Songs from the Violet Café Fiona Kidman Random House, $26.95, ISBN 1869414055 In his 1984 essay “Reflections on Exile”, Edward Said remarks: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least…
Retrospective Shelagh Duckham Cox We met first in Lauris Edmond’s house at 22 Grass St in the middle of 1990 and the six of us – Lauris, John Mansfield Thomson, Pat Hawthorne, Vincent O’Sullivan, Martin Bond and Shelagh Duckham…
Room Laurence Fearnley Victoria University Press, $24.95, ISBN 0864733909 Dr Amelia Walsh is an abortionist and the room of the title is her consulting room. A succession of women sit in her patient’s chair and respond in various ways to…
Featherstone Kirsty Gunn Faber & Faber, $34.95, ISBN 0571212476 The epigraph is an entry in an imagined handbook. It provides information you’d expect from a motoring guide about a small town you’ve never visited before, and it’s in the same format…
The Certainty of Doubt. Tributes to Peter Munz Miles Fairburn and W H Oliver (eds) Victoria University Press, Wellington, $39.95 ISBN 086473302X Immigration is a strange enterprise. In 1966, just off the Northern Star, heading for the exit of the…
Employment Contracts: New Zealand Experiences Raymond Harbridge (ed), Victoria University Press, $29.95 I need to write two reviews of this book. The second should be placed on top of the first as a palimpset – to infuse, colour and modify…
Undeveloping Nation: New Zealand’s Twenty Year Fall Towards the Third World David McLoughlin, Penguin, $24.95 The Decent Society: Essays In Response to National’s Economic and Social Policies Jonathan Boston and Paul Dalziel (eds) Oxford University Press, $29.95 Controlling Interests: Business,…
Daughters of Heaven a play by Michelanne Forster Daughters of Heaven has already been performed at Court Theatre in Christchurch and Downstage in Wellington. Now its author, Michelanne Forster, has received a joint commission from Television New Zealand and New Zealand…
The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa Charlotte Macdonald, Merimeri Penfold and Bridget Williams (eds), Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1991, $45 You could start to read The Book of New Zealand Women at the beginning and make your way…
Finding Connections P J Kavanagh, Hutchinson (distrib Random Century, Auckland), 1990, $42.95 Over half a century ago Karl Mannheim wrote in Ideology and Utopia of the western intelligentsia as a uniquely privileged caste. Intellectuals, he said, were fortunate enough to…