It's toured the internet many times over, but I thought I'd stick it up as a mark of respect, if nothing else. Matt Taibbi's The Chicken Doves in Rolling Stone explains how the Democrats have tried to prolong the Iraq War until election day '08, while looking like they've been battling to bring the troops home. The UK press has giving this argument very little air, but I expect them to catch up when a book called The Uprising comes out in mid-May. Most intruiging, it seems this effort has been coordinated by Democratic Senators and their aides. Know any famous Democratic Senators?

Newspapers tend to feel, with some justification, that they need anniversaries or contemporary resonances to run history-based articles, but it can be so rewarding when they do send a writer back into the archives or to interview elderly participants in past events. Research has shown that many people wander away from complex contemporary stories specifically BECAUSE the don't understand the history behing them - Israel, Zimbabwe, the former Soviet Union, etc.

Here, John Huxley of the Sydney Morning Herald interviews someof the first non-white immigrants to Australia, pioneers in the painful process of a country becoming multicultural. Fascinating stuff - and the British, inevitably don't come up smelling of roses. British passengers on the first multi-national immigrant ship demdaned their own dining room, as it was 'an insult' to ask them to eat with foreigners! Lovely stuff...

I've been on my hols, and can return with verdicts on a few of the expected books of the year. First up was Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is such an important, debate-leading book, but will it really change the world if it's physically impossible to carry? It's so long, it's a test of physical strength and mental endurance, clearly designed to beat an entire economic world-view (free-market corporatism) into submission. Personally, I think a brave editor might have mentioned to her that books CAN start popular uprisings, but only popular books - so shall we trim a few chapters? It's interesting to wonder what an editor would have done with the same manuscript submitted by a debut author - I haven't gone near the Harry Potter books, but enthusiasts report that they got flabbier the more cash they made...

Regardless, The Shock Doctrine is probably as close as anyone born in the 1970s will ever get to reading the Book of our Lifetime, the chronicle that explains how we got here (and, uncomfortably, why we're so rich) so I heartily suggest you battle through it (in paperback!)

Another contender is Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, whose writing on poverty in the UK is part of the reason why I became a journalist. Again, it's a hugely important book, but the scale of its target (the English-speaking media) is so great, and the editing so lax, that the fantastic passages of genuinely shocking revelations come padded with repetitions and digressions that really deserved a trim. Others have suggested the book contains profound innacuracies (I would suspect not) but in a telling revelation of how the British view non-fiction, few critics have noted that it needs an edit.

At least Davies does acknowledge, at the end of the book, that he holds out little hope that his tirade will change anything. That attitude would certainly make editing a book much easier (it doesn't matter, just let the writer run free) but says something rather disconcerting about modern polemic non-fiction. Is it written to generate the warm feeling of righteous anger, or to generate change?