Old Ginger Cat Whatever the books sayshe loves to make eye-contactcurled on our laps. Purring on our kneesshe keeps her claws retractedas she kneads skin. Allowed on the bedshe fights to keep eyes open:bliss surpassing sleep. Late at night she walksup the bed to the pillow,meows for a hand’s touch. Neighbours bring home fish.She carries some with much prideto our kitchen table. She…

Edmund Rice sex ed I was very impressed by Chris McCormack’s detailed analysis of what Edmund Rice Education Australia  (EREA) (News Weekly, July. 29. 2017.) proposes to do in regard to transgender sex education in its schools. As a grandparent who witnessed the secular-humanistic changes in the methodology of education in schools in the late 1960s early ’70s, one can only say that…

THE HOLOCAUST: A New History by Laurence Rees   Viking/Penguin, London Hardcover: 512 pages Price: AUD$55 Reviewed by Bill James   The Holocaust, the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews between 1933 and 1945, is history’s most intensively studied event. Rees describes it as “the most infamous crime in the history of the world”. But for all its…

HOME FRONT TO BATTLEFRONT: An Ohio Teenager in World War II by Frank Lavin University of Ohio Press, Athens, Ohio Hardcover: 304 pages Price: AUD$69.99 Reviewed by Jeffry Babb   Wars are won, not by the great captains, but by the footsloggers. Infantry – boots on the ground – are the soldiers who win battles. Carl Lavin was in high…