Thrown shoes, sabotaged launches and exposed affairs: the drama of Australian political publishing

The most striking example of performance politics in Joshua Black’s entertaining book comes when an audience member at a 2010 taping of the now-defunct ABC show Q&A throws a shoe at former prime minister John Howard. (It echoed a famous moment two years earlier, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US president George W. Bush.) Howard, who laughed it off, was on the show to promote his memoir, Lazarus Rising. Performance Politics is informative and interesting, but has a somewhat…