Web Development Live

As an avid Apple afficianado and advocate of all things open source, my stance on Microsoft is usually clear-cut: I don’t care for it.  Everything about Microsoft’s business practices rubs me wrong.  With that said, I was surprised to learn that Microsoft has been toying with its own little pet social network since the beginning of the year.

Well “social” might not be quite the right term for Microsoft’s baby network, which is called TownSquare.  Consider it a more elite community of Microsoft nerds.  Perhaps a better term would be the anti-social network.  Townsquare is an intranet-based social network currently open to all Microsoft employees, and shares many similarities with Facebook.

All the normal social goodies - pictures, bios, updates, feed are included on TownSquare for each user and shared with the Microsoft community.  Additionally, Microsoft employees can see when documents and files on the intranet have been updated  or modified.  The whole thing is designed on enterprise newsfeeds to compile various public information about employees on the network.

Microsoft is also sharing TownSquare with a group of select consumers who are responsible for testing Townsquare.  All the testing and restructuring can’t possibly be for Microsoft’s own good time, though; it wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft did a revision or two and marketed the intranetwork social structure to businesses.  As one of the main features is updating users on document and data revision on the intranet, many businesses could, no doubt, benefit from such advances.

Which brings me back to my original issue with Microsoft.  What could be a fantastic tool developed by some no-name third party developer will undoubtedly be marketed for sale by Microsoft to small business owners who will buy into the product simply because it has Microsoft’s stamp of approval.  If anything, I would be delighted to see a third party developer replicate the social structure for viewing profiles and updating intranet-public documents as open-source freeware, available to all.

The entire reason I believe that Microsoft will continue to spiral downward is because the who’s who in Microsoft’s management will never be able to adapt to the new, very open style of program sharing and development, and leave behind the monopoly mindset. In the end, Microsoft will have to buy into a little Darwinian theory and adapt and evolve, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

Van Diemen’s Land is a fresh and sparkling account of
the first generation of British settlement in Tasmania that also
makes an important contribution to Australian colonial
historiography. The product of seven years’ research and writing,
and a longer time talking about and walking across the island, it
focuses attention and admiration on the convicts and their children
- Tasmania’s founding mothers and fathers.
The book bears some of the characteristic signs of an adapted
doctoral thesis. Attached to the main body is a 56-page section on
the Aborigines, anomalously called an appendix, which many readers
will find the most important part of the book.
The material was added to the original thesis both because of
current interest in the subject and James Boyce’s important
contribution to the debate that followed the publication of Keith
Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History in 2002
and the answering Whitewash edited by Robert Manne the following
year.
Boyce follows the well-travelled interpretive track cut in the
19th century by historians John West, James Bonwick and James
Erskine Calder that Windschuttle quixotically assailed.
With such depth of research behind him, Boyce bolsters that
tradition while adding colour and nuance and along the way posing
questions that we still find troubling. He has no doubts about the
violence that accompanied the Black War in Tasmania and if anything
believes that traditional accounts “probably underestimate
fatalities”.
He extends the duration of the “Killing Times” to take in the
early 1820s and importantly amends the accepted view that the
settlers were no match for the Aborigines in the bush.
He argues, I think convincingly, that the frontier stockmen,
shepherds and hunters had, over the first 20 years of settlement,
acquired the bushcraft to seriously threaten the Aboriginal bands.
By the 1820s these men “knew the Aboriginal seasonal gathering
places, camping sites and movements and paths that ran between
them. Aboriginal communities that still included small children,
pregnant women and the elderly were highly vulnerable to armed
parties guided by such men”.
Boyce discounts the impact of disease in the destruction of
Aboriginal society before the 1830s, observing that there are
literally no accounts of sickness in the records of the
colonists.
The policies of the administration of Governor Arthur are also
examined anew, Boyce reminding us that at one time, serious
consideration was given to partitioning the island, giving over a
“remote quarter of the island” to the Aborigines, a proposal that
had the potential to provide “an alternative model of Australian
land settlement”.
But intensifying conflict overtook the policy and eventually the
momentous decision was taken to exile the surviving Aborigines to
Flinders Island. Boyce argues that the remaining bands in the
eastern half of the island had entered into negotiation with G. A.
Robinson and Governor Arthur and had been assured that their
sojourn in Bass Strait would be a short prelude to their return to
their homelands.
“As the Aborigines sailed from Hobart Town in early 1832, they
undoubtedly believed that their time on Flinders Island would be
short.”
Arthur’s desire to remove the hostile bands was, at least,
understandable but Boyce turns his attention to the much more
questionable policy towards the tribes on the West Coast who were
still largely undisturbed and whose country was largely unknown to
and of little interest to the settlers. This was an entirely
different matter - much harder to justify either morally or
legally.
“There was no economic justification for the forced removal that
made it unique among the tragedies experienced by indigenous people
during the 19th century,” he writes.
Boyce considers the question of why there was such a strong
desire for the settlers to have an island free of Aborigines . . .
to ethnically cleanse the whole colony. It was an objective admired
by the young Charles Darwin who, when visiting the island in 1836,
observed that the colonists enjoyed the great advantage of being
“free from a native population”.
In asking these questions Boyce brings us to the heart of the
desire expressed all over Australia to be rid of the Aboriginal
presence - overtaken in the late 19th century by the certainty that
nature herself was sweeping them away following the iron laws of
evolution. All too often settlers expressed the view that only with
the “passing” of the Aborigines would the process of colonisation
be complete.
While Boyce has important things to say about the tragic fate of
Tasmania’s Aboriginal tribes, the central focus of the book is on
the first generation of the overwhelmingly convict settlers and
their adaption to the island environment that, with its mild
climate and abundant resources, was “a veritable Eden” - far more
welcoming and amenable than the land around Sydney.
He argues cogently that there needs to be two quite different
narratives about the original colonisation of Eastern Australia,
explaining that “how the early British settlers of Van Diemen’s
Land experienced the Australian continent is thus greatly at
variance with the standard opening of the national story”. The Van
Diemonian convict settlers were, indeed, Australia’s first
successful hunters, pastoralists and colonisers of the bush, which,
with its abundant wildlife and fresh water, provided the convicts
with a vast common where they could escape the constraints of life
under the surveillance of police and soldiers a generation before
Russel Ward’s nomad tribe traversed the outback of New South
Wales.
The hills, mountains and sea-shore “ensured a sanctuary for the
poor where a degree of independence and freedom could long be
maintained”. That freedom, once gained, could never be totally
rescinded by the free settlers or the governments they dominated.
The old spirit of Van Diemen’s Land lived on.
Boyce is unashamedly an island patriot who celebrates those
aspects of the past that were long shunned as being part of the
hated stain of convictism. The convict pioneers were the first to
illustrate the fact that, as Boyce recently told The Mercury
newspaper in Hobart, “there is something distinctive about this
land that people connect and belong to”.
Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and
Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. He is co-author
with Marilyn Lake of Drawing the Global Colour Line, to be
published next month by Melbourne University Press.

