Book Review | Children’s Books

Wave Me Goodbye, by Jacqueline Wilson (Penguin Random House/Doubleday, $30)

Reviewed by Sophie Robinson

“‘Would you like to go on a little holiday?’ asked Mum, the moment she’d shaken me awake.”

Main character Shirley, aged 10, was shocked at the question, because her family never went out of London on holiday. But things were different now due to the approaching war. Children of all ages, including Shirley, were being sent out to the countryside for safety.

The story follows Shirley through the beginning of her new life as an evacuee. She is shy and has no friends, and people sense this. When host families are choosing evacuees, Shirley is one of the last 3 children to be rehomed. Everything in her life is turned upside down – first she has to cope with her father leaving for war, then she has to leave her mother behind in London when she is evacuated to the country, and she has to cope with living with strangers.

This story made me feel like I was there with Shirley, as she left her old life in London, and then had to start a new life in the country with no friends or family. Jacqueline Wilson’s character development is thorough so the reader feels like they have a personal connection with the main character. Read more »

Book Review

Good Sons: A Novel of the Great War, by Greg Hall (Mary Egan Publishing, $32)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

“She’s a wonderful woman, she gave three sons to the war.” So I recall an elderly relative saying about her neighbour when I was a child. Anzac Day was “to remember the glorious dead”. The gory-ish dead, more like it. We all know WW1 was not a pretty place. Other writers have told stories, and now Greg Hall has told it from a local viewpoint. The first half  of the book is set in New Zealand, showing how we were experiencing the world situation at that time.

The three good sons of this historical novel’s title are those who have volunteered, one by one, each in their own time, for their own reasons; Tom, Robert and Frank step up to the mark to save us from “the hun”. And to save themselves from public censure, stressful home life or to see the world. It’s made clear that you would be labelled a shirker if you didn’t enlist. And conscientious objectors were mostly shunned – or worse. It must have been curious for boys raised in a church-going society with “thou shalt not kill” to learn that they were expected to do so.

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Book Review

To the Memory: New Zealand’s war memorials, by Jock Phillips (Potton & Burton, $60)

Reviewed by Simon Nathan

It is hard to believe that there are over a thousand public war memorials scattered around the country, commemorating over 30,000 New Zealanders who have died in wartime, and most of whom are buried overseas. This fascinating book gives an overview of the war memorials, showing how the commemoration of the casualties of war has changed over 150 years.

The author, Jock Phillips has been documenting war memorials for over 30 years, and the book is based on his detailed research, including the compilation of a database of all known war memorials. Because this is a topic that has been largely overlooked by past researchers, new information constantly comes to hand. In the opening paragraph, Phillips details his delight at finding a previously unidentified memorial obelisk in the Symonds Street cemetery as recently as September 2015.

An earlier version of this book was published in 1990 as The Sorrow and the Pride: New Zealand War Memorials by Jock Phillips and Chris Maclean. At that time there was little interest in military commemoration, and the book appeared an oddity. But in recent years there has been an awakening of interest in the commemoration of Anzac Day, and the centenary of World War 1 has inspired enormous interest in understanding New Zealand’s part in military conflict. This book is a completely new edition, incorporating the large amount of new information and interpretation that has become available over 25 years.

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Book Review

Breaking Ranks: Three Interrupted Lives, by James McNeish (Harper Collins, $35)

Reviewed by Judith Morrell Nathan

James McNeish, well known author of novels, non-fiction and drama, sent his publishers the final manuscript of this book a few weeks before he died in 2016.  In it, he tells the stories of psychiatrist John Saxby, soldier Reginald Miles and Judge Peter Mahon, described by McNeish as “three men who defied authority and paid for it”.  He says the chapters are not biographies: “at most they are sketches”.

While Mahon is well known for his damning report on the Erebus air disaster, in which he claimed he was presented with an “Orchestrated litany of lies”, Brigadier Miles, and especially John Saxby, are less well known.  They both apparently committed suicide, though what drove them to it is not entirely clear. Whether Mahon’s premature death was hastened by the reaction to his criticism of Air New Zealand and of his subsequent release of a book to justify his conduct, is a matter of conjecture.

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Book Review

Tax and Fairness

by Deborah Russell and Terry Baucher (BWB Texts, paper $14.99; e-book $4.99)

Reviewed by Peter Malcolm

This is an excellent and timely book, since apart from general statements about increasing or mostly reducing tax, there has been very little comment or debate as to whether we should pay tax at all and how much tax each of us should pay.

