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NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Buddhist and the Ethicist
Peter Singer & Shih Chao-Hwei, Text, $36.99
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Dialogues are a long-established method of teasing out philosophical positions. This five-year-long exchange between utilitarian philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer and Buddhist monastic and social activist Shih Chao-Hwei is a lively, instructive and respectful exploration of where these two traditions meet and where they differ, especially concerning some of the thorniest moral issues of our time: sexism and gender discrimination, embryo research and abortion, animal welfare, euthanasia and the death penalty. Particularly illuminating is Chao-Hwei’s clarification of terms, often misunderstood in the West, such as karma, rebirth and nirvana, as well as the central role and nature of compassion in Buddhist ethics. For those interested in how nuanced philosophical thought can inform our daily lives and actions, this accessible meeting of minds is a good place to start.
Way Makers
Ed., Kerri Andrews, Reaktion, $37
“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading;/ It vexes me to choose another guide,” wrote Emily Brontë. Yet going for a walk, whether across the moors, up a mountain or down a dark street, has never been a simple matter for most women.
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As this anthology – the first of women’s writing about walking – shows, social assumptions about ladylike behaviour, the dangers of being alone and about women’s physical abilities have complicated this expression of freedom in a way rarely experienced by men. At the same time, the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, the diaries of Virginia Woolf, the exquisite prose of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain and Simone de Beauvoir’s fearless solo hikes in the south of France testify to the spirit and exhilaration with which these writers walked. There’s much to savour here even if the selection is weighted towards the historical and the British.
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The New World Disorder
Peter R. Neumann, Scribe, $36.99
How is the West destroying itself? With its own triumphalism, naive optimism and belief that its values and ideas are peerless, says Peter Neumann. The solution is not to jettison these values and ideas but to learn from where they went wrong. Most of this book is a litany of the liberal West’s delusions, mistakes and false assumptions from 1990 to the present. The biggest fallacy being that democracy can be exported through the barrel of a gun, such as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, or magicked up through free market economics, like Russia and China. Then there is the failure to foresee the rise of religious fundamentalism, nationalism and terrorism, the 2008 global economic crisis and the climate emergency. As grim as this might sound, Neumann’s conclusion is hopeful. Through rigorous self-examination, he says, a humbler West can recover its cultural capital and reinvent itself.
The Outback Court Reporter
Jamelle Wells, ABC Books, $34.99
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“A local courtroom can tell you a lot about the life and fiefdoms of a town,” says ABC presenter and court reporter Jamelle Wells, who grew up in Cobar in outback New South Wales. While she has spent much of her career based in Sydney, her work sometimes takes her to country courts. To sit with her in the public gallery is to witness the full gamut of the human comedy, from the trivial to the tragic, all inflected with the flavour and the challenges of country life. At the lighter end, there is the case of the missing lollipops and the exploding milk cartons. But when it comes to the barriers faced by Indigenous people in remote communities where the courts are beset by lack of translators and legal support, injustice prevails. Wells’ family memories, along with vignettes of the magistrates, the lawyers, the defendants, the public observers and the journalists, make for a vivid tableau.
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