As she did in The Tall Man, Chloe Hooper takes us to a part of the country seldom explored, and reveals something buried but essential in our national psyche. The bush, summertime, a smouldering cigarette - none of these will feel the same again.
The Arsonist takes readers inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made homeless. Here, in the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria's electricity is generated, and the rates of unemployment, crime and domestic abuse are the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know.
The Arsonist tells a remarkable detective story, as the police close in on someone they believe to be a cunning offender; and a puzzling psychological story, as defence lawyers seek to understand the motives of a man who, they claimed, was a na?f that had accidentally dropped a cigarette.
It is the story not only of this fire - how it happened, the people who died, the aftermath for the community - but of fire in this country. What it has done, what it has meant, what it might yet do. Bushfire is one of Australia's deepest anxieties, never more so than when deliberately lit. Arson, wrote Henry Lawson, expresses a malice 'terrifying to those who have seen what it is capable of. You never know when you are safe.'
發表於2024-11-23
The Arsonist 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
圖書標籤: non-fiction investigative-journalism australian-studies 2018閱讀
3.5/5 The Arsonist is an ambitious piece of non-fiction that aims to closely examine the human elements involved in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that caused havoc throughout Victoria. While offering no absolute answers to whether the fires had been deliberately lit, Hooper sheds new light on how we and the arsonists aren't really a world apart
評分3.5/5 The Arsonist is an ambitious piece of non-fiction that aims to closely examine the human elements involved in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that caused havoc throughout Victoria. While offering no absolute answers to whether the fires had been deliberately lit, Hooper sheds new light on how we and the arsonists aren't really a world apart
評分3.5/5 The Arsonist is an ambitious piece of non-fiction that aims to closely examine the human elements involved in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that caused havoc throughout Victoria. While offering no absolute answers to whether the fires had been deliberately lit, Hooper sheds new light on how we and the arsonists aren't really a world apart
評分3.5/5 The Arsonist is an ambitious piece of non-fiction that aims to closely examine the human elements involved in the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires that caused havoc throughout Victoria. While offering no absolute answers to whether the fires had been deliberately lit, Hooper sheds new light on how we and the arsonists aren't really a world apart
評分澳洲版Hillbilly Elegy
The Arsonist 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載