Vaughan Rapatahana Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti (Penguin Random House, 2017), 336 pp., $40 You can certainly judge a book by its cover, in this case. On the dust jacket of Black Marks on the White Page, starkly smudged in black and white, James Ormsby has depicted […]
Tracing One Iwi’s Carving Style
Andrew Paul Wood A Whakapapa of Tradition: One hundred years of Ngāti Porou carving, 1830–1930 by Ngarino Ellis with new photography by Natalie Robertson (Auckland University Press, 2016), 304 pp., $69.99 The arrival of Pākehā in Aotearoa was not a good thing for Māori whakairo taonga; vide the denuded whare of Ngāpuhi, their carved ancestors […]
Ask that Mountain
Gerry Te Kapa Coates Te Whiti O Rongomai and the Resistance of Parihaka by Danny Keenan (Huia Publishers, 2015), 275 pp., $45 It is some time since I read Dick Scott’s Ask That Mountain, so Danny Keenan’s book is a welcome refresher, informed as it is by his ancestry, contacts and biography of Te Whiti […]
Have I Got Time to Look at This?
Max Oettli A Beautiful Hesitation by Fiona Pardington, with Kriselle Baker and Aaron Lister and others (Victoria University Press, 2016), 264 pp., $70 Have I got time to look at this? Books of pictures always seem to have a time signature built into them, and from that point of view Fiona Pardington’s A Beautiful Hesitation is […]
Awa, Maunga, Iwi, Waka
David Eggleton Māori Art: History, architecture, landscape and theory by Rangīhiroa Panoho (Bateman, 2015), 352 pp., $89.99 Māori Art: History, architecture, landscape and theory is, as the book’s convoluted subtitle might suggest, a somewhat lumpy assemblage: an idiosyncratic if entertaining gathering of themes and examples lashed together raft-like in support of its aim, which is […]
Perpetrator, Judge and Jury
Gerry Te Kapa Coates Kūpapa: The Bitter Legacy of Māori Alliances with the Crown by Ron Crosbie (Penguin Random House, 2015) 504 pp., $65 Ron Crosby is a barrister with a keen interest in Māori history, and a recent member of the Waitangi Tribunal. He also is the author of The Musket Wars (1999), which […]
Connecting Places, Ancestors, Gods with the Present
Edmund Bohan The Lives of Colonial Objects, edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (Otago University Press, 2015), 368 pp., $50 The inspiration for this beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated essay collection, described by its three editors as one ‘in which objects serve as pathways into New Zealand’s colonial history’, comes originally from […]
Kia Ora, Everybody!
Michael O’Leary Parekura Horomia – ‘Kia Ora Chief’, by Wira Gardiner (Huia Publishers, 2014), 448 pp., $45 If there was ever an Apt Phrase Award about its subject in the title of a book, then this biography of Parekura Horomia, with its ringing ‘Kia ora, Chief’, would have to be in the running for top […]
The Missionary and the Murderer
Max Oettli Journey to a Hanging by Peter Wells (Vintage, 2014), 412 pp., $45 Peter Wells’ historical account of the persecution and assassination of Kereopa Te Rau has a rather gloomy title, and I first opened it with a sense of foreboding and unease. It’s true though that the story he tells us here is […]
Maoriland
Nicholas Reid Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99 Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays […]
Addressing and Naming the Unknown
David Herkt The Naturalist by Thom Conroy (Vintage, 2014), 381 pp., $37.99 The German mid-nineteenth-century scientific explorers of New Zealand conducted an extraordinary project of revealing a new colony in the midst of a great transition. They described the natural and indigenous social environments of an isolated archipelago, the last country in the world before […]
A White Collar and a Red Tie
Edmund Bohan White-Collar Radical: Dan Long and the rise of the white-collar unions, by Mark Derby, (Craig Potton Publishing, 2013), 302 pp., $39.99 White-Collar Radical: Dan Long and the rise of the white-collar unions reveals its author Mark Derby writes well, though this is hardly surprising because he is an experienced writer and historian, whose […]
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