Late in his fourth decade as a published author, Thomas Keneally has turned his well-honed techniques as a novelist to works of popular history. The first of them was The Great Shame (1998), his account of the Irish diaspora of the mid nineteenth century...

An Australian Catholic with no immediate ties to the Holocaust, Thomas Keneally had written sixteen novels before Schindler's List (first published as Schindler's Ark, 1982) and has continued to produce a steady literary output since then. In addition to...

Thomas Keneally (born 1935) is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer who gained worldwide attention when his best-known work, the Holocaust novel Schindler's List, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning motion picture in 1993. Keneally was born...

It is inevitable, I suppose, that only a few of us church music troglodytes can still sight-sing Gregorian Chant from the neumatic notation on a four-line staff. All the more remarkable, then, has been the success of the album, Chant," sung by the...

GREGORIAN CHANT * Monks of Notre Dame de Fontgombault abbey * NYC MUSIC 1213 (67:11) This disc arrived on an unfamiliar label based in New York City, as its name suggests. It was originally issued on Art & Musique AM/CD 107/39004 under the...

Race relations in Australia's past, and, by implication, present are the accepted theme of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and discussion of the novel, whatever success it is seen to have, has started from this assumption. There are, however, two further ways in which the book needs to be seen to appreciate how it explores beyond the social-racial level, and to pinpoint more accurately the role of Keneally as narrator. The first of these approaches is to set the Blacksmith story against that of its h...

[In "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith"] Thomas Keneally has chosen an actual incident—in 1900, when the disparate [Australian] states were rapidly but uneasily moving toward federation—around which to weave a powerful and disturbing fiction: the growth of a half-caste young man, Jimmie Blacksmith, from Methodist "mission black" to murderer and outlaw. Here are the trappings of "In Cold Blood"—rural isolation, slaughter, manhunt—but the impu...

If we think of "the mythology of Australian history" in terms of imaginative fiction, one name springs instantly to mind: Patrick White. With Voss and The Tree of Man he mapped out a territory which seemed to be peculiarly his own. Anyone else working the same ground could scarcely help but appear as an imitator. So it's particularly interesting to see a talented writer like Thomas Keneally staking his claim in the White territory. Mr. Keneally's [The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith] ...