The Enamelled Box When they unearth the mass graves and discover the rivers of blood, or even stop to puzzle over a million lost golf-balls, may they also find medical instruments of ingenious design and exquisite precision; Let them…
See more ›
Blog Archives
Mingling the sacred and the profane, Martin Edmond
The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing
Harry Ricketts and Gavin McLean (eds)
Penguin Books, $65.00, ISBN 9780143573098
Oddly enough – or perhaps not – when this book arrived at my door I remembered one of the more arcane customs recorded in Te Rangi Hiroa’s The Coming of the Māori: “Warriors before setting out on a military campaign,” he writes, “each in turn bit (ngau) the cross beam (paepae) of the latrine.” These were cliff-side toilets in hill forts and the cross beam was what you held onto while you shat into the void below. There was a strong tapu upon it, to prevent the theft of faecal matter for the purposes of sorcery; and the ceremony of the biting of the bar was attended by a tohunga chanting karakia considered protective of Te Hokowhitu a Tu as they went off to make war.
See more ›
Tagged with: Gavin McLean, Harry Ricketts, Issue 112, Martin Edmond, Penguin Books, Summer 2015
Posted in Non-fiction, Review, War
Posted in Non-fiction, Review, War
Voices from the past, Jock Phillips
Remembering Gallipoli: Interviews with New Zealand Gallipoli Veterans
Christopher Pugsley and Charles Ferrall (eds)
Victoria University Press, $40.00
ISBN 9780864739919
Amid the flood of printed words that have marked the centenary of New Zealand’s Gallipoli experience, Remembering Gallipoli comes with, in every sense, the most history. The interviews on which the book is based were initially conducted in 1982 by four women, members of a media company, Bluestockings, as background research for Television New Zealand. There were 130 soldiers and one nurse interviewed, all in their late 80s or 90s. Chris Pugsley and Maurice Shadbolt then re-interviewed 21 (or 26 as Pugsley writes elsewhere) on camera. Extracts were used in the powerful 1984 documentary Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story and drawn on for Pugsley’s magnificent book in the same year with the same name. Shadbolt chose 12 of the subjects to tell their stories in his stirring Voices of Gallipoli (1988), a book which was a revelation to many, including Helen Clark, who read it on the plane flying to Gallipoli in 2000 when she conceived of a project to record the memories of WWII veterans.
See more ›
Tagged with: Charles Ferrall, Christopher Pugsley, Issue 112, Jock Phillips, Summer 2015, Victoria University Press
Posted in Non-fiction, Review, War
Posted in Non-fiction, Review, War
Obituary — Jack Body
Harmonious sensuality Ross Harris recalls the life and work of fellow-composer Jack Body (1944-2015) Jack Body was born in the small North Island farming town of Te Aroha to parents with little interest in music. Even so, he was playing…
See more ›
Tagged with: Gillian Whitehead, Issue 112, Jack Body, Jennifer Shennan, Ross Harris, Scilla Askew, Steele Roberts, Summer 2015
Posted in Obituaries
Posted in Obituaries
Poem – Leonard Lambert
Lives shaped by the novelist, Elspeth Sandys
Death and Forgiveness
Jindra Tichá
Mary Egan Publishing, $30.00,
ISBN 9780473306717
Rich Man Road
Ann Glamuzina
Eunoia Publishing, $30.00,
ISBN 9780994104748
In a recent review in New Zealand Books, Jane Westaway commented on the rise, both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, of the small press, a phenomenon directly attributable to the devouring appetite of the multinational conglomerates. Having charted the rise and rise of such monster publishing companies as Penguin Random House, and the corresponding disappearance, at least from the fiction market, of hitherto commercially successful local presses, Westaway went on to observe that, whereas in the past book editors (she herself is a past co-editor of New Zealand Books) were inclined to turn their noses up at the so-called “vanity press”, in today’s changed world of publishing, that response is no longer valid. Small presses are here to stay!
See more ›
Tagged with: Ann Glamuzina, Elspeth Sandys, Eunoia Publishing, Issue 112, Jindra Tichá, Mary Egan Publishing, Summer 2015
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Crime wave, Bernard Carpinter
Running Towards Danger
Tina Clough
Vanguard Press, $30.00,
ISBN 97811784650100
Blood, Wine and Chocolate
Julie Thomas
HarperCollins, $35.00
ISBN 9781775540533
Something Is Rotten
Adam Sarafis
Echo, $35.00
ISBN 9781760067762
New Zealand crime fiction is booming. The long list for the Ngaio Marsh Award this year comprised nine books and the five on the short list are all very good. Those books are, in no particular order, Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave, The Petticoat Men by Barbara Ewing, Swimming in the Dark by Paddy Richardson, The Children’s Pond by Tina Shaw and Fallout by Paul Thomas.
Thomas and Cleave, in particular, have given New Zealand crime fiction credibility, their lively prose delivering crackling plots, larger-than-life characters and even humour. And they are distinctively Kiwi books; Thomas’s protagonist of five novels, Tito Ihaka, is Māori and well versed in the blunter forms of the Kiwi vernacular.
See more ›
Tagged with: Adam Sarafis, Bernard Carpinter, Echo, HarperCollins, Issue 112, Julie Thomas, Summer 2015, Tina Clough, Vanguard Press
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review
Reviewing the reviewers
Matthew Wright reflects on the ethics of book reviewing
It’s some years since New Zealand Books published a wonderfully nasty litany of my supposed failures in a book I’d written on South Island settler society where, the reviewer insisted as an opening declaration, his own work had never been challenged in 30 years.
Posted in Comment