Foreign City Charlotte Grimshaw Vintage, $36.95, ISBN 1869417275 Responsibility Nigel Cox Victoria University Press, $29.95, ISBN 0864734964 White Shadows: Memories of Marienbad Philip Temple Vintage, $27.95, ISBN 1869416996 I’m old enough to remember the days when a New Zealand novel…
The Mediator: A Life of Richard Taylor 1805-1873 J M R Owens Victoria University Press, $39.95, ISBN 0864734646 Richard Taylor was one of the more effective and influential of Church Missionary Society (CMS) workers during that golden age for missionaries,…
A Sort of Conscience – The Wakefields Philip Temple Auckland University Press, $69.95, ISBN 1869402766 Myth one about the Wakefields (enshrined in colonial textbooks of long ago). The Wakefields were a great founding family of New Zealand, and Edward Gibbon…
Kaput! Stevan Eldred-Grigg 1stBooks Library, $50 approx, ISBN 1587215543 Before me I have a postcard of a 1952 poster published by the Office of Information of the German Democratic Republic. A Berlin working woman stands behind a pile of bricks, ruined…
Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders. From the 1880s to the Year 2000 James Belich Allen Lane/ Penguin, $59.95, ISBN 0713991720 One person’s “History of the New Zealanders” over a period of 120 years can never be complete,…
View From The Summit Sir Edmund Hillary Doubleday, $59.95, ISBN 0 908821 09 3 This is a book by a man’s man, the kind of Kiwi male whom R A K Mason saw as the “embodiment of the New Zealand…
To Each His Own Philip Temple Hazard Press, $24.95, ISBN 1 877161 51 9 At the limits of the mellow plain of memory, there stands for each of us a mountain range of sorts, glittering with a hostility that repels…
Mr Explorer Douglas John Pascoe’s New Zealand classic revised by Graham Langton Canterbury University Press, $39.95, ISBN 0 908812 95 7 For bushmen, trampers and mountaineers, the exploits and writings of 19th century explorer Charlie Douglas have become folkloric. Enduring…