The link below is to a book review of ‘Church Elders – How To Shepherd God’s People Like Jesus,’ by Jeramie Rinne.
For more visit:
http://matt-mitchell.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/review-church-elders-how-to-shepherd.html
Category Archives: Book Review
Book review: Takeover – Foreign Investment and the Australian Psyche
Mark Beeson, University of Western Australia
Some things never change. One of the perennial features of Australia’s economic and political discourse is how to deal with foreign investment and ownership. Given Australia’s historical reliance on foreign capital to fund national development, this is more surprising than it might seem.
David Uren is one of Australia’s best economic commentators. His excellent analysis of Australian attitudes toward foreign investment in Takeover – Foreign Investment and the Australian Psyche explains how the frequently conflicting views of free traders and protectionists – whether on the political left or right – have shaped public policy.
The “national interest”, at least as far as economic policy is concerned, has always been a contested compromise and a consequence of the relative political influence of these domestic forces. This is an important conclusion that emerges from Uren’s detailed exploration of Australia’s economic history.
If there is one criticism to be made about the book it is that Uren is at times surprisingly reserved about spelling out the implications of his own analysis. Dispassionate disinterest has its merits, but it is somewhat surprising that someone whose day job is writing for The Australian is not more forceful in spelling out the book’s central argument about a liberal investment regime’s possible merits.
As it is, the book has a rather “academic” feel, at least as far as the content is concerned. One of its strengths is in making clear just what a long-standing part of Australia’s economic and political history anxiety about foreign investment actually is, and how this has shaped domestic political debates and attitudes.
As Uren points out, when Joe Hockey blocked the takeover of GrainCorp by the US multinational Archer Daniels Midland in 2013, he employed precisely the same sorts of arguments that were made to justify protectionism in the 1850s.
That the Abbott government could snub a company from the US – Australia’s closest strategic ally – is indicative of the domestic political sensitivity of foreign investment. It’s also a reminder of the Nationals’ enduring influence on trade and investment issues. The rise of China as Australia’s most important trading partner and a growing source of investment adds an additional layer of complexity to the task of deciding what’s in Australia’s supposed national interest.
In this context, at least, Uren is unambiguous. The way questions about the national interest are decided in relation to investment is “a travesty”, he argues, and “lacks transparency, predictability and accountability”. He is especially scathing about the way policy toward Chinese investment has been handled.
And yet, concerns about the nature of China’s form of “state capitalism” are not without foundation. Market forces and a concern about short-term profitability are not the sole determinant of investment decisions by state-owned enterprises. Even if such policies are ultimately misguided and destined to fail, it is important that other governments recognise their potential impact on economic and even strategic outcomes.
Black Inc
Uren gives this possibility short shrift. But even if he’s right about the largely beneficial impact of foreign investment, it might have been useful to give more consideration to the origins of inward capital flows.
It often does make a difference where it comes from, how foreign multinationals operate, and what their relationship is with their countries of origin. Japanese multinationals really did try to shape the resource trade in the 1980s and the possible implications of that experience have not been lost on China’s policymakers.
The key question Australian policymakers have to consider is about the long-term impact of investment decisions that are made elsewhere, but which ultimately help to determine the structure of the national economy. This is no easy task. Some observers think the national economy no longer actually exists as a discrete entity over which policymakers can exercise control.
But even if “globalisation” has transformed an increasingly integrated international economy, politics remains relentlessly local – and so do most people’s jobs.
So while Uren might be right to highlight the rent-seeking behaviour of foreign multinationals in the car industry, for example, the reality is that they provided relatively high-skill, well-paid jobs for many Australians – not to mention the backbone of a national manufacturing capacity.
The problem with letting footloose multinational capital make all the decisions about where investment occurs is that Australia may end up with an economy that is narrowly focused and overly reliant on activities that are prone to cyclical booms and busts. That is precisely where Australia finds itself.
If the national economic interest means anything, it must surely refer to policies and outcomes that benefit the majority of the population who live in a particular place.
It is already clear that the vast wealth generated by the resource boom was squandered. It is also evident that the effort to tax the primarily foreign companies that were the resource boom’s principal beneficiaries was, according to Uren:
… one of the greatest failures of public policy in the history of Australian government.
It is not necessary to agree with Uren’s concerns about the possibly negative impact of nationalist sentiment on investment policy and decisions to recognise that this book is a significant contribution to our understanding of why foreign investment remains a contentious area of public policy.
As no less a figure than Malcolm Turnbull declares on the back cover, the book:
… explains the lay of the land today.
Indeed it does, prime minister – even if the author could have been a bit more forthright about his conclusions.
Mark Beeson, Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Not My Review: After Acts, by Bryan Litftin
The link below is to a book review of ‘After Acts,’ by Bryan Litftin.
