Blog Archives

Not in Guatemala now, Linda Burgess

Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama Trish Dunleavy Auckland University Press, $49.99, ISBN 1869403398 If Ourselves in Primetime were television, rather than a book about television, it would be tucked away on TV1 at 11.30pm. Or

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Posted in History, Media, Non-fiction, Review, Sociology

Erratic humanity, Roger Blackley

Nerli: An Italian Painter in the South Pacific Michael Dunn Auckland University Press, $79.99, ISBN I869403355 According to the traditional mythology of New Zealand art, the annus mirabilis of 1890 heralds the arrival of professionalism and modernism in the figures

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Posted in Art, Non-fiction, Pacific, Review

Slow readers, Tim Hazledine

Economist and member of the 2000 Heart of the Nation Taskforce on the Arts Tim Hazledine asks if we’re feeding public money to the wrong end of the literary food chain.  The New York Times once ran a competition for

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Posted in Comment

History, processes and principles, Bronwyn Dalley

The Waitangi Tribunal/Te Roopu Whakamana i te Tiriti o Waitangi ed Janine Hayward and Nicola R Wheen Bridget Williams Books, $49.95, ISBN 1877242322 State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy: Crown-Maori Relations in New Zealand/Aotearoa 1900–1950 Richard S Hill Victoria University Press, $39.95,

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Posted in History, Māori, Non-fiction, Politics & Law, Review

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
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