The authors announce that
With some trepidation, we offer the first wholly new work on Australian equity for some time. For some years, fundamentalist members of the restitutionist school have proceeded on the basis that equity does not exist, or at least cease to be recognised as a discrete body of principles. Our observations have led us to conclude that this is an idle pretence. Equity is not only alive and well, but continues to grow and develop. It may be that this growth and development is more vigorous in Australia than in England due to the fact that in Australia we are removed from the corrupting influences of continental based civil and Roman law.Not the book to read in bed at 1:00 AM but then neither is Gordon Horwitz's Ghettostadt - Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009), which I confess I'm reading sporadically and slowly. It's a mix of a sober account of moral dilemmas facing the person in the street (a street sometimes knee-deep in mud and effluent) and those with a measure of power such as Rumkowski, notes on appropriation (warehouses of stolen feather blankets and baby caps and booties) and searing descriptions of what the bureaucrats characterised as 'resettlement' of small children, the ill and elderly.
Ghettostadt lacks the grand vision and pace of Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction - The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane 2006) or the focus provided in Gotz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries: How the Nazis Bought the German People (London: Verso 2007) and arguably elides the presence of Roman Catholic Poles around the Łódź ghetto but is worth reading for a scarifying account of inhumanity.
