Letters to a young scientist by Edward O. Wilson : interview

I am an early- to mid-career researcher, and Letters to a Young Scientist struck a chord with me from the very first page. The journey from amateur enthusiast to professional scientist is an exciting, challenging and often difficult one, and Edward Wilson - a Pulitzer prizewinner and one of the world's greatest entomologists - is well qualified to guide and advise the new generation. Written as a collection of letters filled with anecdotes and well-considered advice, this book is inspired by the author's experience of the journey from being a young boy enthused by ants to an eminent scholar. Like many in his field, Wilson's education began when he was a child fascinated by insects in the garden (my own summers spent excavating ant nests feel somewhat validated). He traces his progression through formal education to the establishment of his own scientific research programme.

Book review: Edward M Curr and the tide of history

As much scholarship has shown over the past decades, settler attitudes to Indigenous peoples thrived on difference and righteousness — the latter not in a religious sense (necessarily) but in an absolute conviction, one sunk deep into the settler heart, of the moral and material just-ness of their usurpation of Indigenous country. This conviction sanctioned settler violence and outlawed Indigenous resistance. Difference not only denied the humanity in the Indigenous face; it made the people objects of curiosity, to be quickly described, analysed and catalogued for science before they ‘disappeared’ as naturally as one season disappears into another.

Book review: Hannah Murphy, The Making of International Trade Policy: NGOs, Agenda-setting and the WTO (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010), 240 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978 18498 00181 (hbk).

The nexus between states,non-state actors and intergovernmental organisations is an increasingly important area in both the study and practice of global governance. Hannah Murphy makes a meaningful contribution to this area in examining the informal role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in relation to agenda-setting within the World Trade Organization (WTO). © Dean Coldicott, Deakin University 2012.