Van Diemen’s Land is a fresh and sparkling account of
the first generation of British settlement in Tasmania that also
makes an important contribution to Australian colonial
historiography. The product of seven years’ research and writing,
and a longer time talking about and walking across the island, it
focuses attention and admiration on the convicts and their children
- Tasmania’s founding mothers and fathers.
The book bears some of the characteristic signs of an adapted
doctoral thesis. Attached to the main body is a 56-page section on
the Aborigines, anomalously called an appendix, which many readers
will find the most important part of the book.
The material was added to the original thesis both because of
current interest in the subject and James Boyce’s important
contribution to the debate that followed the publication of Keith
Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History in 2002
and the answering Whitewash edited by Robert Manne the following
year.
Boyce follows the well-travelled interpretive track cut in the
19th century by historians John West, James Bonwick and James
Erskine Calder that Windschuttle quixotically assailed.
With such depth of research behind him, Boyce bolsters that
tradition while adding colour and nuance and along the way posing
questions that we still find troubling. He has no doubts about the
violence that accompanied the Black War in Tasmania and if anything
believes that traditional accounts “probably underestimate
fatalities”.
He extends the duration of the “Killing Times” to take in the
early 1820s and importantly amends the accepted view that the
settlers were no match for the Aborigines in the bush.
He argues, I think convincingly, that the frontier stockmen,
shepherds and hunters had, over the first 20 years of settlement,
acquired the bushcraft to seriously threaten the Aboriginal bands.
By the 1820s these men “knew the Aboriginal seasonal gathering
places, camping sites and movements and paths that ran between
them. Aboriginal communities that still included small children,
pregnant women and the elderly were highly vulnerable to armed
parties guided by such men”.
Boyce discounts the impact of disease in the destruction of
Aboriginal society before the 1830s, observing that there are
literally no accounts of sickness in the records of the
colonists.
The policies of the administration of Governor Arthur are also
examined anew, Boyce reminding us that at one time, serious
consideration was given to partitioning the island, giving over a
“remote quarter of the island” to the Aborigines, a proposal that
had the potential to provide “an alternative model of Australian
land settlement”.
But intensifying conflict overtook the policy and eventually the
momentous decision was taken to exile the surviving Aborigines to
Flinders Island. Boyce argues that the remaining bands in the
eastern half of the island had entered into negotiation with G. A.
Robinson and Governor Arthur and had been assured that their
sojourn in Bass Strait would be a short prelude to their return to
their homelands.
“As the Aborigines sailed from Hobart Town in early 1832, they
undoubtedly believed that their time on Flinders Island would be
short.”
Arthur’s desire to remove the hostile bands was, at least,
understandable but Boyce turns his attention to the much more
questionable policy towards the tribes on the West Coast who were
still largely undisturbed and whose country was largely unknown to
and of little interest to the settlers. This was an entirely
different matter - much harder to justify either morally or
legally.
“There was no economic justification for the forced removal that
made it unique among the tragedies experienced by indigenous people
during the 19th century,” he writes.
Boyce considers the question of why there was such a strong
desire for the settlers to have an island free of Aborigines . . .
to ethnically cleanse the whole colony. It was an objective admired
by the young Charles Darwin who, when visiting the island in 1836,
observed that the colonists enjoyed the great advantage of being
“free from a native population”.
In asking these questions Boyce brings us to the heart of the
desire expressed all over Australia to be rid of the Aboriginal
presence - overtaken in the late 19th century by the certainty that
nature herself was sweeping them away following the iron laws of
evolution. All too often settlers expressed the view that only with
the “passing” of the Aborigines would the process of colonisation
be complete.
While Boyce has important things to say about the tragic fate of
Tasmania’s Aboriginal tribes, the central focus of the book is on
the first generation of the overwhelmingly convict settlers and
their adaption to the island environment that, with its mild
climate and abundant resources, was “a veritable Eden” - far more
welcoming and amenable than the land around Sydney.
He argues cogently that there needs to be two quite different
narratives about the original colonisation of Eastern Australia,
explaining that “how the early British settlers of Van Diemen’s
Land experienced the Australian continent is thus greatly at
variance with the standard opening of the national story”. The Van
Diemonian convict settlers were, indeed, Australia’s first
successful hunters, pastoralists and colonisers of the bush, which,
with its abundant wildlife and fresh water, provided the convicts
with a vast common where they could escape the constraints of life
under the surveillance of police and soldiers a generation before
Russel Ward’s nomad tribe traversed the outback of New South
Wales.
The hills, mountains and sea-shore “ensured a sanctuary for the
poor where a degree of independence and freedom could long be
maintained”. That freedom, once gained, could never be totally
rescinded by the free settlers or the governments they dominated.
The old spirit of Van Diemen’s Land lived on.
Boyce is unashamedly an island patriot who celebrates those
aspects of the past that were long shunned as being part of the
hated stain of convictism. The convict pioneers were the first to
illustrate the fact that, as Boyce recently told The Mercury
newspaper in Hobart, “there is something distinctive about this
land that people connect and belong to”.
Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and
Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. He is co-author
with Marilyn Lake of Drawing the Global Colour Line, to be
published next month by Melbourne University Press.

