This is a beautifully written book that ought to be widely read. It ought to set off alarm bells all over the place. As much as any single book since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), it makes starkly clear how reckless and destructive we are being as a species in our impact on the ecosphere. It does so with an easy to read, but cumulatively disturbing weave of interviews, anecdotes and telling data. Read it and you are unlikely to think of insects, including those you regard as pets, in quite the same way again.

Since the fall of Kabul last Sunday week, countless commentators have likened it to the fall Saigon, in April 1975. The analogy has been a lament and a rebuke. But all that is just emotional and intuitive thinking. What’s needed right now is depth of perspective. There are analogies between the two wars and their endings. But the fall of Vietnam did not end the Pax Americana. We need to avoid catastrophism now and take a deep breath.

The sudden death, last Thursday, of Senator Kimberley Kitching caught all of us by surprise. I was more stunned than most, because I had had lunch with her that very afternoon. We talked about the war in Ukraine, the broader strategic picture regarding the United States, the EU and NATO, Australia’s foreign policy, Federal politics and the challenges we face with China, Chinese influence operations and Kimberley’s recent questions to ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess, in parliament. One thing we did not discuss was Kimberley’s pre-selection battle.

Vladimir Putin is a dark character, straight out of a novel by Dostoevsky. His whole coterie of kleptocrats and thugs and neo-fascists come across as though they were the realization in actuality of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground or The Possessed. The question hanging in the balance, as we fly into 2023, is what could possibly be an appropriate punishment for the carnage and destruction he has inflicted on Ukraine?

North Korea is one of the most closed and despotic countries in the world. For three generations, since 1945, it has been dominated by a tyrannical dynasty. This compact book brings their story up to date. It is deeply researched and amply referenced. It makes abundantly clear how the regime works and why it is a house of horrors that merits no sympathy of any kind. At the centre of the story told by the author is the long obscure and sinister figure of Kim Jo Yong, younger sister and comrade in tyranny of Kim Jong Un – the man Donald Trump, half a dozen years ago, dubbed ‘Little Rocket Man’.

Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine has been a dismal failure. Even his criminal acolyte and mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin now speaks of possible revolution in Russia. But the war has stirred up every kind of confusion, anxiety and polemic in twitterdom and global geopolitics. Authoritative, book length accounts have been sorely needed.  These three books all meet that criterion.

Few things have more bedevilled the debate about global warming than the question of scientific consensus. About what the scientific consensus on the subject is and about what degree of deference should be paid to scientific consensus as such. Both debates have been seriously aggravated by two other factors.  Global warming seems to have colossal economic implications, which has activated the concerns of many interested parties; and the ecological nature of global warming has stirred up heated ideological passions that go well beyond the science. It’s all very well to feel either passionate or sceptical about these matters, but how are we to think clearly about them?

About six weeks ago, in a televised address during Ramadan, the leading Muslim cleric in Egypt, Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of al-Azhar University in Cairo, who is hailed as one of the leading ‘moderate’ teachers in the Islamic world, denounced apostasy from Islam as ‘grand treason’. He stated categorically: ‘Those learned in Islam and the imams of the four schools of jurisprudence consider apostasy a crime and agree that the apostate must either renounce his apostasy or else be killed.’ 

Just before New Year, this newspaper reprinted a column from The Wall Street Journal headed ‘Science turns to God as universe appears to be ultimate miracle’. The author was one Eric Metaxas, an American religious writer, who has written a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He argued that there is increasing evidence that the probability of the universe existing at all and in such a way that intelligent life can have evolved is so astronomically small that these things cannot have happened by chance, but must be the work of an intelligent designer – ‘God’.

The Chinese Communist Party again and again accuses Japan of being in denial about its World War Two history and being insufficiently repentant about its crimes of that by-gone era. In a speech at Nanjing recently, Chinese president Xi Jinping was at it again, attacking Japan for atrocities committed 77 years ago band charging that it continues to fudge or deny the facts of the matter. ‘History will not be altered as time changes and facts will not disappear because of any chicanery or denials,’ he declared to an audience of thousands. 

On 23 July, Waleed Aly will be presented with the Voltaire Award for free speech from Liberty Victoria. It would be rather charming were he to give a speech on that occasion reflecting on Voltaire’s play Mahomet, which depicted Islam as based on false miracles, personal ambition and ruthless fanaticism. Aly has for some time been the go to person for commentary on Islam and avoiding what is widely dubbed ‘Islamophobia’. It is safe to say he does not share Voltaire’s assessment of Islam.

 The single most important reference point in the debate over the WikiLeaks case is the leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, in 1971, by Daniel Ellsberg. Those who see Ellsberg as a hero tend to see Julian Assange as one. Those critical of Assange tend to denounce what he has done for the same reasons and in the same language that Henry Kissinger used in 1971, when he described his old Harvard University colleague Ellsberg as “the most dangerous man in America.” Ellsberg himself has come out in support of Assange. But the differences between the Ellsberg and Assange cases are more important than the similarities.

The recent massacre of innocents in Paris and French President Francois Hollande’s declaration of a ‘merciless’ war on ISIS, have heightened the danger of aggravated anti-Muslim sentiment in the West at large. The fact that huge numbers of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are pouring into Europe and that a small number of them are likely to be ISIS infiltrators exacerbates this problem, even outside Europe. 

The DVD cover for Alex Gibney’s riveting documentary Zero Days features a picture of a computer screen with a mushroom cloud rising high into the air and the caption World War 3.0. The cover of the September/October 2018 of Foreign Affairs carries the title World War Web: The Fight for the Internet’s Future, accompanied by the image of a menu of Wi-Fi options in different languages. David Sanger’s new book simply has a massive stream of zeros and ones as a background to its title. Welcome to the real/virtual world of our time.

With The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History (2016), Frank Dikotter completes a trilogy on the catastrophic impact that Mao Zedong and his Communist Party inflicted on China between their seizure of power in 1949 and Mao’s death in 1976. The first volume in the trilogy chronologically, though it was written second, was The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-57 (2013). It covers the civil war, the seizure of power, the mass terror campaigns that accompanied and followed that seizure of power, the vaunted Marxist-Leninist nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange and the crushing of intellectual and popular dissent in the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign – which was led by none other than Deng Xiaoping.

There are a great many newly published books that might be interesting, instructive or entertaining to read. There are relatively few that can rightly be called required reading. This is one of them. Every literate person should read it - now.

It is about a deadly existential threat to human civilization and even life on Earth: nuclear arms and the danger of nuclear winter. It is written by a person unusually well informed on this particular subject, having worked at the highest levels with extraordinary access to the most secret plans and discussions and fully conversant with the subject.

PAUL Thomas Anderson's recent film The Master is transparently a critical portrait of the early years of the Church of Scientology under its strange founder Lafayette Ron Hubbard. It is 1950, the year Hubbard published his signature book Dianetics. Philip Seymour Hoffmann plays Lancaster Dodd, who sails around in a boat called Aletheia, practising a new form of talking cure called "processing" and recruiting volunteers on billion-year contracts, while bullying and abusing critics or questioners.

The rise of China is the biggest story in geopolitics. We fuss about where we stand between China and the United States; the end of the commodities boom and our future place in China’s economic development; the uncertainties engendered by Donald Trump’s leadership style; and the systematic efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to buy influence within our institutions and stifle criticism of its own policies and mode of government.