The Melbourne Athenaeum Book Club

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father (Rating: 4)

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father’s life and reconcile his divided inheritance.Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams from My Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama’s journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

Ath Book Club comments:

The Ath Book Club’s discerning members rated Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father very highly. His language is terrific prose and some descriptive chapters were comparable with Charles Dickens! Especially Obama’s descriptions of Africa and his relatives living there. Dreams from My Father is sensitive, insightful and also an unusually honest account of a man who now is a man of power.

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 Helene Chung: Ching Chong China Girl (Rating: 2)

Warning: Not to be read by convent girls not wearing their gloves.’Ching Chong Chinaman’ girls taunted Helene Chung in her Catholic school playground. An Australian-born Chinese growing up in 1950s Hobart, Helene not only dealt with being different from her blonde-haired, blue-eyed classmates but suffered the shame of having divorced parents. And she kept a shocking secret – her mother, Miss Henry, was a nude model, who also lived in sin with a foreign devil and drove a red MG.Surviving the embarrassment of childhood, Helene discovered the thrill of the theatre, fell into journalism and travelled the world. She became the first non-white reporter on Australian TV and the first female posted abroad by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Ching Chong China Girlis filled with honesty, humour, love and loss, and gives insight into life that traverses cultures East and West.

Ath Book Club comments:

Ching Chong China Girl has all the elements of being a good story. Unfortunately it was not very well told. Helene Chung is an excellent reporter and that shows in her book. Being an autobiography, it was lacking personal feeling – it was written like a report about somebody else’s life and family. However, Helene Chung gave an interesting insight into adaptation of early Chinese immigrants’ life in Tasmania and how she dealt with her own racial issues later, when she progressed in her career.

The Ath Book Club wanted to see more of the personal engagement that is necessary in an autobiography, hence the low rating.

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Peter Ralph - The CEO (Rating: 3+)

The CEO is a pacy business thriller reminiscent of Douglas Kennedy’s The Job and some of John Grisham’s books, but with a couple of major differences: it is set in Melbourne, and in those novels, you are always rooting for the hero. She may be flawed, but in the end she comes good. In contrast, the ‘hero’ of this book is almost without redeeming qualities. As the blurb states, ‘Douglas Aspine is a cold, calculating bastard.’ The CEO is the story of how this aggressive, greedy and ambitious man lies, cheats and manipulates his way to the CEO position of an underperforming public company, and what he does once he gets there. It’s a tale of mass sackings, intimidation, insider trading, infidelity and unscrupulous behaviour—and that’s just the start.

Populated by thinly veiled versions of Australia’s most notorious white-collar criminals, it’s a page-turner about the dark side of the corporate world, and it makes compulsive reading. As his enemies gather and the desire to see him get his comeuppance increases, it’s scary to see just how much Aspine can get away with. Although The CEO is patchy in parts, and I found the ending just a little unsatisfying, it shows strong potential.

Ath Book Club comments:

The CEO is a good story of good and evil that keeps the reader engaged with the characters right to the end. The name Aspine (a combination of asp and spine?) was a good choice for the main character who, unfortunately, was very believable, and who none of the Ath Book Club members would want to meet in real life. Many of the members did recognise real people and events behind the story.

The ending was disappointing to some members, although it was a suitable punishment for a thoroughly evil character such as Mr Aspine. The alternative would have been a court of law and a possibility of escaping punishment.

Unfortunately the book was lacking a sound proof reading and there were a number of grammatical errors which diminished the pleasure of reading such a good story.

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Robert Hollingworth: They called me the Wildman (Rating: 4)

They Called Me the Wildman is historian and artist Robert Hollingworth’s captivating reconstruction of Swedish-born naturalist Henricke Nelsen’s solitary life. Henricke lived on a mountain in Victoria’s Tallarook Ranges in the 1860s. Robert Hollingworth has written Henricke’s life story in the form of a prison diary. No imaginary work could arrange a better cast of characters than this meticulously researched story.

Ath Book Club comments:

When reading They called me the Wildman it was sometimes difficult to remember that the book is fiction. It is beautifully written, deliberately kept short and poetic, although there was material for more. Also the artistic cover, dust jacket, paper and binding increased the pleasure of reading this book.

They called me the Wildman scored a couple of “fives” from the Ath’s discerning Book Club – an honour only to be seen very rarely. – Robert Hollingworth has done a lot of research and tenderly given an authentic “voice” to an otherwise forgotten character.

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