Bob Ellis – författare

Alana Dorset was savagely raped. Zania, Fedilia and others, by chance, become her bonded friends. Each has a story to tell about the lengths men had gone to use them, harm them and even murder those women unable to defend against them. Is it right that because of their undeniable beauty, they should become targets? The women all have the same question ... should those men pay? The power of woman is, more often than not, underestimated by men. When they decide to fight back, men had better run for the hills.

''One of the better books on our time and the fools we have lately survived. Like War and Peace and the Iliad, it is abundant, instructive, exhilarating and cathartic.'' BOB CARR From the suicide bombing of Glasgow Airport and the flooding of England to the horse flu and the Chinese earthquake and the Bhutto assassination, from the rise of Turnbull and Rudd to the slow disintegration of Howard, Ruddock, Olmert, Blair, Musharreff, Mugabe, Costello, Nelson, Buswell and Bush, from the campaign insults of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin to the great economic meltdown and the night of Obama''s audacious victory, Bob Ellis took notes, attended funerals, went to the cricket, wrote mordant midnight verse, walked his dogs and pondered on humanity''s most formative interim in quite a while. No better meditation on the Iraq war''s backwash and the propaganda weapons of the Right has been thus far attempted, no wittier essay on human mortality, the planet''s fate, and the melancholy harvest of Australia''s most rancorous political years. And So It Went is a book to read and savour.

In the free market we trust.  Look where that''s got us. With our economy based upon money as illusory as God''s love, Bob Ellis calls time on free market fundamentalism. We put our faith in a system that awards do-nothing CEOs with millions as their companies collapse and provoke a global crisis. We judge corporate success on the number of sackings, fund the privatisation of essential services with public money and favour cheap goods discounted by the loss of our jobs. We sign up for wars in which capitalism makes a killing. Continuing from his classic dissection of economic rationalism, First Abolish the Customer, Ellis presents 345 arguments challenging the free market orthodoxy with ferocious intelligence and wit. His free-flowing meditation on the gross inequalities in our society contends that we are irresponsibly fixated on the sale of goods, instead of on delivering jobs that put money into people''s hands. Skewering the legacies of Thatcherism, he proposes some radically simple remedies, including restoring tariffs, investing in country towns and restricting corporate salaries. The Capitalism Delusion is vintage Ellis: exasperated, impolite and inspiring.

Written in Bob Ellis''s inimitable style, this is a very personal book about the recent period of intense political change in Australia. Ellis''s diary-style narrative starts on 12 November, 2009 (when Rhys Muldoon picks Ellis up from Parliament House and drives him to visit the poet Les Murray at Bunyah for some lively political discussions) and takes us through to when Bob''s sometime mentor, Mike Rann, faces his recent assailant in in an Adelaide court. The book includes coverage and analysis of sittings of the New South Wales Parliament and the result of the South Australian election. A final section updates events through to April. Bob Ellis is close to many of the political players during this rapidly-changing period in Australian politics, but he also manages to stay plugged in to the cultural scene, and has plenty to say about the films, books and theatre of the period.    ''If you are yet to become a convert to his laconic and hilarious writing, start now'' – Canberra Times ''Bob Ellis is never less than hugely entertaining. He combines hyperbole, passion, intensely personal reminiscence, emotions always on the surface, implausible and outrageous generalisations and sullen anger into a hilarious mixture of Shakespearean rhetoric and good, old-fashioned Hunter S. Thompson-inspired gonzo journalism'' – Sydney Morning Herald

''A very readable, occasionally apocalyptic, almanac of ''''interesting times.'''''' The Age ''He writes beautifully and his ability to pick out the human stories among the headlines is what makes the book worth reading.'' Weekly Times ''????? He...write[s] like an angel, albeit an avenging one with a taste for the salacious.'' Good Reading In 2011, history was made and the future broken... One of our most incisive and eloquent observers, Bob Ellis has reviewed the occurrences of 2011 and found it to be a year as important as 1848. He and his collaborators, Damian Spruce and Stephen Ramsey, refresh and repopulate our memories with enormous events already half-forgotten, revealing their coherence and resonance. From the Arab Spring to the London riots and Occupy Wall Street; from the Christchurch earthquake and the Fukushima meltdown to the possible discovery of the Higgs-Boson ''God'' particle; from the shooting of US Senator Gabby Giffords to her vote on the bill that saved America''s economy; from Assange fighting extradition to the Murdoch empire on trial; from the last hours of Kim Jong-il and Vaclav Havel to the Breivik massacre in Norway and the executions of Gaddafi and bin Laden – the year 2011 was portentously charged. The shockwaves from these events – and more – continue to reverberate through the corridors of power and even the foundations of the planet. The Year It All Fell Down is a compulsively readable meditation on the state of our world and its future. ''The scope of world affairs covered is impressive. Ellis''s prose is intelligent and often devastatingly acerbic.'' Australian Book Review ''Ellis is a stormy petrel, but he''s our wild child and he should be celebrated.'' Weekend Australian

In these witty, outrageous ten laws, the well-beloved gadfly, sage and wordsmith Bob Ellis investigates dislocation and security, competence and charisma, youth and old age. He explains why bicycles encourage premarital sex, moving house too many times drives humans mad, ''the rising price of a roof '' is the root of all economic evil, and, most ominously, ''power flows to the most boring man in the room''. He alleges, pretty persuasively, that all CEOs – except, perhaps, George Lucas – should be sacked, fined or imprisoned. This is a book to cherish, re-read and pass on to generations less informed of how humans were at the turn of the millennium, and how much they got wrong.