Griffith Review 17 - Spring 2007: Staying Alive

There is a range of informative and reflective writing here. This volume of Griffith REVIEW positions its readers in the ring with life and death questions. ----Australian Book Review

Griffith REVIEW, arguably the best of all the Australian literary magazines, tackles illness and death. The opening essay Applying the paradox of prevention: eradicate HIV by Bill Bowtell is a fine and passionate overview of the history of HIV/AIDS that tries to grapple with the stupidity that has allowed a virus which was nearly beaten to turn into a pandemic affecting tens of millions in the third world.

Equally impressive is Donna Mulhearn's grim account of trying to be an aid worker in Fallujah in Iraq during the US attack on the city. Bille Brown's delightful rite-of-passage reminiscence, Playing with fire, is an evocative piece about a sleepy country town in the 1950s and the antics that went on in and around the cinema.

This Griffith REVIEW has enough tasty morsels to ensure that the most discriminating reader will be more than satisfied. ----Sydney Morning Herald

With the grand, twinned theme of survival and death, this issue of the admirable Griffith REVIEW sweeps from the broad to the narrow, from the public to the personal, from the abstract to the concrete.

The broad view is taken by Bill Bowtell in his long, opening essay on the prevention of HIV, something he believes is ultimately achievable if lessons from Australia's comparatively successful prevention policy can be learnt. His polemic also stands as a lament for so many preventable deaths.

Susan Varga's essay on suicide is the most radical piece in that it asks us to contemplate suicide as a valid choice and not just for the terminally ill. It is immediately followed by a piece by Diego De Leo who argues that 'suicide is the very worst of all human tragedies' as he explains how his personal experience led him to try to prevent it.

The stand-out article comes almost at the very end - palliative care physician Frank Brennan draws starkly beautiful sketches of his encounters with dying patients. It is an apt conclusion to what has gone before, a reminder that death is common to us all but that our experience of it is unique.

If Griffith REVIEW isn't Australia's best literary magazine, it's only because the lit-mag tag doesn't quite fit this more political beast. Whatever it is, it's a fine publication. --The Age