Blog Archives

A question of tone, Shelagh Duckham Cox

Employment Contracts: New Zealand Experiences Raymond Harbridge (ed), Victoria University Press, $29.95 I need to write two reviews of this book. The second should be placed on top of the first as a palimpset – to infuse, colour and modify

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Posted in Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

Surveying, sketching and painting, Nola Easdale

John Turnbull Thomson: First Surveyor-General of NZ John Hall-Jones, McIndoe, $59.95 With trained professional eyes, New Zealand’s early surveyor/explorers sketched and mapped their way up the rivers and through the mountains of our country. Their journals and art works form

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction

This will cause no stir, Lloyd Geering

Honest to Goodness Humanist Society of New Zealand, $10 This is a collection of short essays, published to celebrate the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Humanist Society of New Zealand. Jim Dakin provides a useful sketch of the

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Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Shedding light on an unknown place, Lauris Edmond

Maud and Amber, A New Zealand mother and daughter and the Women’s Cause, 1865 to 1981 Ruth Fry, Canterbury University Press, $29.95 Mihipeka: Time of Turmoil Mihi Edwards, Penguin, $24.95 For the past twenty years or so historians and biographers

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Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Comprehensive, practical and well‑informed, Barbara Mabbett

School Textbooks published in New Zealand to 1960 Hugh Price, Dunmore Press with Gondwanaland Press, $33 In introducing this bibliography, Hugh Price modestly invites us to recognise the ‘good case’ for adding educational book publishers, to the teacher-student, relationship that

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Posted in Education, Non-fiction, Review

Undoubted achievements, Ivan Snook

The Biography of an Idea: Beeby on Education, C E Beeby, NZCER, $39.00 Pbk, $49.00 Hbk The Beeby Fascicles, G McDonald and R Benton (eds), Te Aro Press, $45.00 For over twenty years, from 1939 to 1960, C E Beeby was Director of Education in

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Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Conversations on sexuality, Elisabeth McDonald

The Women’s Studies Journal, Vol 8, No 2, 1992, The Women’s Studies Association of New Zealand, $9.95 Ten years ago Catherine MacKinnon announced in Signs that sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality. This issue of the Women’s Studies Journal gives local substance to this

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Posted in Gender, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

A wealth of incident and language, Harry Orsman

A Fence around the Cuckoo  Ruth Park, Viking, $49.95 Ruth Park’s success has come as a surprise to many New Zealanders, and raises questions about how we regard our expatriate writers, or rather how we define them. She counts as

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Posted in Autobiography, Non-fiction, Review

A wide-ranging collection, Ivanica Vodanovich

The Gender Factor: Women in NZ Organisations Suzann Olsson (ed), Dunmore Press, $39.95 A focus on gender, one of the major contributions of feminist research, shifts the emphasis from biology to culture, from a perspective that sees the organisation of work in

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Posted in Gender, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Books against totalitarianism, Diane Hebley

The Conjuror Jack Lasenby, Oxford University Press, $24.95 Winter of Fire Sherryl Jordan, Ashton Scholastic, $17.95 The abuse of power in society – how it is maintained by violence, superstition, and lies – is a major indictment of these two

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Young adults
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