Blog Archives

Bad luck, bad language, bad management, Bronwyn Dalley

Bligh: William Bligh in the South Seas Anne Salmond Viking, $65.00, ISBN 9780670075560   One of the prefaces in the late Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (1992) is written at the “bicentenary…
Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Biography, History, Non-fiction, Review

Careful sympathy, Roger Robinson

Katherine Mansfield: The Story-teller Kathleen Jones Viking, $65.00, ISBN 9780670074358   Let’s hear Katherine Mansfield speak first: The cleanliness of Switzerland! Darling, it is frightening. The chastity of my lily-white bed! The waxy-fine floors! The huge bouquet of white lilac,…
Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Biography, Literature, Non-fiction, Review

Innocence, disruption, death, Tom Brooking

Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti Anne Salmond Viking, $65.00, ISBN 9780670073962 The publication of a new book by Anne Salmond is always an occasion worth celebrating and savouring. Aphrodite’s Island, about the European discovery of, and encounter with,…
Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in History, Non-fiction, Review

Home and away, Nicholas Reid

Dead People’s Music Sarah Laing Vintage, $29.99, ISBN 9781869791087 Footnotes to Sex Mia Farlane Viking, $37.00, ISBN 9780670917938 Mother’s Day Laurence Fearnley Penguin, $28.00, ISBN 9780143011255 I am male, middle-aged, heterosexual and monogamous. The first two terms make me different…
Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Fiction, Literature, Review

Felling a forest giant, Janet Hunt

Kauri Keith Stewart Viking, $60.00, ISBN 9780670045525 Keith Stewart’s Kauri is the latest in a succession of publications about this iconic tree, following books by esteemed natural history writers A H Reed, J G Erne Adams, Gordon Ell and others…
Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Natural History, Non-fiction, Review

Shooting the south, Stella Ramage

White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica Grahame Sydney  Viking, $115.00, ISBN 9780670072538 How does the sustained gaze of the landscape painter, obsessively re-imagining the sun-scorched expanses of Central Otago in a million meticulous brushstrokes, adjust to the mechanical snap of a…
Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Non-fiction, Photography, Review

No Hamlet, Barry Gustafson

My Life David Lange Viking, $49.95, ISBN 067004556X David Lange was no Will Shakespeare, and his memoir My Life is no Hamlet, Othello or Macbeth. Lange’s prose is distinguished by clever one-liners, not lengthy, self-revealing soliloquies. My Life does, however,…
Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Memoir, Non-fiction, Review

Jib-booms and bobstays, Anne French

Southern Breeze: a history of yachting in New Zealand Harold Kidd, Robin Elliott, and David Pardon Viking, $74.95, ISBN 0 670 88650 5 Salt beneath the skin: Seafaring Kiwis tell their stories ed Tessa Duder HarperCollins, $29.95, ISBN 1 86950…
Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Essays, Non-fiction, Review

“Better to tell it all”, Vincent O’Sullivan

Wrestling with the Angel: a life of Janet Frame  Michael King Viking, $49.95, ISBN 0 670 89371 4   Penguin Books knew they were onto what commerce knows as “a good thing” when they took on the publication they now…
Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in Biography, Non-fiction, Review

Where history is made, Bernard Kernot

Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans 1773-1815 Anne Salmond Viking $69.95 ISBN 0 67087787 5 The publication in 1991 of Salmond’s Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772 marked a major re-interpretation of first contacts between…
Tagged with: , , ,
Posted in History, Māori, Non-fiction, Review
Search the archive

More results...

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
Filter by Categories
Architecture
Art
Autobiography
Awards
Biography
Byline
Children
Comment
Contents
ebooks
Economics
Editorial
Education
Essays
Extract
Fiction
Gender
Graphic novel
Health
History
Imprints
Language
Lecture
Letters
Letters
Literature
Māori
Media
Memoir
Music
Natural History
Non-fiction
Obituaries
Opinion
Pacific
Photography
Plays
Poem
Poetry
Politics & Law
Psychology
Religion
Review
Science
Short stories
Sociology
Sport
War
YA Reviewers
Young adults
Recent issues: subscriber-only access

    Subscribe to NZ Books to access the issues above

    Search by category