NO TERN UNSTONED Musings at Breakfast

Tim Bowden's collection of radio essays is charming, irreverent, and thoughtful. Bowden is an experienced Australian broadcaster with a marvelous radio voice and perfect timing but with a laconic edge and good-hearted irritability. He riffs on whatever topic he takes a fancy to. Some are laugh-out-loud funny--the dull food in 1950s Australian restaurants dubbed "Gordon Blue cuisine" or PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as the movie of choice at the Australian Antarctic Center. Others are more cutting--the mass lay-offs in the 1980s so that no one who knew anything was left at the Australian Broadcasting Company, his observations that "thugby" and "footbrawl" are unnecessarily violent. Bowden's serious journalistic credentials show up, too, with musings on the United Nations as well as Idi Amin's horrendous rule over Uganda. A.B. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine [Published: SEPTEMBER 2016]