Deborah Challinor says her latest reading list includes a terrifying psychiatric assessment of the US President. Photo / supplied
Deborah Challinor says her latest reading list includes a terrifying psychiatric assessment of the US President. Photo / supplied
I didn't realise how wrong I was about quite a lot of things, actually - Deborah Challinor
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (updated), Bandy Lee, et al (2019). The message in this book won't surprise anyone with a TV orinternet access, but it's learned, considered and terrifying.
The Perils of Perception: Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything, Bobby Duffy (2018). Ipsos MORI is an international market research company: Duffy is the former managing director. I didn't realise how wrong I was about quite a lot of things, actually. Read this and find out what you don't know, and why. Very interesting.
The Arsonist: a Mind on Fire, Chloe Hooper (2019). This excellent book is about the hunt for Brendan Sokaluk, jailed for 18 years for arson causing 10 deaths during Australia's Black Saturday, 2009. It's both fascinating and deeply disturbing. He said he didn't mean it. Were his acts deliberate, or were his mental health issues to blame? Chloe Hooper also wrote The Tall Man (2008), another great book.
America: the Farewell Tour, Chris Hedges (2018). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedges describes the US as a nation riddled by the pathologies of approaching death, including civil unrest, an opioid crisis, economic distress, mass magical thinking, corporate plunder and a broken-down democracy. Add to this cataclysmic climate change and you have, well, what they've got, and no one competent to drive the bus. A sobering read.
Big Sky, Kate Atkinson (2019). I said I'd never read another Kate Atkinson book again after the mean trick she played at the end of A God in Ruins, but anyway I read this. It's the fifth book in the Jackson Brodie, private detective, series and I enjoyed it, although quite a few loose ends were tied up and I got the feeling it could be the last. Deborah Challinor's new book The Jacaranda House (HarperCollins, $37) is out now.