Van Diemen’s Land is a fresh and sparkling account of
the first generation of British settlement in Tasmania that also
makes an important contribution to Australian colonial
historiography. The product of seven years’ research and writing,
and a longer time talking about and walking across the island, it
focuses attention and admiration on the convicts and their children
- Tasmania’s founding mothers and fathers.
The book bears some of the characteristic signs of an adapted
doctoral thesis. Attached to the main body is a 56-page section on
the Aborigines, anomalously called an appendix, which many readers
will find the most important part of the book.
The material was added to the original thesis both because of
current interest in the subject and James Boyce’s important
contribution to the debate that followed the publication of Keith
Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History in 2002
and the answering Whitewash edited by Robert Manne the following
year.
Boyce follows the well-travelled interpretive track cut in the
19th century by historians John West, James Bonwick and James
Erskine Calder that Windschuttle quixotically assailed.
With such depth of research behind him, Boyce bolsters that
tradition while adding colour and nuance and along the way posing
questions that we still find troubling. He has no doubts about the
violence that accompanied the Black War in Tasmania and if anything
believes that traditional accounts “probably underestimate
fatalities”.
He extends the duration of the “Killing Times” to take in the
early 1820s and importantly amends the accepted view that the
settlers were no match for the Aborigines in the bush.
He argues, I think convincingly, that the frontier stockmen,
shepherds and hunters had, over the first 20 years of settlement,
acquired the bushcraft to seriously threaten the Aboriginal bands.
By the 1820s these men “knew the Aboriginal seasonal gathering
places, camping sites and movements and paths that ran between
them. Aboriginal communities that still included small children,
pregnant women and the elderly were highly vulnerable to armed
parties guided by such men”.
Boyce discounts the impact of disease in the destruction of
Aboriginal society before the 1830s, observing that there are
literally no accounts of sickness in the records of the
colonists.
The policies of the administration of Governor Arthur are also
examined anew, Boyce reminding us that at one time, serious
consideration was given to partitioning the island, giving over a
“remote quarter of the island” to the Aborigines, a proposal that
had the potential to provide “an alternative model of Australian
land settlement”.
But intensifying conflict overtook the policy and eventually the
momentous decision was taken to exile the surviving Aborigines to
Flinders Island. Boyce argues that the remaining bands in the
eastern half of the island had entered into negotiation with G. A.
Robinson and Governor Arthur and had been assured that their
sojourn in Bass Strait would be a short prelude to their return to
their homelands.
“As the Aborigines sailed from Hobart Town in early 1832, they
undoubtedly believed that their time on Flinders Island would be
short.”
Arthur’s desire to remove the hostile bands was, at least,
understandable but Boyce turns his attention to the much more
questionable policy towards the tribes on the West Coast who were
still largely undisturbed and whose country was largely unknown to
and of little interest to the settlers. This was an entirely
different matter - much harder to justify either morally or
legally.
“There was no economic justification for the forced removal that
made it unique among the tragedies experienced by indigenous people
during the 19th century,” he writes.
Boyce considers the question of why there was such a strong
desire for the settlers to have an island free of Aborigines . . .
to ethnically cleanse the whole colony. It was an objective admired
by the young Charles Darwin who, when visiting the island in 1836,
observed that the colonists enjoyed the great advantage of being
“free from a native population”.
In asking these questions Boyce brings us to the heart of the
desire expressed all over Australia to be rid of the Aboriginal
presence - overtaken in the late 19th century by the certainty that
nature herself was sweeping them away following the iron laws of
evolution. All too often settlers expressed the view that only with
the “passing” of the Aborigines would the process of colonisation
be complete.
While Boyce has important things to say about the tragic fate of
Tasmania’s Aboriginal tribes, the central focus of the book is on
the first generation of the overwhelmingly convict settlers and
their adaption to the island environment that, with its mild
climate and abundant resources, was “a veritable Eden” - far more
welcoming and amenable than the land around Sydney.
He argues cogently that there needs to be two quite different
narratives about the original colonisation of Eastern Australia,
explaining that “how the early British settlers of Van Diemen’s
Land experienced the Australian continent is thus greatly at
variance with the standard opening of the national story”. The Van
Diemonian convict settlers were, indeed, Australia’s first
successful hunters, pastoralists and colonisers of the bush, which,
with its abundant wildlife and fresh water, provided the convicts
with a vast common where they could escape the constraints of life
under the surveillance of police and soldiers a generation before
Russel Ward’s nomad tribe traversed the outback of New South
Wales.
The hills, mountains and sea-shore “ensured a sanctuary for the
poor where a degree of independence and freedom could long be
maintained”. That freedom, once gained, could never be totally
rescinded by the free settlers or the governments they dominated.
The old spirit of Van Diemen’s Land lived on.
Boyce is unashamedly an island patriot who celebrates those
aspects of the past that were long shunned as being part of the
hated stain of convictism. The convict pioneers were the first to
illustrate the fact that, as Boyce recently told The Mercury
newspaper in Hobart, “there is something distinctive about this
land that people connect and belong to”.
Henry Reynolds holds a Personal Chair in History and
Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. He is co-author
with Marilyn Lake of Drawing the Global Colour Line, to be
published next month by Melbourne University Press.

