Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air City Gallery/Victoria University Press, $49.95, ISBN 0864734727 As I shelved Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air among my treasured collection of exhibition catalogues, it set me thinking about the reasons we buy catalogues, and the various pleasures they…
Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings ed Roger Robinson Streamline, $34.95, ISBN 0958210624 Everyone knows about Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), described by a contemporary as “a spirit intense and rare” and immortalised by Samoans as Tusitala (the teller of…
Chronicle of the Unsung Martin Edmond Auckland University Press, $34.99, ISBN 1869403118 Martin Edmond, son of Lauris, played a role in two iconic cultural phenomena of my formative years in 70s and 80s Auckland – he wrote the screenplay for…
Paste Up – A Century of New Zealand Poster Art Hamish Thompson Godwit, $39.95, ISBN 1869621042 In February, Auckland Mayor Banks found himself compelled to tell immigrants not to spit in public. “Many of them come from countries where spitting…
A Strange Outcome – The Remarkable Survival Story of a Polish Child John Roy-Wojciechowski and Allan Parker Penguin Books, $35.00, ISBN 014301904X About 800 Polish refugees, 733 of them children and Most of them orphans, sailed into Wellington harbour in…
Paint Your Wife Lloyd Jones Penguin, $35, ISBN 0143019066 “He had seen one thing and thought the other. He’d made the mistake of seeing what he expected to see, what he was used to seeing”– this quotation from the back…
New Zealand Votes: The General Election of 2002 ed J Boston, S Church, S Levine, E McLeay & N Roberts Victoria University Press, $49.95, ISBN 0864734689 I was on the baños in Baños, Ecuador when the 2002 election results were…
New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2004
A Bird in the Hand: Keeping New Zealand Wildlife Safe by Janet Hunt of Waiheke won the New Zealand Post Book of the Year 2004 as well as the non-fiction prize. Other category winners were Cuthbert’s Babies, written and illustrated…
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