The Death of Truth
Michiko Kakutani
William Collins

In Extremis: The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin
Lindsey Hilsum
Vintage

The Super Bowl professional football championship is the single biggest sporting event in America. The television audience is enormous – some 100 million people watched the game this year – allowing the network to charge corporations $10 million a minute to air their advertisements. These ads famously try to convince the captive audience, through wit or sentimentality, to buy the beer or the car, the food or the skin cream, for sale.

The Great Successor: The Secret Rise and Rule of Kim Jong Un
Anna Fifield
John Murray

Writing and commentary on North Korea are routinely crippled by our poor knowledge of its inner workings. The government publishes few formal documents or White Papers for outsiders, provides little hard data such as calculations of annual economic growth or national budget figures, and routinely exaggerates or lies in its propaganda. So we often rely on logic or parallels to now-defunct Stalinist states to make estimations of its motivations. In her biography of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, Anna Fifield has tried hard to push beyond these limitations, chasing leads around the world and reaching out directly to dozens if not hundreds of interviewees, including many North Korean defectors. This gives the book a powerful credibility.

Common Enemies: Crime, Policy and Politics in Australia–Indonesia Relations
Michael McKenzie
Oxford University Press

Myanmar’s “Rohingya” Conflict
Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides
Hurst Publishers

This time of year, over the verdant paddies, deforested hills and tea-brown waterways of Rakhine State, every molecule of air seems to swell to bursting, and it’s a relief when the pressure plummets and the dark skies unleash their torrents.

Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and Religious Violence in Post-Suharto Indonesia
Andreas Harsono
Monash University Publishing

Lead singer of rock band Slank, shirt unbuttoned, wearing a red bandana, gripped his microphone and belted out ballads onstage. Ulama, religious scholars, in Middle Eastern attire paced in the wings like harried producers. On the roof a pawang hujan, rain shaman, warded off thunderstorms. And the crowd overfilling the 80,000-seat Gelora Bung Karno, Jakarta’s biggest stadium, began a series of Mexican waves. Hands flew into the air: of santri Muslims in white caps and Chinese Indonesians, people from the Javanese hinterland and islands far to the east, all singing along while waving red-and-white Indonesian flags. It seemed, in the moment, like an inspired demonstration of inclusive nationalism.

How to Defend Australia
Hugh White
La Trobe University Press

I have always admired Hugh White for his clarity of thought, his pellucid prose and the way he “shows his work”, explaining the assumptions that shape his conclusions. His latest book, How to Defend Australia, is true to form – seeking, as he puts it, to lay out “what risks we are trying to manage, then what role we expect armed force to play in managing them, then what kinds of operations our forces would need to undertake to perform those roles, then what capabilities can best conduct those operations, and, finally, how they could be built and maintained, and how much they would cost”.