People of The Book is a novel of
contrasting textures. It centres on a young Australian book
conservator, Hannah Heath, working in a Sarajevo library to study
and restore a recently recovered medieval manuscript.
The controlled climate of the library archive where Hannah works
on the exquisite illuminated Haggadah, the Jewish book used to tell
of the biblical Passover, is set amid a broken, chaotic world -
smashed buildings and fractured lives - exemplified by the
librarian, Ozren Karamen, who has taken extraordinary risks to save
the manuscript.
Brooks’ novel revolves around the contrast between the exquisite
care taken to examine the ancient Haggadah, scarcely touching it to
tease out its secrets, and, on the other hand, the many violences,
and spillages - tears, blood, wine - that have shaped its creation
and endangered its survival for more than 600 years, and that now
surround its recovery.
Running parallel with the career-making work she is undertaking
is an exploration of Hannah’s own identity and temperament, and a
process of emotional education she experiences, as her own
concealed familial history is uncovered, and her own defences
touched.
At the novel’s heart is a magnificent opulence. The evocation of
the many textures of the manuscript itself, and the worlds from
which it comes, and into which it arrives, is dazzling.
Brooks’ close focus is like Hannah’s own, and the writing often
has a curatorial precision and focus whose effects are beautiful:
the description of a tiny scrap of an insect’s wing, or the mingled
stain of kosher wine and blood, clues to the book’s journey,
exemplify this.
Brooks, whose previous novel March won a Pulitzer Prize, and
whose otherwise-multifarious fiction and non-fictional work has
focused on themes of travel, exile and loss, is meticulous in her
evocation of the many worlds through which the manuscript
travels.
From Seville in 1480, where extraordinary foresight enables a
father to prepare his daughter for an exceptional life, to the
mountains around Sarajevo in 1940, where fascism and its resistance
endanger the treasured book, Brooks conjures places and events with
clarity.
In this, her talents as a researcher are apparent, and they fuse
with a delicate poetry, through which the sense of painstaking
close work, both Hannah’s and Brooks’, is apparent.
The scarring of books and their creators, protectors and readers
- many of whom are young women - is twined into a narrative about
the spectrum of violences in a bruising world, a metaphor Brooks
handles deftly. She gestures towards complex reverberations about
violence and violation, respect, care and resilience.
The structure of People of the Book is as intricate as
the book’s history, and unfolds in discrete sections as the
disparate clues to its identity themselves appear, moving backwards
in time to the book’s creation. These punctuate Hannah’s
forward-moving story, and relate figuratively to what she herself
learns both through her professional endeavours, and her
relationships.
The worlds evoked through the microscopic clues - the insect’s
wing, a trace of salt - are woven into the overarching narrative of
Hannah’s discovery and self-discovery, which takes on aspects of
the detective novel, as she chases clues and encounters
concealment.
March, which takes as its main character the absent
father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, raised
debate about its protagonist’s likeability. The question of the
extent to which a fictional character needs to be embraced by a
reader is a difficult one, and one that recurs here.
Hannah describes her own emotional aloofness, without any sense
of its being a problem, as though the same clinical style that
characterises her approach to love is exactly that which generates
her professional success. This is tested as the narrative
progresses, though Hannah retains a determined bloodlessness.
One spurned lover (who makes the mistake of imagining himself
with her, hiking in the mountains in the future, completed by a
baby in a back-pack, efficiently puncturing her vision of ideal sex
as light, fun, convenient and disconnected) identifies in her a
species of retrogressive masculinity, moving on at the slightest
taste of emotional entanglement. She doesn’t want things to get
heavy, and she is, as she repeats on a couple of occasions, averse
to “wringing out other people’s soggy hankies”.
Much of this stems back to her relationship with a particularly
monstrous mother - a brilliant neurosurgeon - who is as wealthy,
arrogant and smug as her colleague in fiction, Henry Perrone in Ian
McEwan’s Saturday.
Destructive and ambivalent mothering, especially of daughters,
recurs as a theme throughout the novel’s sub-plots, underlining its
fettering effects. One young mother so abhors the thought of having
a child that she rejoices at the thought of its having been
still-born, while another fills the home with toxic invective that
threatens to cripple her daughter.
Fathers, on the other hand, recur asfigures of salvation, and
this includes the fortunate, albeit posthumous, advent of Hannah’s
own.
There is, in Hannah’s transformation, a sort of Austen-esque
archness, as the young heroine comes to understand something of her
own emotional pride, and the resolution of the strands of the novel
by means of a romance narrative underline its place in this
tradition.
In this way, in ideological terms, the novel can be read as
containing a narrative of Hannah’s own recovery, which eventually
involves placing her back in the bosom of her lost family, and the
arms of a lover (babies in back-packs perhaps no longer so remote a
possibility).
The way Hannah talks about her toughness is obviously telling,
and locates her within a lineage of tough-talking and sexually
acquisitive detectives, but part of this relates to the question of
her voice, which is, from the opening, brash and slangy with the
occasional false note. Her laconic Australianness is something she
seems occasionally aware of as an affectation, such as when a
conference of British art historians, whom Hannah imagines as all
having double-barrelled surnames, finds her bringing out her most
pronounced Australian idiom.
At other times her brashness feels a bit unlikely, or
unexplained. I found it odd, for instance, that Hannah would, in
one of the novel’s most dramatic moments (of which there are quite
a few) - the Haggadah is under threat, Ozren is bereaved and
exhausted - punctuate an impassioned appeal to him with the
appellation “mate”.
Hannah’s Australianness felt, to me, slightly anachronistic, or
confected, or perhaps made with an eye to the international
audience the Australian-born, US-based Brooks no doubt
commands.
In other respects, Brooks’ characterisation is remarkable. Her
ability to evoke the conflicts that tear at an otherwise-devout
Rabbi, or the altruism of resistance in, for example, a young
Muslim wife in Sarajevo in the 1940s, is exceptional.
Brooks’ ability to take an initial inspiration and weave from
fact a vibrant fiction situates it within the rich seams of
“faction”, increasingly frequent in contemporary writing.
Felicity Plunkett teaches literature and poetics at the
University of Queensland.

