From George Bush's victory speech on the Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to America's humbling in May 2004, Bob Ellis watched by night the carnage in Baghdad, Fallujah, Gaza and Tel Aviv and, as a political backroomer, the differing fates of Crean, Carr, Kerry, Blair, Bush, Beazley, Bin Laden, Latham, Arafat and Sharon and the Bakhtiyari family's quest for liberty in Howard's Australia.
From this daunting tapestry of human sorrow and strutting hubris, Ellis has contrived a sweet, sharp, melancholy meditation, laced with his characteristic watchful humour, that should long outlast the present neo-Biblical chaos and the fools and rogues who continue to brutalise and smash a world still, on the whole, worth saving.
