the world's politics. Nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, gender: these categories have overtaken broader, inclusive ideas of who we are. We have built walls rather than bridges. The result: increasing in anti-immigrant sentiment, rioting on college campuses, and the return of open white supremacy to our politics. In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American and global institutions were in a state of decay, as the state was captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatens to destabilise the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to 'the people', who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.Identity is an urgent and necessary book: a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continual conflict.

I Live Here

I Live Here
Author: Mia Kirshner
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN:

A visually stunning narrative--told through journals, stories, images, and graphic novels--"I Live Here" bears witness to the lives of refugees and displaced people throughout crisis zones in four corners of the globe.

Stranded Nation

Stranded Nation
Author: David Robert Walker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 526
Release: 2019
Genre: Asia
ISBN: 9781760800604

David Walker's Stranded Nation is a recommended read for anyone, politicians and students alike, seeking to know the history of Australia's agonising over Asia; how it began, how it evolved and the passionate and colourful characters involved. Stranded Nation is told with authority, insight and wit, and the satisfying readability of a good novel, and that makes it great history.' -- Stephen FitzGerald, writer, sinologist and Australia's first Ambassador to the People's Republic of ChinaFor well over a century Australia's place in Asia has been at the forefront of public discussion and controve.

The Empress Lover

The Empress Lover
Author: Linda Jaivin
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0730497755

A witty, playful, intriguing and ultimately very moving novel of identity and loss. 'Stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine...' Peking, 1944: Sir Edmund Backhouse is a man of many parts. A polyglot scholar. An effete homosexual. A genius of perversity, a forger, arms salesman, occasional spy and fantasist. Also, if he is to be believed, the onetime lover of the redoubtable Empress Dowager of China, a woman many decades his senior. In his declining years, tended by his friend, Dr Hoeppli, he writes his memoir - 'a wild tale', as he calls it, 'far-fetched and fantastical'- of his affair with the Dowager Empress. Beijing, 2014: Linnie is an Australian woman of uncertain provenance struggling to make a living in Beijing. A Sinophile, a translator of film subtitles, the author of an unpublished novel about Backhouse called the Empress Lover. One day, she receives an intriguingly old-fashioned and formal invitation from a Professor H, an invitation that promises to reveal long hidden secrets of her family... And so two worlds collide. An enchantingly slippery, sinuous, playful - and ultimately very moving - novel of love, loss, identity and history from one of Australia's finest novelists. 'Jaivin's writing shines and burns.' Sunday Age 'the Empress Lover is a fascinating work, infused as it is with China's history, Jaivin's experience of it, and her own capacious imagination. Surely this is the novel to gain her a reputation as one of Australia's best and most versatile writers.' Sydney Morning Herald 'A supple and intricate piece of storytelling ... a touching,inventive and gratifyingly unpredictable novel.' the Australian

The Brooklyn Nobody Knows

The Brooklyn Nobody Knows
Author: William B. Helmreich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2016-10-03
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1400883121

A one-of-a-kind walking guide to Brooklyn, from the man who walked every block in New York City Bill Helmreich walked every block of New York City—6,000 miles in all—to write the award-winning The New York Nobody Knows. Later, he re-walked Brooklyn—some 816 miles—to write this one-of-a-kind walking guide to the city's hottest borough. Drawing on hundreds of conversations he had with residents during his block-by-block journeys, The Brooklyn Nobody Knows captures the heart and soul of a diverse, booming, and constantly changing borough that defines cool around the world. The guide covers every one of Brooklyn’s forty-four neighborhoods, from Greenpoint to Coney Island, providing a colorful portrait of each section’s most interesting, unusual, and unknown people, places, and things. Along the way you will learn about a Greenpoint park devoted to plants and trees that produce materials used in industry; a hornsmith who practices his craft in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens; a collection of 1,140 stuffed animals hanging from a tree in Bergen Beach; a five-story Brownsville mural that depicts Zionist leader Theodor Herzl—and that was the brainchild of black teenagers; Brooklyn’s most private—yet public—beach in Manhattan Beach; and much, much more. An unforgettably vivid chronicle of today’s Brooklyn, the book can also be enjoyed without ever leaving home—but it’s almost guaranteed to inspire you to get out and explore one of the most fascinating urban areas anywhere. Covers every one of Brooklyn’s 44 neighborhoods, providing a colorful portrait of their most interesting, unusual, and unknown people, places, and things Each neighborhood section features a brief overview and history; a detailed, user-friendly map keyed to the text; and a lively guided walking tour Draws on the author’s 816-mile walk through every Brooklyn neighborhood Includes insights from conversations with hundreds of residents

The Least of Us

The Least of Us
Author: Sam Quinones
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1635574374

Apple Best Books of 2021 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal * Shortlisted for the Zocalo Book Prize From the New York Times bestselling author of Dreamland, a searing follow-up that explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic and the quiet yet ardent stories of community repair. Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the U.S. to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths-at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States. Quinones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the call that shocked the nation in Sam Quinones's award-winning Dreamland.