People of The Book is a novel of
contrasting textures. It centres on a young Australian book
conservator, Hannah Heath, working in a Sarajevo library to study
and restore a recently recovered medieval manuscript.
The controlled climate of the library archive where Hannah works
on the exquisite illuminated Haggadah, the Jewish book used to tell
of the biblical Passover, is set amid a broken, chaotic world -
smashed buildings and fractured lives - exemplified by the
librarian, Ozren Karamen, who has taken extraordinary risks to save
the manuscript.
Brooks’ novel revolves around the contrast between the exquisite
care taken to examine the ancient Haggadah, scarcely touching it to
tease out its secrets, and, on the other hand, the many violences,
and spillages - tears, blood, wine - that have shaped its creation
and endangered its survival for more than 600 years, and that now
surround its recovery.
Running parallel with the career-making work she is undertaking
is an exploration of Hannah’s own identity and temperament, and a
process of emotional education she experiences, as her own
concealed familial history is uncovered, and her own defences
touched.
At the novel’s heart is a magnificent opulence. The evocation of
the many textures of the manuscript itself, and the worlds from
which it comes, and into which it arrives, is dazzling.
Brooks’ close focus is like Hannah’s own, and the writing often
has a curatorial precision and focus whose effects are beautiful:
the description of a tiny scrap of an insect’s wing, or the mingled
stain of kosher wine and blood, clues to the book’s journey,
exemplify this.
Brooks, whose previous novel March won a Pulitzer Prize, and
whose otherwise-multifarious fiction and non-fictional work has
focused on themes of travel, exile and loss, is meticulous in her
evocation of the many worlds through which the manuscript
travels.
From Seville in 1480, where extraordinary foresight enables a
father to prepare his daughter for an exceptional life, to the
mountains around Sarajevo in 1940, where fascism and its resistance
endanger the treasured book, Brooks conjures places and events with
clarity.
In this, her talents as a researcher are apparent, and they fuse
with a delicate poetry, through which the sense of painstaking
close work, both Hannah’s and Brooks’, is apparent.
The scarring of books and their creators, protectors and readers
- many of whom are young women - is twined into a narrative about
the spectrum of violences in a bruising world, a metaphor Brooks
handles deftly. She gestures towards complex reverberations about
violence and violation, respect, care and resilience.
The structure of People of the Book is as intricate as
the book’s history, and unfolds in discrete sections as the
disparate clues to its identity themselves appear, moving backwards
in time to the book’s creation. These punctuate Hannah’s
forward-moving story, and relate figuratively to what she herself
learns both through her professional endeavours, and her
relationships.
The worlds evoked through the microscopic clues - the insect’s
wing, a trace of salt - are woven into the overarching narrative of
Hannah’s discovery and self-discovery, which takes on aspects of
the detective novel, as she chases clues and encounters
concealment.
March, which takes as its main character the absent
father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, raised
debate about its protagonist’s likeability. The question of the
extent to which a fictional character needs to be embraced by a
reader is a difficult one, and one that recurs here.
Hannah describes her own emotional aloofness, without any sense
of its being a problem, as though the same clinical style that
characterises her approach to love is exactly that which generates
her professional success. This is tested as the narrative
progresses, though Hannah retains a determined bloodlessness.
One spurned lover (who makes the mistake of imagining himself
with her, hiking in the mountains in the future, completed by a
baby in a back-pack, efficiently puncturing her vision of ideal sex
as light, fun, convenient and disconnected) identifies in her a
species of retrogressive masculinity, moving on at the slightest
taste of emotional entanglement. She doesn’t want things to get
heavy, and she is, as she repeats on a couple of occasions, averse
to “wringing out other people’s soggy hankies”.
Much of this stems back to her relationship with a particularly
monstrous mother - a brilliant neurosurgeon - who is as wealthy,
arrogant and smug as her colleague in fiction, Henry Perrone in Ian
McEwan’s Saturday.
Destructive and ambivalent mothering, especially of daughters,
recurs as a theme throughout the novel’s sub-plots, underlining its
fettering effects. One young mother so abhors the thought of having
a child that she rejoices at the thought of its having been
still-born, while another fills the home with toxic invective that
threatens to cripple her daughter.
Fathers, on the other hand, recur asfigures of salvation, and
this includes the fortunate, albeit posthumous, advent of Hannah’s
own.
There is, in Hannah’s transformation, a sort of Austen-esque
archness, as the young heroine comes to understand something of her
own emotional pride, and the resolution of the strands of the novel
by means of a romance narrative underline its place in this
tradition.
In this way, in ideological terms, the novel can be read as
containing a narrative of Hannah’s own recovery, which eventually
involves placing her back in the bosom of her lost family, and the
arms of a lover (babies in back-packs perhaps no longer so remote a
possibility).
The way Hannah talks about her toughness is obviously telling,
and locates her within a lineage of tough-talking and sexually
acquisitive detectives, but part of this relates to the question of
her voice, which is, from the opening, brash and slangy with the
occasional false note. Her laconic Australianness is something she
seems occasionally aware of as an affectation, such as when a
conference of British art historians, whom Hannah imagines as all
having double-barrelled surnames, finds her bringing out her most
pronounced Australian idiom.
At other times her brashness feels a bit unlikely, or
unexplained. I found it odd, for instance, that Hannah would, in
one of the novel’s most dramatic moments (of which there are quite
a few) - the Haggadah is under threat, Ozren is bereaved and
exhausted - punctuate an impassioned appeal to him with the
appellation “mate”.
Hannah’s Australianness felt, to me, slightly anachronistic, or
confected, or perhaps made with an eye to the international
audience the Australian-born, US-based Brooks no doubt
commands.
In other respects, Brooks’ characterisation is remarkable. Her
ability to evoke the conflicts that tear at an otherwise-devout
Rabbi, or the altruism of resistance in, for example, a young
Muslim wife in Sarajevo in the 1940s, is exceptional.
Brooks’ ability to take an initial inspiration and weave from
fact a vibrant fiction situates it within the rich seams of
“faction”, increasingly frequent in contemporary writing.
Felicity Plunkett teaches literature and poetics at the
University of Queensland.

