Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Is it me or is it us?

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Susan Wardell

Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an age of loneliness by Jenny Robin Jones (Saddleback, 2018), 248 pp., $39.99

… I grew up without a community, You went to school, you joined Girl Guides, later on the Brethren, But they never felt like communities, or at least not communities that I really belonged to, What would a community you ‘really belonged to’ look like, Utopia? I must admit, I’m interested in utopias. So how come you didn’t belong to the communities you joined? Perhaps I didn’t understand the rules or perhaps I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted. 

In this book Jenny Robin Jones has invited you into her living room, where she has pulled every book out of her well-cultured bookshelf. They fall open on the floor – history, sociology, poetry, some old photo albums. She makes you a cup of coffee. She makes a new and willing friend of you. You sit down in the midst of it all and she starts talking … [Read more…]

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…]

The Beginnings of Provincial Identities

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Jane McCabe

Acknowledge No Frontier: The creation and demise of New Zealand’s provinces, 1853–76, by André Brett (Otago University Press, 2016), 346pp, $45

The provincial system is undoubtedly an aspect of New Zealand history that was overdue for scholarly attention. The lack of close historical treatment to the semi-federal system that divided the colony into six provincial legislatures is surprising given the formative phase that it represents – where colonial administration moved beyond a formal treaty with Māori and into the complicated business of the development of land, infrastructure and economy. The violence and conflict that attended appropriation of land has rightly preoccupied historians of this period. In contrast, the blind spot around provincial politics can be attributed to a kind of common-sense consensus about this short-lived system. In a field where histories have (until recently) been primarily framed around the nation, the provinces are regarded as a brief and explainable blip on the road to a strong central government.   [Read more…]

How to Inhabit a Place

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extraordinary_anywhere_horrocks_and_laceyPat White

Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on place from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Ingrid Horrocks and Cherie Lacey (Victoria University Press, 2016), 222 pp., $40

Extraordinary Anywhere consists of sixteen essays, a ten-page introduction jointly signed by the editors, and a response essay by Martin Edmond: 222 pages of prose in all.

Edmond writes that in order ‘to investigate something properly we need … archives, dreams, memories’. That was expressed in another way some decades ago by the American author Wendell Berry, who suggested that ‘we have to know where we are before we know who we are’ – in other words develop a sense of deep culture, human or otherwise. An individual, he is saying, needs to explore the physical, historical and ‘storied’ environment of a place before he/she can truly place themselves there. We can use either of these statements as parameters with which to consider the contents of the volume, because they suggest a movement beyond the superficial from the essayist. [Read more…]