Trouble

by Kate Jennings

In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put women s lib on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time. Trouble collects Jennings s best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate s frankness. Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts seismic and subtle, personal and political that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise shocking with the shock of recognition as the day it was written.

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2010

About the author

Kate Jennings was a poet, essayist, short-story writer and novelist. Both her novels, Snake and Moral Hazard, were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has won the ALS Gold Medal, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the Adelaide Festival fiction prize. Born in rural New South Wales, she has lived in New York since 1979.

Her most recent books are Stanley and Sophie, Quarterly Essay 32: American Revolution and Trouble: Evolution of a Radical.

Reviews

[Chiuho · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is most satisfying book I read this year. I have never heard of Kate Jennings until I ran into this book in Gleebooks in Sydney. Through her writings I walk in to a very interesting history class, the topic covers the politics, morality, finance, feminism connecting with Australia or the United State. I also get to know her and admire her greatly as a remarkable woman who is brave and honest with her piercing thoughts just about anything, even with herself. I enjoyed it very much. I look forward to reading her other works.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 3 out of 5]

A patchy compilation of Jennings' (mostly) non-fiction writing, spanning her early feminist speeches and her late financial journalism. I found some of it deeply engaging and struggled through long sections - probably not the best introduction to her work.

[Vita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh seriously great bok but I tell ya what I am not writing reviews for f..king good reads honestly interestingly can't seem to add anything that I've read with an arabic name very telling