MEXICO CITY Mexico indicated Wednesday it expects the downturn in the U.S. will mean much slower growth this year for its own economy, which depends on its northern neighbor for the bulk of its trade and investment.The Treasury Department said it was lowering its forecast for Mexico’s 2008 economic growth to 2.8 percent from 3.7 percent - a 24 percent drop.”It is expected that the prevalent international economic scenario in 2008 will be less favorable for Mexico than what was anticipated,” the department said in a report posted on its Web site.Mexico’s gross domestic product is expected to have grown about 3.2 percent last year, the department said.More than any other country in Latin America, Mexico’s economic fate is tied to the U.S., its partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico sends more than 80 percent of its exports to the U.S., which is also Mexico’s largest source of direct foreign investment and remittances.Mexico’s central bank on Wednesday also lowered its growth estimate by half a percentage point - to between 2.75 percent and 3.25 percent, compared to its previous estimate of 3.25 percent to 3.75 percent - also citing the U.S. downturn.Banco de Mexico said it expects there will be 620,000 jobs created in the formal economy this year, down from 756,000 in 2007.The bank also said remittances from Mexicans living abroad - the country’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil - had increased by a modest 1 percent last year compared with 2006, to $23.9 billion.It said it expected similar remittance growth in 2008.The lowered Mexican growth projections came on the same day the U.S. Commerce Department announced a growth rate of just 0.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, the worst rate since 2002. Some fear a recession as U.S. growth - just 2.2 percent for all of 2007 - has stalled due to the ailing housing market and credit tightening.The Treasury Department said, however, there are “diverse factors that will mitigate the effects” of the slowing U.S. and global economy. It cited strong Mexican economic policies, increased spending on infrastructure, housing and other sectors, and anticipated high oil revenues.If it were not for those factors offsetting the U.S. slowdown, “the effect would have been much worse,” said Mauricio Gonzalez, president of the Mexico-based analysis firm Grupo Economistas Asociados.Latin America - especially Mexico - has always been hit hard by U.S. economic downturns. The region as a whole directs 50 percent of its exports to the United States, said Keiji Inoue, an economist at the United Nations.But Latin America is less vulnerable than in past crises, when a case of the sniffles in the U.S. economy prompted full-blown pneumonia across the region, economists say.One of Mexico’s strongest weapons is a huge public-private infrastructure plan proposed by President Felipe Calderon, who promised the government would spend $39 billion annually over his six-year term on roads, bridges, seaports, dams, and oil installations.Calderon noted the coming difficult times for the U.S. and global economy.”What we do not want is that this puts the brakes on the Mexican economy,” he said.In addition to Mexico’s infrastructure plan, the country is “revving the motors of our economy” with housing-construction projects, credit-lending programs, tourism development and diversification of its export markets, Calderon said earlier this month at a ceremony marking the start of construction on an $800 million dam.Such factors will indeed help to lessen the impact of the United States’ economic woes on Mexico, said Gonzalez, who noted that when former President Vicente Fox’s term began in 2000, Mexico’s growth rate dropped from about 6 percent to zero growth due to a U.S. drop from 3 percent to 1 percent.”That was not even a recession,” he said. “This time it’s not going to be that way.”If the U.S. does slip into a recession, the United Nations predicts Latin America as a whole would grow by only 2.6 percent, while Mexico’s growth would slow to about 1 percent, said chief U.N. economist Robert Vos.”That the U.S. downturn will affect us - there can be no doubt,” Gonzalez said.(This version CORRECTS year to 2007 from 2008 in 7th graf. )

