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Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Quite a Ride

March 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Helen Watson White

Making History: A New Zealand story by Jock Phillips (Auckland University Press, 2019), 373pp., $45

In 1973 it was considered newsworthy that a couple of young postgrads, Phillida Bunkle and Jock Phillips (then called John), had come to teach at Victoria University of Wellington, sharing a four-course lectureship in the field of American history. Since few, if any, academics with ‘identical’ qualifications had occupied the same job before, in a small way they were making history, and on 16 June the Dominion made a note (and photo) of it. The couple’s motivations were a reflection of the times. Phillips is quoted as saying that in the US, where they had been living, the counter-culture had ‘launched an attack on American middle-class ambition and the emphasis on men “getting ahead”. Men are beginning to feel now that the job is not everything.’  [Read more…]

Filed Under: arts and culture, history, memoir, social sciences

Hear Our Voices

March 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Giovanni Tiso 

The Broken Estate by Mel Bunce (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 224pp., $14.99; Student Political Action in New Zealand by Sylvia Nissen (Bridget Williams Books, 2019), 168pp., $14.99

To receive reliable information about the world; and to be able to act on this information to change how society works. These basic conditions for democracy are the subject of two new books in Bridget Williams’ Texts series. Mel Bunce’s The Broken Estate explores the state of contemporary journalism, asking whether it is still (or ever was) equipped to fulfil its dual role of informing the public and helping to produce imagined communities. Sylvia Nissen’s Student Political Action in New Zealand examines the realities faced by young people undertaking university education and how these shape or constrain their political expression.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, politics, reviews and essays, social sciences

Witness Marks

August 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Jodie Dalgleish 

Kaitiaki o te Pō by John-Paul Powley (Seraph Press, 2018), 165 pp, $35

In his book of essays, Kaitiaki o te Pō, historian and teacher John-Paul Powley ruminates on self and a broader culture through the flow of his life, which eddies around the jut of histories and events that break a country’s current into caesurae. Each one is a stopping point full of personal refusals and tentative potentialities, poignant and sometimes rousing. [Read more…]

Filed Under: reviews and essays, social sciences

Rescuing Sex Work from Stigma

April 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

Barbara Brookes

My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton, (Otago University Press, 2018), 286 pp., $45

Oral history took off from the 1970s as a way of recording the lives of those who were absent from the written record. Prostitution has, in fact, never been absent from the written record: in nineteenth-century Britain there was an explosion of interest in the subject, particularly aroused by W.T. Stead’s Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon. Debates raged over licensing, regulation and ‘instrumental rape’ – the latter referring to compulsory examination of women under the notorious Contagious Diseases Act (also introduced in New Zealand), which focused on women only while male clients went scot-free. But while much ink was split on the issue, prostitutes themselves were rarely given a voice: others spoke for them, whether anti-C.D. Act campaigners such as Josephine Butler, or those medical men who believed that venereal diseases could be better controlled through regulation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: history, memoir, politics, social sciences

Is it me or is it us?

March 1, 2019 Leave a Comment

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…]

Filed Under: memoir, social sciences

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