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”…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 a…