MEXICO CITY Mexico indicated Wednesday it expects the downturn in the U.S. will mean much slower growth this year for its own economy, which depends on its northern neighbor for the bulk of its trade and investment.The Treasury Department said it was lowering its forecast for Mexico’s 2008 economic growth to 2.8 percent from 3.7 percent - a 24 percent drop.”It is expected that the prevalent international economic scenario in 2008 will be less favorable for Mexico than what was anticipated,” the department said in a report posted on its Web site.Mexico’s gross domestic product is expected to have grown about 3.2 percent last year, the department said.More than any other country in Latin America, Mexico’s economic fate is tied to the U.S., its partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico sends more than 80 percent of its exports to the U.S., which is also Mexico’s largest source of direct foreign investment and remittances.Mexico’s central bank on Wednesday also lowered its growth estimate by half a percentage point - to between 2.75 percent and 3.25 percent, compared to its previous estimate of 3.25 percent to 3.75 percent - also citing the U.S. downturn.Banco de Mexico said it expects there will be 620,000 jobs created in the formal economy this year, down from 756,000 in 2007.The bank also said remittances from Mexicans living abroad - the country’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil - had increased by a modest 1 percent last year compared with 2006, to $23.9 billion.It said it expected similar remittance growth in 2008.The lowered Mexican growth projections came on the same day the U.S. Commerce Department announced a growth rate of just 0.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, the worst rate since 2002. Some fear a recession as U.S. growth - just 2.2 percent for all of 2007 - has stalled due to the ailing housing market and credit tightening.The Treasury Department said, however, there are “diverse factors that will mitigate the effects” of the slowing U.S. and global economy. It cited strong Mexican economic policies, increased spending on infrastructure, housing and other sectors, and anticipated high oil revenues.If it were not for those factors offsetting the U.S. slowdown, “the effect would have been much worse,” said Mauricio Gonzalez, president of the Mexico-based analysis firm Grupo Economistas Asociados.Latin America - especially Mexico - has always been hit hard by U.S. economic downturns. The region as a whole directs 50 percent of its exports to the United States, said Keiji Inoue, an economist at the United Nations.But Latin America is less vulnerable than in past crises, when a case of the sniffles in the U.S. economy prompted full-blown pneumonia across the region, economists say.One of Mexico’s strongest weapons is a huge public-private infrastructure plan proposed by President Felipe Calderon, who promised the government would spend $39 billion annually over his six-year term on roads, bridges, seaports, dams, and oil installations.Calderon noted the coming difficult times for the U.S. and global economy.”What we do not want is that this puts the brakes on the Mexican economy,” he said.In addition to Mexico’s infrastructure plan, the country is “revving the motors of our economy” with housing-construction projects, credit-lending programs, tourism development and diversification of its export markets, Calderon said earlier this month at a ceremony marking the start of construction on an $800 million dam.Such factors will indeed help to lessen the impact of the United States’ economic woes on Mexico, said Gonzalez, who noted that when former President Vicente Fox’s term began in 2000, Mexico’s growth rate dropped from about 6 percent to zero growth due to a U.S. drop from 3 percent to 1 percent.”That was not even a recession,” he said. “This time it’s not going to be that way.”If the U.S. does slip into a recession, the United Nations predicts Latin America as a whole would grow by only 2.6 percent, while Mexico’s growth would slow to about 1 percent, said chief U.N. economist Robert Vos.”That the U.S. downturn will affect us - there can be no doubt,” Gonzalez said.(This version CORRECTS year to 2007 from 2008 in 7th graf. )

