Somebody Stole My Game Chris Laidlaw HodderMoa, $39.99, ISBN 9781869711924 The Awa Book of New Zealand Sports Writing Harry Ricketts (ed) Awa Press, $40.00, ISBN 9780958291620 These two books complement each other, and their paths criss-cross. In Somebody Stole My…
Tall Tales (Some True): Memoirs of an Unlikely Writer Greg McGee Penguin Books, $37.00, ISBN 9780143009139 McGee describes himself as an unlikely writer. This rather begs the question: what makes for a likely writer? Someone who has been brought up…
Tackling Rugby Myths: Rugby and New Zealand Society 1854-2004 ed Greg Ryan University of Otago Press, $39.95, ISBN 1877276979 It was Voltaire, who, not without a dash of cynicism, declared that all history is but myth that time has rendered…
The Judas Game: The Betrayal of New Zealand rugby Joseph Romanos Darius Press, $29.95, ISBN 0958240906 Meads Brian Turner Hodder Moa Beckett $49.95, ISBN 1869589173 A little anecdote buried in Joseph Romanos’ latest book The Judas Game: The Betrayal of…
Rights of Passage: Beyond the New Zealand Identity Crisis Chris Laidlaw Hodder Moa Beckett, $29.95, ISBN 1 86958 723 5 Chris Laidlaw was a quality All Black in the late 1960s, who achieved prominence by firing a Parthian shot at…
A Lucky Man Keith Quinn Shoal Bay Press, $44.95, ISBN 0908704917 It is one of life’s idiosyncrasies that the nicer a guy is, the more some people will feel compelled to hate him. Keith Quinn, the doyen of television sports…
Inside the All Blacks Robin McConnell HarperCollins, $39.95 ISBN 1 86950 274 4 One of the hardest things to do in any book about the sociology of sport is to draw the line between breathless spectatorship and real analysis. Robin…
For love and money, Chris Laidlaw
Sport If sport is indeed the opium of the masses then New Zealand has been on an awfully long trip. For more than a century sport has filled the Kiwi consciousness almost to bursting point, giving pride, pleasure and pain…
Posted in Comment, Essays, Sport