Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many major subjects from Francisco de Goya y Lucientes Goya to the city of Barcelona Barcelona to the history of his native Australia The Fatal Shore to modern American mores and values The Culture of Complaint. Now he turns that eye on perhaps his most fascinating subject himself and the world that formed him.Things I Didnt Know is a memoir unlike any other because Hughes is a writer unlike any other. He analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh or a Picasso he describes the surface so we can picture the end result, then he peels away the layers and scratches underneath that surface so we can understand all the beauty and tragedy and passion and history that lie below. So when Hughes describes his relationship with his stern and distant father, an Australian Air Force hero of the First World War, were not simply simply told of typical fatherson complications, we see the thrilling exploits of a WWI pilot, learn about the nature of heroism, get the history of modern warfare — from the air and from the trenches — and we become aware how all of this relates to the wars were fighting today, and we understand how Hughess brilliant anti-war diatribe comes from both the heart and an understanding of the horrors of combat.
