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April 13, 2021  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review

An Australian Man of Letters: Don Watson

Don Watson has been an academic historian, a speechwriter and a satirist. What has linked all these different stages of his working life has been his astonishing ability as a writer. Watsonia is a compilation of Watson’s writing that racks up an impressive 500 pages. The book covers Watson’s writing on politics, sport, nature and […]

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December 19, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, Society

‘If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future’ review: the origins of Big Data

We now live in a world where corporations have a massive amount of data on anyone who has used a phone and searched the internet or even shopped at a supermarket. A new book by Jill Lepore looks at one of the precursors of data giants like Amazon and political analysis firms such as Cambridge […]

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October 12, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review

Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

Cynical Theories:  How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Swift: London, 2020) United States President Donald Trump will chant back “Fake news” to any journalist who asks a question that does not align with his conception of the world. The left ridicules the President’s absurd protests as […]

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September 21, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history

J. R. Jordan, Robert Wise: The Motion Pictures, Revised Edition. (Florida: Bear Manor, 2020)

No ghost picture scared people more than The Haunting, with its doomed house where doors seem to buckle and bulge unnaturally from the inside. The opening of Sound of Music, as a helicopter sweeps down on Julie Andrews, in the Swiss Alps is a visual and musical triumph. Both landmark scenes were the work of […]

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March 31, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, Uncategorized

Is Jesus History? A review

John Dickson has an impressive CV. He was the Founding Director of theCentre for Public Christianity. He has a degree in theology and a Ph.D. inancient history. An ordained Anglican minister, he was a Research Fellow of the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, and became a Visiting Academic in the Faculty of Classics […]

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March 5, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history, Uncategorized

The Brothers Mankiewicz review: a groundbreaking dual biography

Sydney Ladensohn Stern, The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope. Heartbreak and Hollywood Classics (USA: University Press of Mississippi, 2019) The writing talent alone of the Mankiewicz Brothers – Herman and Joseph – is overwhelming. Younger brother Joseph won academy awards for writing and directing, particularly for the verbal fireworks of All About Eve, and Herman laid the basis […]

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January 2, 2020  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, film history

No more Grapes of Wrath – really?

Jill Lepore’s magisterial These Truths is a fantastic book. It is highly ambitious and delivers a strong narrative history of the United States. Professor Lepore has taken the United States Constitution as a starting point for a highly impressive single-volume survey of the history of the USA. Impressive as it is, it is not without […]

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December 24, 2019  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, Uncategorized

What place does history have in a post-truth world?

The Knowledge Solution: Australian History Anna Clark, Melbourne University Press, 2019 Book Review When the subtitle of a book reads: “What place does history have in apost-truth world?”, you would think that the book might actually touch upon the topic. Anna Clark has edited this book on Australian historical writing. AssociateProfessor Clark is an Australian […]

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January 17, 2019  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review

The Screen is Red – book review

Brianton, Kevin Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2018, Vol.48(2), pp.64-67 Bernard F. Dick, The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. 282 pp., illus. Hardcover: $65. During the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities – or HUAC – investigations of Hollywood in 1947, chairman […]

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October 11, 2018  |  By Kevin Brianton  |  In Book Review, Uncategorized

Philip Taffs’s Reviews > Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist

Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist by Kevin Brianton   Philip Taffs‘s review Oct 10, 2018 really liked it   John Ford once famously introduced himself: “I’m John Ford. I make Westerns.” To which Australian author, Kevin Brianton, might now rightfully respond: “I’m Kevin Brianton. I write […]

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  • Richard Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination
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