Blog Archives

Springing a trap for islands, Phil Barton

Captain Cook’s World: Maps of the Life and Voyages of James Cook RN  John Robson Random House, $59.95, ISBN 1869414098 The publisher’s blurb states that the book under review  “is an atlas, chronology and biography of the life and voyages”…
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Posted in Art, Biography, History, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review

Lagoon-level view, Martin Sutton

In Polynesia Antony Alpers Hazard Press, $29.95, ISBN 1877161802 For over forty years, Antony Alpers has given us books which all share as their main themes the diametrically opposed but often intersecting realms of myth and reality, fact and fiction.…
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Posted in History, Literature, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review

Overlapping associations, Tom Larkin

Japan and New Zealand, 150 Years ed Roger Peren New Zealand Centre for Japanese Studies, Massey University, in association with the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, [not for sale], ISBN 0958350574   In 1878, Asajiro Noda, the eight-year-old son…
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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review, War

An indispensable resource, Alan Wells

Weavers of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance  Mervyn McLean Auckland University Press, $79.95, ISBN 1 86940 212 X   A companion volume to the same author’s Maori Music 1996: reviewed in our March 1998 issue), Mervyn McLean’s Weavers of Song…
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Posted in Māori, Music, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review

Beyond the tapa curtain, David Eggleton

Speaking in Colour Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira Te Papa Press, $39.95 ISBN 0 90901044 7 The country of the tourist brochures is, as Nadine Gordimer has suggested, always someone else’s country: unreal in its airbrushed perfection; its beckoning…
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Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Pacific

Miscellany: Short reviews, Dale Williams

Godwits Return, Margaret Clark (ed), Bridget Williams Books, $29.95 New Zealanders are a restless lot – the more job training we get, the more likely we are to pack up and swim in bigger ponds overseas. Sometimes we come back.…
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Posted in Art, Natural History, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review, Sociology

How misleading it all is, K R Howe

The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, $34.95 The barrage of criticism that greeted this book in New Zealand needs to be ignored. The exception taken to Paul Theroux’s acerbic comments about New Zealanders and…
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Posted in Non-fiction, Pacific, Review

More polemic than analysis, Barrie Macdonald

Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific David Robie (ed), Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, and Pluto Press, Annandale, Australia, 1992, $39.95 At one level David Robie, a journalist well-versed in political and environmental conflicts in Oceania, has succeeded in bringing…
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Posted in Non-fiction, Pacific, Review, Sociology

June 1992: Music and the arts, House Notes

The Great New Zealand Songbook Les Cleveland, Godwit, Auckland, 1991, $29.95 Les Cleveland’s friendly and informal approach illuminates this collection of 60 New Zealand songs from early ballads to goldrush classics and Ruru Karaitiana’s ‘Blue Smoke’. An excellent introduction is…
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Posted in Literature, Music, Non-fiction, Pacific, Plays, Review, Sociology

From the marae to modernism: the buildings in which we live, Pam Wilson

New Zealand Architecture from Polynesian Beginnings to 1990 Peter Shaw, photographs by Robin Morrison, Hodder & Stoughton, Auckland, 1991, $59.95 ‘New Zealand’s European-derived architectural history may be short but it should be accorded the same respect we now give as…
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Posted in Architecture, History, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review
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