Culture

Starring Steve Carell and Morgan Freeman PG Evan Almighty brings Noah and his ark into 21st Century Washington DC, courtesy of the folk who made Bruce Almighty. If it had been a British production, Adrian Plass might have written it. Perhaps it was Morgan Freeman playing God, but this reviewer heard echoes of “God is nice and he likes me”. ...

Headline Publishing Group, London, 2007, 437 pages. RRP: $32.95 Set in the earlier days of the Australian outback The feather and the Stone is a delightful novel with rich insight into the lifestyles of the pioneer settlers. But more than that, it is an enthralling story built around the varied lives and the diverse characters who came from England and ...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the long-awaited final book in the Harry Potter series. While at times the plot reads like the instructions to a hypothetical board game (use your sacred House object to destroy each Horcrux, then go to the Forbidden Forest and encounter Voldemort to win the game), Deathly Hallows is a fitting culmination to the ...

Aquila Press RRP $19.95 If you have ever been troubled by friends casually discussing postmillennial eschatology or afraid to venture into the book of Revelation because “it’s just too scary” then 666 and all That is a book to take your fears away. John Dickson and Greg Clarke strip away the technical jargon and the caricatures of the end times ...

Jossey-Bass, 2007 RRP $26.95 I can’t figure out who The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture is written for. It’s one in a series entitled the Woman’s Guide to the Bible but it is not one that is likely to be picked up by any church study group soon, and it’s certainly not for a book for female biblical ...

Lion RRP $22.95 I had just picked up the The Big Questions and was standing outside the Trinity College Library when a wag came up and told me if I could find a book called “The Big Answers”, he would be interested. While I am aware of the risks of judging books by their covers, the chicken and the egg ...

A world expert in language and reference publishing, David Crystal, has asked poetry lovers to take seriously recently published works of John Bradburne, known in African circles of the Roman Catholic Church as Zimbabwe’s "leper saint". Writing in a recently published book about the lay Franciscan, who devoted a large part of his life to looking after lepers in Zimbabwe, ...

Monarch Books RRP $32.95 David Stratton, movie reviewer for The Australian and the ABC, gave two and a half stars to the movie Amazing Grace – the story of William Wilberforce and the heroic campaign to end slavery. I’m still going to see the movie – because this book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the heroic campaign to end slavery, ...

Lion Hudson plc RRP $21.95 Breaking the Chains of Abuse is more than a self-help book about abuse. It is a dichotomy of listed practical solutions, as well as a collection of moving insights for any reader; either victim, carer, or even the curious. It illustrates the chronic struggles for the victim, (and those who journey with them), in the ...

Published by Mastercorp Pty Ltd, Mt Gravatt 2006 Ruth Delbridge’s painstaking research results in a dual biography that also informs the social history of Queensland’s early pioneers. Clearly this has been a labour of love as articles, stories, letters and photos have been discovered to reveal the lives of two amazing women. The book describes well the living conditions of ...