Dead Letters: Censorship And Subversion In New Zealand 1914–1920
Jared Davidson
Otago University Press, $35.00,
ISBN 9781988531526

Dead Letters contains intriguing detail about a random cast of now-forgotten people who were considered likely subversives in New Zealand during WWI. For their stories to be told at all, we have to thank both the pedantically plodding public-servant compilers of long-buried files and author Jared Davidson, an archivist by trade, for his skill in researching and giving human faces to the consequences of a government obsessively prying into private lives at times of perceived national crisis.