The authors have subtitled the book “we need to talk about why we pay taxes”, an important statement, although I believe they should have added “and how much should each of us pay”. The last couple of pages make an excellent case for “the why”, and the last two sentences encourage us to see our tax system in a more positive light:

“Proudly paying our taxes is a sign that we believe in our own capacity to create a flourishing society that gives all New Zealanders fair opportunities. We should smile when we pay our taxes.”

But what about the “Fairness”? The authors give little space to this critical question apart from the unfairness of an almost non-existence Capital Gains Tax. The question of tax scales, progressive or regressive tax systems, hardly rates a mention. Many commentators aruge that in comparison with most other developed countries our tax rates on the poor are heavy and the tax rates on the high income/wealthy are light. Is this fair?

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Book Review

Individual Happiness Now

by Len Lye and Robert Graves, with an introduction by Roger Horrocks (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, $12)

Reviewed by Jan Rivers

The recent launch for the previously unpublished Individual Happiness Now by New Zealander Len Lye and UK academic and classicist Robert Graves by the Govett Brewster Gallery brings an essay first written in 1941 to a contemporary audience. Lye, who was living in Kent at the time, wrote it with bombers flying overhead towards London each night. It was edited, improved and toned down by Graves.  Lye was troubled that English propaganda about the fight against fascism failed to have the power, vibrancy and persuasiveness of the German variety in support of the Reich. At a time when some were advocating that being conquered might be tolerable he wanted to write something that countered this propaganda with a powerful statement about the freedoms offered by UK culture and society, guaranteed through its government, and to make the case that they were worth fighting for.

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Excerpt / Release

Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems

Edited by Philip Temple & Emma Neale (Otago U Press, $35)

We are grateful to Otago University Press and to Maraea Rakuraku and Vaughan Rapatahana for permission to reproduce their poems below, just two of the 101 included in this collection. Click here for more information about the ‘Manifesto Aotearoa: 101 Political Poems.

For those of you who insist on using the term Te Urewera 17, 12 or 4 to accompany any newspaper headline or media soundbite. by Maraea Rakuraku

anglican prattle. by Vaughan Rapatahana

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Book Review

The Attention Merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads

by Tim Wu (Penguin Random House, $50)

Reviewed by Alex Beattie

In the 2016 sci-fi movie Arrival, there’s an intriguing scene that speculates about the effects of learning a new language. A linguist, played by Amy Adams, offers a theory that the language you speak determines how you think. Part of what makes Arrival fun is the implausible places it goes with this. But the idea – known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – is real and the lesson quite handy: language is a toolbox to unlock new perspectives.

If that’s the case, than Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants could change the way you see the Internet. It isn’t science-fiction, or about extra-terrestrials – rather, it’s a non-fiction book that offers a new language to understand the economics of the Internet. Reading it will alert you to how Internet really works, and make the whole online experience feel – well,  a little alien.

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Releases

Charles Brasch Journals 1945-1957 selected by Peter Simpson (Otago U Press, $59.95)

This volume of Charles Brasch’s journals covers the years from late 1945 to the end of 1957, when the poet and editor was aged 36 to 48. It begins with his return to New Zealand after World War II to establish a literary quarterly to be published by the Caxton Press. The journals cover the first decade or so of his distinguished editorship of Landfall, a role that brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand’s leading artists and intelligentsia.

‘Although a discreet and reserved man in public, Brasch was often candid and direct in his comments about people he met,’ says editor Peter Simpson.

They included many of the best known people of his generation – including Frank Sargeson, A.R.D. Fairburn, Keith Sinclair, Eric McCormick, James Bertram, J.C. Beaglehole, Maria Dronke, Fred and Evelyn Page, Alistair Campbell, Bill Oliver, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Leo Bensemann, Lawrence Baigent, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and many others – and are among the highlights of the book.

Unmarried and longing for intimacy, Brasch also writes with great candour about his relationships with Rose Archdall, Rodney Kennedy and Harry Scott, revealing a side of himself that has not been known about before. Read more »

Releases

The New Zealand Project by Max Harris (Bridget Williams Books, $40)

It would be tempting to say that Max Harris is a young man in a hurry. Certainly there is a sense of urgency evident in the pages of The New Zealand Project, the title of this, his extraordinary first book: extraordinary in its maturity, its intellectual scope, its creative vision and its – literally – death-defying origins. But to say he is in a hurry would be to mischaracterise his ultimate ambition and the deliberate, careful and often lyrical manner in which he presents and interrogates it. Which is just as well, since his goal for the book is nothing less than ‘rediscovering New Zealand’s lost direction’.

I haven’t lived long enough yet to have lost a sense of hope or a sense of the possible. But I’ve lived long enough to know that things are moving too slowly for those of us with hope, who want to make the impossible possible. And I’ve lived close enough to death to feel like we have no time to lose.
– Max Harris, The New Zealand Project

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