Isles of Unknowing. "American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839–1850" by Cassandra Pybus and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. [review]

One of the pleasures of reading "American Citizens, British Slaves" is its invitation to think about writing. It asks us to consider the need of prisoners to maintain, and later restore, normal relations with one's self and the world by putting words on paper. It also asks us to consider the site of writing inhabited by authorities: the bureaucratic world that made men objects of paperwork: pages shuffled, copied and, sometimes wantonly, destroyed. In Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s, that site was as much one of corruption and personal humiliation as were the probation stations of the penal system. The reports and archives tell the tale. So does the superb writing of Pybus and Maxwell-Stewart.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Father Abraham. "Lincoln" by Thomas Keneally. [review]

Weidenfield & Nicholson were both wise and fortunate in their choice of Thomas Keneally to write a study of Abraham Lincoln for their "Lives" series. He in turn gifted them, and us, with a story that listens closely to Lincoln's words and sees some shape in the internal and external demons that so often troubled his life. Keneally’s narrative moves quietly alongside the Illinois rail-splitter as Lincoln transforms himself from local small-time politician to President of the USA.Australia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Stuyvesant bound: an essay on loss across time

Stuyvesant Bound is an innovative and compelling evaluation of the last Director General of New Netherland. Drawing from historiography, cultural anthropology, literary criticism, and semiotic analysis, Donna Merwick examines the layers of culture in which Peter Stuyvesant forged his career and performed his identity, ultimately reappraising the view of Stuyvesant long held by the majority of U.S. historians and commentators. Borrowing its form from the genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-?century learned essays, Stuyvesant Bound invites the reader to step into a premodern worldview as Merwick considers Stuyvesant's role in history from the perspectives of duty, belief, and loss. Stuyvesant is presented as a mid-seventeenth-century magistrate obliged by his official oath to manage New Netherland, including installing Calvinist politics and belief practices in the fragile conditions of early modern spirituality after the Protestant Reformation. Merwick meticulously reconstructs the process by which Stuyvesant became his own archivist and historian when, recalled to the Hague to answer for his surrender of New Netherland in 1664, he gathered together papers amounting to almost 50,000 words and offered them to the States General. Though Merwick weaves the theme of loss throughout this meditation on Stuyvesant's career, the association culminates in New Netherland's fall to the English in 1664 and Stuyvesant's immediate recall to Holland to defend his surrender. Rigorously researched and unabashedly interpretive, Stuyvesant Bound makes a major contribution to recovery of the cultural and religious diversity that marked colonial America