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The effort at reasonableness, Miranda Johnson

Paikea: The Life of I L G Sutherland
Oliver Sutherland
University of Canterbury Press
ISBN 9781927145432

The critical theme of Oliver Sutherland’s biography of his father, Ivan Sutherland, is the rational pursuit of an understanding of others. The theme is developed in several ways: through a description of Sutherland senior’s own intellectual development in New Zealand and Britain; via an extensive examination of his engagement with and writing about Māori in the 1930s and 1940s; and in Oliver Sutherland’s own attempt to make sense of his father’s life, cut short by his suicide in 1952 when Oliver was eight years old.

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Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review
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