Raewyn Alexander A Woman’s Place: Good Wives, Happy Husbands and Why a Woman’s Work Is Never Done, compiled by Redmer Yska (Penguin, 2013), 128 pp., $24.99; Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890—1975, by Frances Walsh (Godwit Books, 2010), 375 pp., $49.99. Yellowing and faded ephemera, whimsy, oddities, out-dated information and gender-specific […]
Wrongdoings
Michael O’Leary Patched: the History of Gangs in New Zealand, by Jarrod Gilbert (AUP, Auckland, 2013), 360 pages, $49.99. Over the years people from various gangs have been part of my life. I grew up in a big State Housing area in Auckland. In the mid 1960s, when my father was in prison and my […]
Boiling it Down
James Dignan On Song: Stories Behind New Zealand’s Pop Classics, by Simon Sweetman (Penguin Books, 2012), 208 pp., $65 It seems only a handful of years ago that there was a distinct shortage of books on New Zealand popular music. In the last few years, however, the subject has escaped from ghettoisation and become […]
The Ties that Bind
Patricia McLean New Zealand’s London: A Colony and its Metropolis, by Felicity Barnes, (Auckland University Press, 2012), 344 pp., $49.99 Felicity Barnes’s engaging book maps the history of New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ relationship with London, from the first colonial journeys back ‘Home’ to the long-prevalent Big OE. Her study introduces the appealing concept of […]
Thread Caught on the Thorn of a Minute
Paula Morris Your Unselfish Kindness: Robin Hyde’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Mary Edmond-Paul, (Otago University Press, 2012) 327 pp., $40. The Lodge, a big wooden house on the edge of Mt Albert, Auckland is a landmark I’ve passed hundreds of times; my sister lives nearby. It was once part of the mental hospital that, […]
Unfettered by Pākehā
Reina Whaitiri Huia Histories of Māori: Nga Tahuhu Korero, edited by Danny Keenan (Huia,Wellington, 2012) 350 pp., $49.99. This handsome book features the essays of sixteen Māori scholars including: a retired justice of the High Court, a professor and assistant vice chancellor, a film and television producer, a principal of a consultancy organisation and former […]
Doctor, I Like Your Nuclear Medicine
Martin Edmond Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age, by Rebecca Priestley (AUP, 2012), 284 pp., $45.00. In December 1923 Ernest Rutherford sent, from England, a cable to Wellington Hospital confirming that the price they were intending to pay for a single gram of radium was a fair one. When the hospital authorities, […]
Civilisation Versus Culture
Michael O’Leary A Savage Country: The Untold Story of New Zealand in the 1820s, by Paul Moon (Penguin Books, Auckland, 2012) ‘[the historian’s] work at best is the provisional creation of a pioneer’ – F.W. Deakin ‘Nothing but experience could evince the frequency of fake information … which is afterwards incorrectly diffused by successive […]
How to Explain Philosophy
Andrew Paul Wood Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions, by Jim Flynn (Awa Press, 2012), 250 pp., $32.99. If The Torchlight List of good books may be glossed as Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn’s genially Quixotic attempt to out-Bloom Harold Bloom’s magisterial Western Canon, then Flynn’s Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s […]
Why we are in Afghanistan
Adam Gifford Other People’s Wars: New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, by Nicky Hager (Craig Potton Publishing, 2011), 439 pp., $49.99. New Zealanders may feel anger and betrayal at reading Nicky Hager’s latest installment of their country’s secret history. But for those described by the former United States ambassador to […]
Galloper Wields Prod and Probe
Nicholas Reid New Zealand in the Twentieth Century – The Nation, The People, by Paul Moon (Harper/Collins 2011) 672 pp. $49.99. Conscientious historians worry about periodisation — that is, in historical terms, when can we say an ‘age’ or a period in a country’s history begins or ends? Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s Music Makers ode […]
Wide Horizon
Vaughann Rapatahana Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania, by Alice Te Punga Sommerville, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 288 pp., $61.99. Their knowing the use of this sort of Cloth doth in some measure account for the extraordinary fondness they have shew’d for it above every other thing we had to give them.” […]