For more visit:
http://matt-mitchell.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/after-acts-by-bryan-litftin-book-review.html
Not My Review: United By Faith – The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race, by Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey and Karen Chai Kim
The link below is to a book review of ‘United By Faith – The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race,’ by Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey and Karen Chai Kim.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-united-by-faith-by-curtiss-paul-deyoung-et-al/
Not My Review: Reviving the Black Church – New Life for a Sacred Institution, by Thabiti Anyabwile
The link below is to a book review of ‘Reviving the Black Church – New Life for a Sacred Institution,’ by Thabiti Anyabwile.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-reviving-the-black-church-by-thabiti-anyabwile/
Not My Review: Right Color Wrong Culture by Bryan Lorrits
The link below is to a book review of ‘Right Color Wrong Culture,’ by Bryan Lorrits.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-right-color-wrong-culture-by-bryan-loritts/
Not My Review: Bloodlines, by John Piper
The link below is to a book review of ‘Bloodlines,’ by John Piper.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-bloodlines-by-john-piper/
Not My Review: ‘The Juvenilization of American Christianity’ & ‘From Here To Maturity,’ by Thomas E. Bergler
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Juvenilization of American Christianity’ & ‘From Here To Maturity,’ by Thomas E. Bergler.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/books-review-the-juvenilization-of-american-christianity-and-from-here-to-maturity-by-thomas-e-bergler/
Not My Review: The Accidental Feminist – Restoring Our Delight in God’s Good Design, by Courtney Reissig
The link below is to a book review of ‘The Accidental Feminist – Restoring Our Delight in God’s Good Design,’ by Courtney Reissig.
For more visit:
http://9marks.org/review/book-review-the-accidental-feminist-by-courtney-reissig/
JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing bears testimony to the value of a literary archive
Tim Mehigan, The University of Queensland
David Attwell’s new book JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015) commands attention for a particular and notable reason: it is the first extended investigation of the South African author’s work since the advent of Coetzee archive at the University of Texas in 2011.
Attwell is always mindful of the conventional wisdom about Coetzee’s works – a wisdom he has contributed to over many years through his own scholarship. But his chief concern in Life of Writing is to allow the archive to speak. He wants the drafts of Coetzee’s novels, his notes, press clippings and miscellaneous remarks, to be considered at length for the first time.
In doing so, the book raises the question of whether that archive makes any real difference to our appreciation of Coetzee’s core concerns. Whether the works stand eloquently, as they mostly have till now, on their own ground, with no need of augmentation.
Another way of putting the same question (a touch polemically, I admit) is to ask whether the philologist – the literary archivist of days gone by – is needed when it comes to ongoing engagement with notable writing.
Image courtesy of Text Publishing
As a way of answering that, let me outline the approach Attwell adopts. The chapter Suburban Bandit: Michael K as outlaw, considers Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K, which marked Coetzee’s arrival on the global stage and bagged him the 1983 Booker Prize – the first of two to come his way.
For those who don’t know, Life & Times is the story of a man called Michael K, who journeys from Cape Town to his mother’s rural birthplace. The setting is apartheid era South Africa during a fictional civil war.
Much scholarship already exists around Life & Times. But the archive reveals the literary model Coetzee was using as a way into his material. It was not, as had been widely assumed, any one of several possible texts by Franz Kafka – many believed “K” was a tribute to Kafka, or the protagonist K in two of his novels.
Instead, the model was a piece of writing that appeared a century before Kafka’s, the novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) by the German author Heinrich von Kleist.
The protagonist of Kleist’s story suffers a loss when two horses he leaves as surety are worked into the ground while he is away on business. His campaign of revenge soon makes him one of the most feared outlaws of his day (Kleist’s story is based on an actual historical chronicle).
The question Coetzee poses in his recasting of Kleist’s story is whether that path of violence would have to be abjured in the fictional universe of his own novel. The complicated gestation of Life & Times sheds light on the complex problem Coetzee chose as his starting point.
Attwell uncovers in this instance, as with so many others he considers, a sprawling edifice of writings and rewritings, plots and subplots, many of which end up – as with a good film – on the cutting-room floor.
EPA/Mauricio Duenas Castaneda
As Attwell shows, Coetzee’s novels do not abandon the contradictions inherent in their intellectual starting point or shift onto easier ground. On the contrary, they retain the sense of contradiction from which they spring and to which they insistently seek a response.
These responses illustrate the struggle of protagonists against a testing, frequently intransigent, outer reality. They also bring forth in essential outline “the life of writing,” the exacting craft of the writer. It turns out that the kind of writing to which Coetzee pledges himself is not fully tractable even to the most dogged and drawn out literary labour.
Small wonder Coetzee chose a moment of decadal significance – January 1, 1970 – as the moment of personal commitment to the supremely challenging literary enterprise he had set himself.
In the concrete instance of Life & Times we see an initial premise, arising from middle-class indignation, move through various stages of development, finally emerging as the pathos of the simpleton Michael K. The rebellion this character stages is then almost completely allegorical.
Harelipped, idiot-seeming, Michael K is fitted to allegory less because of an inability to articulate his concerns than the unspeakable circumstances engulfing him. The novel, on a long journey to its final form, thus reveals to the reader a psychological and existential predicament.
It is a predicament, as the medical officer in the novel tells us, according to which meaning seeks to “take up residence within a system without becoming a term in it”. Though in the end a different novel quite removed from its dominant inspiration, Michael Kohlhaas, Life & Times nevertheless works out the same sort of rebellion of decency against obscene outer circumstances.
Attwell concludes:
Coetzee triumphed over his own earlier difficulties by creating a powerful anomaly – one which, when read back into the culture from which it springs, stands as an affirmation of artistic and intellectual freedom (even if such a declaration, in its finality, traduces what the novel itself argues).
The book is without question an important work of scholarship, and one of the most insightful studies of Coetzee and his oeuvre yet published.
JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing by David Attwell is published by Text Publishing.
Tim Mehigan, Professor of Languages and Cultures , The University of Queensland
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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