'Robyn Williams, presenter of The Science Show on ABC Radio, reveals all in Turmoil, a searingly honest and often blackly funny reflection on his life, friends, the people he loves and loathes, and a multi-faceted career that includes over forty years on radio. Robyn writes frankly about everything, from performing with Monty Python, his impressions of fellow scientists Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, and his unique insights on climate change and the recent devaluing of science, to frugality and being treated for bowel cancer. ' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For Jonica
Epigraph:
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes. -W.H. Auden
'In 2014, veteran ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams was diagnosed with bowel cancer. It was, he reports, his third brush with death, following cardiac arrest in 1988 and bladder cancer in 1991. His description of the experience, including surgical reduction of his gut and rectum and subsequent debilitating chemotherapy, is brief but graphic. He has survived, but the experience, as he puts it, quite literally, gave him the shits. More positively though, it also resulted in this book: a collection of letters from the brink, ‘the book you write when you don’t have much time left’, although it is not entirely clear whether this lack of time is his own or, collectively, ours.' (Introduction)
'In 2014, veteran ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams was diagnosed with bowel cancer. It was, he reports, his third brush with death, following cardiac arrest in 1988 and bladder cancer in 1991. His description of the experience, including surgical reduction of his gut and rectum and subsequent debilitating chemotherapy, is brief but graphic. He has survived, but the experience, as he puts it, quite literally, gave him the shits. More positively though, it also resulted in this book: a collection of letters from the brink, ‘the book you write when you don’t have much time left’, although it is not entirely clear whether this lack of time is his own or, collectively, ours.' (Introduction)
