Barbara Brookes on My Body, My Business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change by Caren Wilton
Is it me or is it us?
Susan Wardell on Not For Ourselves Alone: Belonging in an age of loneliness by Jenny Robin Jones
Urgent Challenges
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 […]
Disobedient Preaching
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. […]
The Beginnings of Provincial Identities
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 […]
How to Inhabit a Place
Pat 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 […]
Raising the Standard
Denis 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 […]
A Post-Quake City
Andrew Paul Wood The Villa at the Edge of the Empire: One hundred ways to read a city, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2015), 363 pp., $40 Fiona Farrell’s The Villa at the Edge of the Empire comes from a place of anger, though that doesn’t really become apparent until quite some way into the book. […]
The Meteor of New Zealand and the Red Star of China
Denis Harold White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 by Stevan Eldred-Grigg, with Zeng Dazheng (Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2014), 384 pp., $55 The subject of White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790–1950 is vast, even daunting, a fable of an elephant and a flea, yet this book succeeds not only […]
Overseas Experience
Nicholas Reid Flying Kiwis: A history of the OE, by Jude Wilson (Otago University Press, 2014), 295 pp., $45 I have a confession to make. It must colour my review of Jude Wilson’s Flying Kiwis, a generously illustrated history, in part based on oral interviews, of young New Zealanders going off on their ‘Overseas Experience’ […]
Improvers in Trousers
Lindsay Rabbitt Unpacking the Kists:The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking and Jim McAloon (Otago University Press, 2013), 412 pp., $70 In the nineteenth century John Polson, my maternal great-great-grandfather, downed tools as a cooper in the herring trade in West Helmsdale and said goodbye to his family at their croft in […]
Dear Antarctica
Alice Miller Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, by Veronika Meduna (Auckland University Press, 2012), 225 pp., $59.99; These Rough Notes, by Bill Manhire, Anne Noble, Norman Meehan, and Hannah Griffin (Victoria University Press, 2012), 64 pp., $40.< A Canadian band I once loved sang an unlikely song about an Antarctic explorer meeting Foucault […]