Raewyn Alexander A Woman’s Place: Good Wives, Happy Husbands and Why a Woman’s Work Is Never Done, compiled by Redmer Yska (Penguin, 2013), 128 pp., $24.99; Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890—1975, by Frances Walsh (Godwit Books, 2010), 375 pp., $49.99. Yellowing and faded ephemera, whimsy, oddities, out-dated information and gender-specific […]
The Ties that Bind
Patricia McLean New Zealand’s London: A Colony and its Metropolis, by Felicity Barnes, (Auckland University Press, 2012), 344 pp., $49.99 Felicity Barnes’s engaging book maps the history of New Zealand’s and New Zealanders’ relationship with London, from the first colonial journeys back ‘Home’ to the long-prevalent Big OE. Her study introduces the appealing concept of […]
How to Explain Philosophy
Andrew Paul Wood Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s Great Questions, by Jim Flynn (Awa Press, 2012), 250 pp., $32.99. If The Torchlight List of good books may be glossed as Emeritus Professor Jim Flynn’s genially Quixotic attempt to out-Bloom Harold Bloom’s magisterial Western Canon, then Flynn’s Fate & Philosophy: A Journey Through Life’s […]
Memory is a Familiar Stranger
Terence Rissetto Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, Michael Jackson (Rosa Mira ebooks, 2012), 222 pp., US$ 11.00. For Albert Camus the only philosophical question is ‘To be or not to be?’ Once affirmed by the existential reverse of Rene Descartes’s ‘Cogito ergo sum’ into ‘I am, therefore I think,’ the existential dilemma […]
Blaxploitation
David Eggleton Black: The History of Black in Fashion, Society and Culture in New Zealand, curated by Doris De Pont (Penguin, 2012), 239 pp. $59.99. In the beginning there was black. As Samuel Butler wrote in his novel Erewhon, pronouncing on the awesomeness of God’s Own Country in the 1860s and describing the Southern […]
You Can Do It Here
Kiran Dass Dunedin Soundings: Place and Performance, edited by Dan Bendrups and Graeme Downes, Otago University Press, 2011, 176 pp., $40.00. ‘The Dunedin Sound, mmmm, me and my big mouth!’ — David Kilgour (The Clean) 2005. The cultish mythology of the so-called ‘Dunedin Sound’ has endured for over 30 years, but what is […]
Let Me Through, I’m a Journalist
Adam Gifford Scooped: The Politics and Power of Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Martin Hirst, Sean Phelan and Verica Rupar (AUT Media, 2012) 232 pp. $39.99. As universities have moved to take over journalist training, a rift has developed between the expectations of traditionally trained journalists and the culture of the academy. Old-school […]
Packaging the Land
Philippa Jamieson Wild Heart: The Possibility of Wilderness in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Mick Abbott and Richard Reeve (Otago University Press) 224 pp. $45; Making Our Place: Exploring Land-use Tensions in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jacinta Ruru, Janet Stephenson and Mick Abbott, (Otago University Press), 243 pp. $45. Although we are becoming […]
Gujurat, the Punjab and Bollywood on Location
Dieter Riemenschneider India in New Zealand: Local Identities, Global Relations, edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Otago University Press, 2010) 226 pp., $49.95 Maintaining that ‘Indians are now a visible minority in New Zealand’s public life’ and commenting upon the comparative scarcity of thorough and comprehensive studies on their presence in the country, Bandhopadhyay and his contributors […]
Diasporic Problems
Areezou Zalipour Localizing Asia in Aotearoa, edited by Paola Voci & Jacqueline Leckie (Auckland: Dunmore Publishing, 2011) 248 pp., $44.99. Localizing Asia in Aotearoa takes a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the contemporary experience of New Zealand in relation to Asia and Asians. The book mainly investigates and examines the ways that Asia and Asians […]