MEXICO CITY Mexico indicated Wednesday it expects the downturn in the U.S. will mean much slower growth this year for its own economy, which depends on its northern neighbor for the bulk of its trade and investment.The Treasury Department said it was lowering its forecast for Mexico’s 2008 economic growth to 2.8 percent from 3.7 percent - a 24 percent drop.”It is expected that the prevalent international economic scenario in 2008 will be less favorable for Mexico than what was anticipated,” the department said in a report posted on its Web site.Mexico’s gross domestic product is expected to have grown about 3.2 percent last year, the department said.More than any other country in Latin America, Mexico’s economic fate is tied to the U.S., its partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico sends more than 80 percent of its exports to the U.S., which is also Mexico’s largest source of direct foreign investment and remittances.Mexico’s central bank on Wednesday also lowered its growth estimate by half a percentage point - to between 2.75 percent and 3.25 percent, compared to its previous estimate of 3.25 percent to 3.75 percent - also citing the U.S. downturn.Banco de Mexico said it expects there will be 620,000 jobs created in the formal economy this year, down from 756,000 in 2007.The bank also said remittances from Mexicans living abroad - the country’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil - had increased by a modest 1 percent last year compared with 2006, to $23.9 billion.It said it expected similar remittance growth in 2008.The lowered Mexican growth projections came on the same day the U.S. Commerce Department announced a growth rate of just 0.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, the worst rate since 2002. Some fear a recession as U.S. growth - just 2.2 percent for all of 2007 - has stalled due to the ailing housing market and credit tightening.The Treasury Department said, however, there are “diverse factors that will mitigate the effects” of the slowing U.S. and global economy. It cited strong Mexican economic policies, increased spending on infrastructure, housing and other sectors, and anticipated high oil revenues.If it were not for those factors offsetting the U.S. slowdown, “the effect would have been much worse,” said Mauricio Gonzalez, president of the Mexico-based analysis firm Grupo Economistas Asociados.Latin America - especially Mexico - has always been hit hard by U.S. economic downturns. The region as a whole directs 50 percent of its exports to the United States, said Keiji Inoue, an economist at the United Nations.But Latin America is less vulnerable than in past crises, when a case of the sniffles in the U.S. economy prompted full-blown pneumonia across the region, economists say.One of Mexico’s strongest weapons is a huge public-private infrastructure plan proposed by President Felipe Calderon, who promised the government would spend $39 billion annually over his six-year term on roads, bridges, seaports, dams, and oil installations.Calderon noted the coming difficult times for the U.S. and global economy.”What we do not want is that this puts the brakes on the Mexican economy,” he said.In addition to Mexico’s infrastructure plan, the country is “revving the motors of our economy” with housing-construction projects, credit-lending programs, tourism development and diversification of its export markets, Calderon said earlier this month at a ceremony marking the start of construction on an $800 million dam.Such factors will indeed help to lessen the impact of the United States’ economic woes on Mexico, said Gonzalez, who noted that when former President Vicente Fox’s term began in 2000, Mexico’s growth rate dropped from about 6 percent to zero growth due to a U.S. drop from 3 percent to 1 percent.”That was not even a recession,” he said. “This time it’s not going to be that way.”If the U.S. does slip into a recession, the United Nations predicts Latin America as a whole would grow by only 2.6 percent, while Mexico’s growth would slow to about 1 percent, said chief U.N. economist Robert Vos.”That the U.S. downturn will affect us - there can be no doubt,” Gonzalez said.(This version CORRECTS year to 2007 from 2008 in 7th graf. )

MEXICO CITY Mexico indicated Wednesday it expects the downturn in the U.S. will mean much slower growth this year for its own economy, which depends on its northern neighbor for the bulk of its trade and investment.The Treasury Department said it was lowering its forecast for Mexico’s 2008 economic growth to 2.8 percent from 3.7 percent - a 24 percent drop.”It is expected that the prevalent international economic scenario in 2008 will be less favorable for Mexico than what was anticipated,” the department said in a report posted on its Web site.Mexico’s gross domestic product is expected to have grown about 3.2 percent last year, the department said.More than any other country in Latin America, Mexico’s economic fate is tied to the U.S., its partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico sends more than 80 percent of its exports to the U.S., which is also Mexico’s largest source of direct foreign investment and remittances.Mexico’s central bank on Wednesday also lowered its growth estimate by half a percentage point - to between 2.75 percent and 3.25 percent, compared to its previous estimate of 3.25 percent to 3.75 percent - also citing the U.S. downturn.Banco de Mexico said it expects there will be 620,000 jobs created in the formal economy this year, down from 756,000 in 2007.The bank also said remittances from Mexicans living abroad - the country’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil - had increased by a modest 1 percent last year compared with 2006, to $23.9 billion.It said it expected similar remittance growth in 2008.The lowered Mexican growth projections came on the same day the U.S. Commerce Department announced a growth rate of just 0.6 percent for the fourth quarter of 2007, the worst rate since 2002. Some fear a recession as U.S. growth - just 2.2 percent for all of 2007 - has stalled due to the ailing housing market and credit tightening.The Treasury Department said, however, there are “diverse factors that will mitigate the effects” of the slowing U.S. and global economy. It cited strong Mexican economic policies, increased spending on infrastructure, housing and other sectors, and anticipated high oil revenues.If it were not for those factors offsetting the U.S. slowdown, “the effect would have been much worse,” said Mauricio Gonzalez, president of the Mexico-based analysis firm Grupo Economistas Asociados.Latin America - especially Mexico - has always been hit hard by U.S. economic downturns. The region as a whole directs 50 percent of its exports to the United States, said Keiji Inoue, an economist at the United Nations.But Latin America is less vulnerable than in past crises, when a case of the sniffles in the U.S. economy prompted full-blown pneumonia across the region, economists say.One of Mexico’s strongest weapons is a huge public-private infrastructure plan proposed by President Felipe Calderon, who promised the government would spend $39 billion annually over his six-year term on roads, bridges, seaports, dams, and oil installations.Calderon noted the coming difficult times for the U.S. and global economy.”What we do not want is that this puts the brakes on the Mexican economy,” he said.In addition to Mexico’s infrastructure plan, the country is “revving the motors of our economy” with housing-construction projects, credit-lending programs, tourism development and diversification of its export markets, Calderon said earlier this month at a ceremony marking the start of construction on an $800 million dam.Such factors will indeed help to lessen the impact of the United States’ economic woes on Mexico, said Gonzalez, who noted that when former President Vicente Fox’s term began in 2000, Mexico’s growth rate dropped from about 6 percent to zero growth due to a U.S. drop from 3 percent to 1 percent.”That was not even a recession,” he said. “This time it’s not going to be that way.”If the U.S. does slip into a recession, the United Nations predicts Latin America as a whole would grow by only 2.6 percent, while Mexico’s growth would slow to about 1 percent, said chief U.N. economist Robert Vos.”That the U.S. downturn will affect us - there can be no doubt,” Gonzalez said.(This version CORRECTS year to 2007 from 2008 in 7th graf. )