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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

A Magnifying Glass to Enormity

May 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Searching for Charlie: In pursuit of the real Charles Upham VC & Bar by Tom Scott (Upstart Press, 2020) 368pp, $49.99

I have to confess that I wanted to review Searching for Charlie not because of its subject—a war hero both famous and infamous for his unstoppable aggression—but because of its author, Tom Scott, a cartoonist and columnist both famous and infamous for his satirical zeal.

Scott’s urge to make satire is equalled only by his enthusiasm for storytelling. At the end of his engaging and agonising study of his own family life, Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir, he acknowledges: ‘I am indebted to a legion of editors on the New Zealand Listener, the Evening Post, the Auckland Star and the Dominion Post for giving me the freedom to leave my office desk in pursuit of stories I thought worth telling.’ The Upham story is one of those, and in March 2019 Scott left the Dominion Post altogether to pursue it. The search for ‘the real Charles Upham’, like his pursuit of Sir Edmund Hillary (for a TV series, a book and a documentary), involved extensive travel in New Zealand and overseas. [Read more…]

Filed Under: biography, history, journalism

He kura kāinga e hokia: he kura tangata e kore e hokia. The treasure of land will persist: human possessions will not

June 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Rebuilding the Kāinga: Lessons from te ao hurihuri by Jade Kake (BWB Texts, 2019), 155 pp., $15; #NoFly: Walking the talk on climate change by Shaun Hendy (BWB Texts ,2019), 130 pp., $15

Jade Kake was raised in Australia by a Māori mother and a Dutch father, and after gaining a Bachelor of Architectural Design from Queensland she moved back to Aotearoa in 2012, where she made contact with her whanaunga Rau Hoskin, a leader in the field of Māori architecture. He encouraged her to do a master’s degree at Auckland University of Technology on papakāinga—a literal embodiment of earth (papa) and kainga (home)—as a model for regeneration of communities in Aotearoa.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism, maori and pacific, politics, social sciences

Hammer and Sickle, Yeah!

August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment

Max Oettli 

Seen in China 1956 by Tom Hutchins, edited by John B. Turner (Turner Photo Books in collaboration with Photo Forum as Photoforum issue 86, 2016), 124 pp., $25; The Shops by Steve Braunias and Peter Black (Luncheon Sausage Press Books/Photo Forum, 2016), 62 pp., $40

What did I know about China in 1956? I was nine at the time, a smart-arsed Swiss-German kid, the runt in a family of four. We had a German Jugend book I’d devoured, as I devoured everything readable in our house, a kind of companion volume to Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet I suppose, of a German’s experience of living in China for 30 years. The book was probably from a time when Germany was a somewhat tarnished currency (as was Harrer’s Tibet book, incidentally), but this did not stop me reading it avidly. There were countless millions of Chinese, apparently; they drank tea, did gruesome things to women’s feet and had rather fixed dietary habits and somewhat rudimentary plumbing, which gave them and their whole country a distinctive smell, to put it mildly. Their governance was based on a very hierarchic Confucian order and their punishment of criminals was gruesome.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: art and photography, history, journalism

Nobodies, Munters and Geniuses

May 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

the_scene_of_the_crime_steve_brauniasDenis Harold

The Scene of the Crime, by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins, 2015), 320 pp., $39.99

We learn that Steve Braunias did some preparatory research for his book The Scene of the Crime, subtitled Twelve extraordinary true stories of crime and punishment, by reading ‘about crime writing in Te Ara, the New Zealand online encyclopedia for children’ (‘for children’ is Braunias’s interpolation): ‘The author was some nobody. “Crime news,” Nobody wrote, “offers the media potent content as it is often negative, personal, visual, violent, emotional and lacks complexity.”’ [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism

Number One with a Bullet

September 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

greatest_hits_david_cohenDavid Herkt

Greatest Hits, by David Cohen (Mākaro Press, 2014), 316 pp., $35

Language can be a weapon, as David Cohen, armed only with his words and phrases, very ably demonstrates in Greatest Hits, an anthology of pieces drawn from a quarter century of media-work. In a Listener review of 2006 he so thoroughly deflates the orange-tinted pretentions of U2 and Bono, the band’s frontman, that it becomes impossible to see the ‘great’ rocker’s performance except through Cohen’s vision of bloated corporate emptiness. In ‘Kingdom of the curdled-milk sheik’, written for the National Business Review in 2009, Cohen’s invitation from Saudi Arabia to participate in a press junket becomes the understated means whereby the freedom-loving proclamations of the kingdom are shown to be just as substantial as a mirage of dairy show-farms on desert sand dunes.

Cohen is a Wellington-based writer, a sometime Guardian and Listener columnist, a correspondent on media affairs for the NBR, a sometime satirist and, that old fashioned term, a mordant wit. If the column is one of the media-styles of our age, then Cohen excels at it, able to tease import from apparent trivia. He has often succeeded at that hardest task, gaining unique revelation from a well-practised interviewee. His idiosyncrasies usually play to his strengths. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism, memoir

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