Mark Stocker It’s All About the Image,by Dick Frizzell (Godwit, 2011), 280 pp., $65.   Something about Dick Frizzell either irks or delights people: there is no scope for the in-between. I’ve just had my third student in as many years asking whether they might please write their Honours dissertation on him. Is there comparable demand, […]

Andrew Paul Wood Art Toi: New Zealand Art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, edited by Ron Brownson (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2011) 388 pp., $59.95; CSA: The Radical, the Reactionary and the Canterbury Society of Arts 1880–1996, by Warren Feeney (Canterbury University Press, 2011) 223 pp., $49.95    The history of New Zealand art […]

David Eggleton Ruling Passions: Essays on just about Everything, by Nick Perry (Otago University Press, 2011) 230 pp. $45   Rudyard Kipling, the globe-trotting bard of the British Empire, famously described Auckland at the beginning of the twentieth century in his poem ‘The Song of the Cities’ as: ‘Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart.’ This implicit […]

David Eggleton Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press, 2011) 198 pp. $37.95   To be an essay writer is to be an eclectic: one who gathers together curious observations and out-of-the-way facts, and then conjures with them so as to offer another interpretation of some aspect of the world. At […]

Tasha Haines Dark Arts, by Leo Bensemann, edited by Peter Simpson (Holloway Press, Auckland) Edition of 100. $300.   Dark Arts is a collection of mostly unpublished essays given as talks by Leo Bensemann circa the 1950s on the subjects of the history of printing, typography, book illustration, graphic arts, the Caxton Press, and The Group. […]

William Dart Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of New Zealand Popular Music 1918–1964, by Chris Bourke (Auckland University Press, 2010), 392 pp., $59.99. Charles Brasch, the founding and somewhat patrician editor of Landfall, considered that New Zealand music found its voice in the late 1940s. It was then, he writes in his 1980 memoir Indiscretions […]

David Eggleton Group Architects: Towards a New Zealand Architecture, edited by Julia Gatley (Auckland University Press, 2010) $75.00 What is the great New Zealand building? One answer — or chorus of answers — would be that it is the shed. Thrown up on the landscape like the exact embodiment of the nation’s perceived utilitarian character, […]

Lydia Wevers The Frame Function: An Inside-Out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame, by Jan Cronin, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 222 pp., $49.99. Janet Frame’s 1979 Living in the Maniototo is her penultimate novel and one generally regarded, as Jan Cronin says in her book, as some kind of creative manifesto. The headings of the different […]