Blog Archives

Living testaments, Susan Fowke

Skin to Skin: Intimate, True Stories of Maori-Pakeha Relationships  Carol Archie Penguin, $35.00, ISBN 0143019627 If you feel like reading something positive about race relations in New Zealand, this is the book for you. And if, like me, you are

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Posted in Māori, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Poem – Bernard Gadd

Another creative prelude [with thanks to R A K Mason] This plump cheque award provides fittingly screen bed and board for stanzas on me They ask no grim Ron Mason verses look what’s happened to him dwindling past curses I

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Posted in Poem

Letters – Issue 71

Going for the kill There are curious contradictions in Guy Somerset’s editorial, “Review and be damned” (NZB, October 2005). Literary life in New Zealand apparently amounts to “rarefied navel-gazing”, supermarket politeness and authorial complaint, all dire “small-country” traits. Yet these

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Posted in Letters

Repackaging the foreign, Giselle Byrnes

Caught Mapping: The Life and Times of New Zealand’s Early Land Surveyors  Janet Holm Hazard Press, $49.99, ISBN 1877270865 In 1849, less than a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the assertion of British sovereignty over

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review

Christmas list

  New Zealand Books reviewers choose which book they’d most like to see in their Christmas stocking and why. Owen Marshall: The Journals of John Cheever, unfortunately out of print; a wonderfully candid and elegant insight into the life of

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Posted in Imprints, Opinion

Pioneering efforts, Tom Brooking

The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall Judith Binney Bridget Williams Books, $49.95, ISBN 1877242330 There are few New Zealand history books that can be described as seminal, that is, books so deep in their research and broad

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Posted in Biography, History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review

Delicate flowers of the wasteland, Les Cleveland

Love in Time of War: Letter Writing in the Second World War Deborah Montgomerie Auckland University Press, $35.00, ISBN 1869403363 Freyberg’s War: The Man, the Legend, the Reality Matthew Wright Penguin Books, $35.00, ISBN 0143019856 Western Front: The New Zealand

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Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review, War

All aboard for Planet Teenage, Brigid Lowry

Deep Fried Bernard Beckett and Clare Knighton Longacre Press, $18.95, ISBN 1887361119    Box Penelope Todd Longacre Press, $16.95, ISBN 1877361127    Sil Jill Harris Longacre Press, $18.95, ISBN 1877361143 Elizabeth Knox recently entered the realms of young adult fiction with her

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Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review, Young adults

Hymns, history and haemorrhoids, Janet Hughes

Three Regrets and a Hymn to Beauty Ian Wedde Auckland University Press, $22.00, ISBN 1869403495 Afternoon of an Evening Train Gregory O’Brien Victoria University Press, $21.99, ISBN 9864735014 Oooooo…..!!! Hone Tuwhare Steele Roberts, $24.95, ISBN 1877338699 Footfall Brian Turner Godwit,

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Posted in Literature, Poetry, Review

What meets the eye, Ian Robertson

My Place  ed Glenn Busch, Bruce Connew with Uiga Bashford, Maria Buhrkuhl, Hanne Johnsen, Dean Kozanic, Tim Veling Canterbury University Press, $29.95, ISBN 187725729X Assume Nothing  Rebecca Swan Boy Tiger Press, $69.95, ISBN 0476004934 My Place is part of an

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Posted in Gender, Non-fiction, Photography, Review, Sociology
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