Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Common Silence

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Shana Chandra

Kalimpong Kids by Jane McCabe (Otago University Press, 2020), 139pp, $35

I have been struck by the silence that was common to our family histories, and by the role that photographs played in keeping curiosity alive.—Jane McCabe

As a historical record and document, Kalimpong Kids is a visual testament to the past, a collection of familial photographs that have survived as relics. Photographs that have provided clues to hushed stories handed down, muted by shame. Photographs of a society that kept hidden what it couldn’t palate. Photographs that say tangible things that lips could not. [Read more…]

The Slow Wheels of Justice 

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Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Justice & Race: Campaigns against racism and abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand by Oliver Sutherland (Steele Roberts, 2020), 288pp., $34.99

Professor Emeritus David Williams, in his foreword to this important book, says it ‘is not an easy read’. The book deals with issues around systemic racism in the justice and policing jurisdictions from 1969 to 1986. Heavy topics, yes, but the book, thanks to Oliver Sutherland’s masterful handling of the material, reads like a thriller, peppered with well-known names and events highlighted by newspaper clippings and photographs.  [Read more…]

A Robot Stole My Economy

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Victor Billot 

Jobs, Robots and Us: Why the future of work in New Zealand is in our hands by Kinley Salmon (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 304 pp., $39.95

My initial response to this book was one of relief that someone had finally bothered to write about automation from a New Zealand perspective. You would think that a technology shift like this would command strong interest in a small nation vulnerable to external shocks, but there seems to be a lack of accessible information on this topic for non-specialist readers, and this book fills a need.

Author Kinley Salmon is a bright young thinker, a Harvard graduate, an expat economist in Washington, DC, and a self-identified millennial. The cover features endorsements from international bigwigs. The style is conversational: his approach is humane, sensible, pragmatic, understated—relentlessly reasonable in that EnZed kind of way. [Read more…]

A Tool of Hope

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Jessica Thompson Carr

Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of resistance, persistence and defiance by Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams and Puawai Cairns (Te Papa Press, 2019), 416 pp., $70

The survival of the objects in these pages has depended on many factors—some exist because of their careful owners, others through luck. – Preface

Growing up, I didn’t have much access to my Māori taonga. Most of the treasures of our whānau were either lost or had disintegrated in the bush, or are now kept in a museum. We learned what we could, and our connection was limited to our mum returning from trips up north with Ngāpuhi T-shirts and bumper stickers. Those were my taonga. [Read more…]

#I am not a virus

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Mira Harrison 

The Dark Island by Benjamin Kingsbury (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 208pp., $39.99

As I read the final chapter of Benjamin Kingsbury’s history of Quail Island, New Zealand’s leprosy colony, news of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic began to break. Leafing back through the pages to Chapter 1, where Kingsbury describes the first suspicious case of leprosy in New Zealand in 1903, similar themes between these past and present stories of illness, suffering and infection control began to emerge. This prompted consideration of how we – as individuals, as health professionals and in our wider communities – respond to people infected with a contagious disease, and the possible consequences of our reactions for the health and wellbeing of societies across the world.  [Read more…]