David Marr – författare

Available again, an influential book that offers a framework for understanding visual perception and considers fundamental questions about the brain and its functions.

David Marr''s posthumously published Vision (1982) influenced a generation of brain and cognitive scientists, inspiring many to enter the field. In Vision, Marr describes a general framework for understanding visual perception and touches on broader questions about how the brain and its functions can be studied and understood. Researchers from a range of brain and cognitive sciences have long valued Marr''s creativity, intellectual power, and ability to integrate insights and data from neuroscience, psychology, and computation. This MIT Press edition makes Marr''s influential work available to a new generation of students and scientists.

In Marr''s framework, the process of vision constructs a set of representations, starting from a description of the input image and culminating with a description of three-dimensional objects in the surrounding environment. A central theme, and one that has had far-reaching influence in both neuroscience and cognitive science, is the notion of different levels of analysis—in Marr''s framework, the computational level, the algorithmic level, and the hardware implementation level.

Now, thirty years later, the main problems that occupied Marr remain fundamental open problems in the study of perception. Vision provides inspiration for the continuing efforts to integrate knowledge from cognition and computation to understand vision and the brain.

Updated edition of the bestselling collection of David Marr's work.

David Marr is the rarest of breeds: one of Australia's most unflinching, forensic reporters of political controversy, and one of its most subtle and eloquent biographers. In Marr's hands, reportage and commentary are elevated to artful and illuminating chronicles of our time.

My Country collects his powerful writing on religion, sex, censorship and the law; striking accounts of leaders, moralists and scandalmongers; and elegant ruminations on the arts and the lives of artists. This updated edition includes reflections on his award-winning history Killing for Country and his explosive investigation of George Pell.

'This is a book of power and poetry, an essential documenting of this place and of the people, the ideas, the political and cultural transactions in it … Marr is an exceptional writer.' —Jonathan Green

'Marr articulates our questions, frustrations and suspicions, capturing the nation's apprehensiveness towards the politicians we vote in and employ to serve us.'—Artshub

'David Marr is as brilliant a biographer and journalist as this country has produced.' —Peter Craven

David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history.

This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today's Australia.

‘This book is more than a personal reckoning with Marr's forebears and their crimes. It is an account of an Australian war fought here in our own country, with names, dates, crimes, body counts and the ghastly, remorseless views of the 'settlers'. Thank you, David.’ —Marcia Langton

‘[Marr is] one of the country's most accomplished non-fiction writers. I was sometimes reminded of Robert Hughes' study of convict transportation, The Fatal Shore (1987), in the epic quality of this book ... Killing For Country is a timely exercise in truth-telling amid a disturbing resurgence of denialism.’ —Frank Bongiorno, The Age

‘Killing for Country ... stands out for its unflinching eye, its dogged research, and the quality and power of its writing.’ —Mark McKenna, Australian Book Review

‘It's a timely, vital story.’ —Jason Steger, The Age

‘The timing of this book is painfully exquisite and it demonstrates perfectly how little race politics have changed in Australia.’ —Lucy Clark, The Guardian

’This is a story about Marr's family darkness, yes. But it is also a book concerned with our collective shame. No one who reads his important and necessary account with an open mind could consider more decades of voicelessness an acceptable outcome for this nation's First Peoples.’ —Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper

‘Killing for Country … shines a light into the dark shameful corners of our collective national experience. What we will find when we look and listen won't be pretty, but it is necessary to confront – not to be captives of history, but to learn from it and transcend it.’ —Julianne Schultz, The Conversation

’The family truth telling … reminds us once again of the terrible cost of the colonisation of Australia’ —Henry Reynolds, Pearls and Irritations

Winner, 2024 Indie Book of the Year Award

Winner, 2024 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction

Shortlisted, Small Publishers' Adult Book of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2024

Shortlisted, 2024 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction

Readings Best Non-Fiction of 2023

Power Trip shows the making of Kevin Rudd, prime minister. In Eumundi, where Rudd was born, David Marr investigates the formative tragedy of his life: the death of his father and what came after. He tracks the transformation of a dreamy kid into an implacably determined youth, already set on the prime ministership. He examines Rudd's years as Wayne Goss's right-hand man in Queensland, his relentless work in federal Opposition – from Sunrise to AWB – and finally his record as prime minister.

In Rudd's Queensland years, Marr finds strange patterns that will recur: a tendency to chaos, a mania for control and a strange mix of heady ambition and retreat. All through this dazzling and revelatory essay, Marr seeks to know what drives an extraordinarily driven man. As Power Trip concludes, he enters into a conversation with the prime minister in which much becomes clear.

"Rudd had sold himself to the Australian people as a new kind of leader: a man of intellect and values out to reshape the future. If he isn't that, people are asking, what is he? And who is he? ... Millions of words have been written about him since he emerged from the Labor pack half-a-dozen years ago, but Rudd remains hidden in full view." David Marr, Power Trip

This issue also contains correspondence discussing Quarterly Essay 37, What's Right?, from John Hirst, George Brandis, Tom Switzer, Andrew Norton, George Megalogenis, Jean Curthoys, Martin Krygier, and Waleed Aly

In this dramatic essay, David Marr traces the hidden career of a Labor warrior. He shows how a brilliant recruiter and formidable campaigner mastered first the unions and then the party. Marr presents a man willing to deal with his enemies and shift his allegiances, whose ambition to lead has been fixed since childhood.

But does he stand for anything? Is Shorten a defender of Labor values in today's Australia or a shape-shifter, driven entirely by politics? How does the union world he comes from shape the prime minister he might be? Marr reveals a man we hardly know: a virtuoso with numbers and a strategist of skill who Labor hopes will return the party to power.

"Australians distrust Shorten almost as much as they distrust Abbott. That's why this election will be fought on trust. It's going to be dirty. At the heart of the contest will be Shorten's character. All the way to polling day, Australians will be invited to rake over every detail of his short life and hidden career." David Marr, Faction Man

This issue contains correspondence relating to Blood Year by David Kilcullen from Hugh White, Jim Molan, Waleed Aly, Paul McGeough, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Martin Chulov, James Brown, Clive Kessler, and David Kilcullen.