Category: Book Reviews

If you follow the narratives of the PhD in the mainstream media you can get really depressed. All the reports are so negative on your job prospects. What’s a PhD student to do? Well, some clever people are turning their minds to the problem and this post concerns a new book on the subject. Normally …continue reading.

I know you all have a lot of reading to do, so p art of our mission here at the Whisperer is to do some of the reading for you and bring you book reviews which might be of interest. This book represented a conflict of interest for me as I have a chapter in …continue reading.

Here at the Whisperer we know you read a lot, so we try to do some of the reading for you. There’s a lot of books out there on doing a PhD and being an academic – which ones should you buy? If you are a regular reader you will know that Pat Thomson and …continue reading.

Here at the Whisperer we try to make your life easier by reading books and doing reviews. We try to review books which would appeal to most researchers, but some of the books we get sent have more specific audiences in mind. “Ethics and Values in Social research” by Paul Ransome is clearly designed for …continue reading.

I started my PhD at the University of Melbourne in early 2006 and finished in 2009. I did well, collecting the John Grice Award for best thesis in my faculty and coming second for the university medal (dammit!). I attribute this success to two ‘how to’ books in particular: Evans and Gruba’s “How to write …continue reading.

The other day I had a lovely lunch on the balcony next to my office with two late stage ANU PhD students. We enjoyed the late winter sun and the view of Black mountain Tower while the ANU Quidditch team frolicked on the oval in front of us. It was one of those moments where academia …continue reading.

Part of our mission here at the Whisperer is to do some of the reading for you – at least as much as we can! Some time ago I did a review of “Doing your dissertation with Microsoft Word”, a self published book by South African academic Jacques Raubenheimer. I was impressed by the throughness …continue reading.

Sara Shinton is a freelance research educator who works for a range of universities north of the Scottish border. I’ve followed Sara on Twitter for ages and kept meeting people who love her work. After a series of missed attempts to meet during my visits to the UK, I did wonder if we were destined …continue reading.

Judy Robertson is the co-editor of  the free to download academic recipe book “BITE: Recipes for  Remarkable Research” which is published by Sense this month. I was privileged to take part in this project and contribute a recipe and case study to the book. In this post Judy explains why on earth she wanted to …continue reading.

As many regular readers of this blog will know, I am NOT a huge fan of Microsoft Word for writing. For writing journal articles and books I use Scrivener, which is a word processing program invented by a PhD student (true story). The genius of Scrivener is that it is designed with the work of …continue reading.