Cirrus@Austlit

'Bob Ellis: In His Own Words is a selection of the best of Ellis's much-loved and celebrated essays, speeches, diaries and reviews, in addition to previously unpublished work, archival photos, and reflections from close friends and family. Compiled in collaboration with Ellis's widow, Anne Brooksbank, this collection contains all the wit, acuity and outspokenness that we came to expect from this inimitable wordsmith'. (Publication blurb)

'Dear Annie,

'This is too hard. I've written sonnets and songs and speeches to you, but this is too hard. In forty-four years I've not thought of this letter to you, the sort you write before the euthanasia drug kicks in, and it's too hard. On my mind are the ghosts of the children miscarried and the faces of those that survived. We should have started sooner, but then we would never have had the ones we know, just others with their names. But more, but more, for sure. The six or eight we thought of. How incorrect we were. A bigger Christmas dinner. More daughter dramas. More music round the table.'   (Introduction)

'In these witty, outrageous ten laws, the well-beloved gadfly, sage and wordsmith Bob Ellis investigates dislocation and security, competence and charisma, youth and old age. He explains why bicycles encourage premarital sex, moving house too many times drives humans mad, 'the rising price of a roof ' is the root of all economic evil, and, most ominously, 'power flows to the most boring man in the room'. He alleges, pretty persuasively, that all CEOs - except, perhaps, George Lucas - should be sacked, fined or imprisoned. This is a book to cherish, re-read and pass on to generations less informed of how humans were at the turn of the millennium, and how much they got wrong.' (Back cover)

'Written in Bob Ellis's inimitable style, this is a very personal book about the recent period of intense political change in Australia. Ellis's diary-style narrative starts on 12 November, 2009 (when Rhys Muldoon picks Ellis up from Parliament House and drives him to visit the poet Les Murray at Bunyah for some lively political discussions) and ends on 7 January, 2010, when Bob's sometime mentor, Mike Rann, faces his recent assailant in in an Adelaide court. The books includes coverage and analysis of the next sitting of the New South Wales Parliament and the result of the South Australian election.

'Bob Ellis is close to many of the political players during this rapidly-changing period in Australian politics, but he also manages to stay plugged in to the cultural scene, and has plenty to say about the films, books and theatre of the period. It's very much a pre-election "rant".' (From the publisher's website.)

Backgrounds events leading to Tony Abbott, q.v., becoming Leader of the Liberal Party of Australia in 2009.

'From the suicide bombing of Glasgow Airport and the flooding of England to the horse flu and the Chinese earthquake and the Bhutto assassination, from the rise of Turnbull and Rudd to the slow disintegration of Howard, Ruddock, Olmert, Blair, Musharreff, Mugabe, Costello, Nelson, Buswell and Bush, from the campaign insults of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin to the great economic meltdown and the night of Obama's audacious victory, Bob Ellis took notes, attended funerals, went to the cricket, wrote mordant midnight verse, walked his dogs and pondered on humanity's most formative interim in quite a while.

'No better meditation on the Iraq war's backwash and the propaganda weapons of the Right has been thus far attempted, no wittier essay on human mortality, the planet's fate, and the melancholy harvest of Australia's most rancorous political years.' (Publisher's website)