Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Urgent Challenges

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Giovanni Tiso

Fair Borders? Migration policy in the twenty-first century, edited by David Hall (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 240 pp., $14; Sea Change: Climate politics and New Zealand by Bronwyn Hayward (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 120 pp., $14; Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific futures by Damon Salesa (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 256 pp., $14.99

The Texts series by Bridget Williams Books has come to occupy a distinctive place on the New Zealand publishing scene, putting out a steady stream of short, timely interventions on a wide range of social and political topics. The hallmark of these ‘short books on big subjects’ is their accessibility, both in terms of the price point and of the clear instruction to the authors to present their ideas to a broad, non-specialist public. In this review I consider three recent titles that exemplify the aims of the series and the vision of publisher Tom Rennie. [Read more…]

Disobedient Preaching

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Bernard Beckett

Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and creating change in education by Welby Ings (Otago University Press, 2017), 208 pp., $35

I sit firmly within the demographic of Welby Ings’ target audience. I am closing in on thirty years of working in secondary-school classrooms, and have not yet outgrown my knack of annoying management upon occasion. Schools are ridiculous, frustrating places, without a doubt, yet viewed through just the right lens, they are inspiring places too. Disobedient Teaching is largely an exercise in constructing just such a lens, not so that we can forgive schools their foolishnesses, but so that we can maintain our optimism and effectiveness in the face of them. This is a book that seeks to offer a warm hug of reassurance to teachers everywhere who lie awake at night wondering ‘Why do I bother?’ – and there are plenty of those. [Read more…]

Where the Four Winds Wend

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Vaughan Rapatahana

South D Poet Lorikeet by Jenny Powell (Cold Hub Press, 2017), 97 pp., $29.95; Walking to Jutland Street by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, 2018), 80 pp., $27.50; The Light and Dark in Our Stuff by Mere Taito (MT Productions, 2016), 30 pp., $10; He’s So MASC by Chris Tse (Auckland University Press, 2018), 84 pp., $29.99

Four collections of poetry, four different Kiwi publishers; four disparate poetic gusts.

I alphabetise this review, for I found not a lot in common between the collections: there is no common seam that threads through all – although for several poets here, we will certainly see a great deal more of their work, such is their merit. [Read more…]

The Great Depression and Collective Memory

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Cybèle Locke

The Broken Decade: Prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand, 1928–39, by Malcolm McKinnon (Otago University Press, 2016), 556 pp., $49.95

In this magisterial account of the 1930s Depression, Malcolm McKinnon aims to disturb the historical orthodoxy which depicts a conflict between the powerless and powerful – ‘We and They’ – ‘in which the “little guy” finally wins’. The first Labour government transforms the conservative political climate of the early 1930s into a ‘collectivist and interventionist one’ after 1935. McKinnon begins in 1928, which enables an exploration of the continuities between Joseph Ward’s expansive pre-Depression policies and those rapidly introduced by the Labour government during its first term in office.  [Read more…]

Raising the Standard

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The Interregum Morgan GodferyDenis Harold

The Interregnum: Rethinking New Zealand, edited by Morgan Godfrey, with Andrew Dean, Max Harris, Lamia Imam, Chloe King, Daniel Kleinsman, Edward Miller, Courtney Sina Meredith, Carrie Stoddart-Smith, Wilbur Townsend, and Holly Walker (Bridget Williams Books Texts, 2016), 172 pp, $14.99

This roughly hewn gem of a book of essays is not a primer for revolution but it is a flyer for the transformation of New Zealand’s dominant neoliberal economic and social order into a state more equal and just. The title The Interregnum, borrowed from a famous quote by the pre-Second World War Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, though somewhat obscure, is apt. In this in-between time, following the withering of the welfare state and the rampant growth of inequality, there is a need for and prospect of radical changes. [Read more…]