Piers Akerman: Must-read titles reveal dark year in global politics
Columnist Piers Akerman recommends these titles - illuminating political secrets and media cover-ups - to add to your summer reading list.
Opinion
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There’s been no respite from the pandemic (that’s the bad news) but the Omicron variant isn’t as lethal as the earlier Covid incarnations (that’s the good news).
But the better news is that there have been some really great works produced during the serial lockdowns that are not only well worth exploring but have produced so insightful that they should be essential to those who wish to know not only what’s happening in the world but why.
Between now and Australia Day I hope to finish reading Sharri Markson’s remarkable investigative work What Really Happened In Wuhan: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths. It’s apparent to all but the most determined apologists for the horrific Chinese Communist Party that the virus emerged in Wuhan just over a two years ago and that the totalitarian state’s leaders knew how deadly it was but did nothing to prevent it spreading to the rest of the world whilst welding shut the doors of sufferers in the city in a vain attempt to curb its assault at home.
American readers immediately pushed Miranda Devine’s demolition of the Biden family Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide to the top of Amazon’s best seller list where it remains the best seller in the politics and censorship category.
This tale of sleaze and the utterly shameful manner in which the media and big tech tried to block the revelations before the 2020 US election is riveting.
Equally revealing on the climate front is Ian Plimer’s Green Murder A Life Sentence of Net Zero with No Parole. Plimer smashes the apocalyptic vision of yet-to-be scientifically proven human-induced global warming in this his eleventh book for the general public – and for those pseuds who challenge the professor’s credentials, he has written more than 120 papers to buttress his formidable reputation as a serious scientist – and he’s as amusing in print as he is over a glass of a decent red.
Gerard Henderson, the well-known co-founder of the Sydney Institute, has torn apart the abominable attempt by the Victorian police with the backing of the Andrews Labor government to destroy the Catholic Church through a targeted prosecution of its most senior representative in Australia.
Henderson’s work, Cardinal Pell, the Media Pile-on & Collective Guilt, takes the microscope to the utterly shameful manner persecution of the cardinal, the flawed investigations and disgraceful trials, wrongful imprisonment, the initial unsound appeal court decision and the final successful appeal to the High Court which overturned the unjust lower court proceedings.
The Victorian police involved with the backing of Premier Dan Andrews are shown to be demonstrably unfit to continue in office.
The last book in this short list of must-reads is Fred Pawle’s Die Laughing The biography of Bill Leak.
As a cartoonist for The Australian, Bill Leak managed to use his satirical pen and brushes to illustrate the worst of the nation so brilliantly that he became the target of the broadest coalition of those who hate Australia’s liberal social democracy, who cringe at the thought of freedom and reject free speech. This group encompasses Islamist terrorists, the former leadership of the Human Rights Commission, and those who promote the black armband view of modern Australian history.
Bill’s legacy is huge and fortunately his successor at The Australian is his equally brilliant son Johannes Leak.
Finally, I want to include as a must-see, the latest documentary from Daizy Gedeon – ENOUGH! Lebanon’s darkest hour.
Gedeon is one of the bravest women I know having taken her camera and sharp questions to the kleptocracy which runs Lebanon from Beirut and asking those at the heart of the corrupt circle whether the cycle can be broken.
Through this film, she hopes to inspire the great Lebanese diaspora to rise up and take responsibility for the carnage in their homeland and restore it to the position it occupied just 50 years ago as the cosmopolitan jewel on the Mediterranean.
What is striking about this selection, I realised, is that I’ve been fortunate to have worked with Sharri, Miranda and Daizy. I’ve known Gerard for years and Bill Leak was a very dear friend and that his biographer Fred Pawle is a mate, as is Ian Plimer.
A.B.Facey’s book title A Fortunate Life, sums it up for me. Happy New Year.
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