Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: travels to find where my stuff comes from, by Fred Pearce

Eden Project Books

Cradle to Cradle: re-making the way we make things, by Michael Braungart and William McDonough

Vintage

Ecological Intelligence: knowing the hidden impacts of what we buy, by Daniel Goleman

Allen Lane

Reviewed by BERNARD STEEDS

Everything we buy has a hidden life.

This life occurs before the product gets to us – as the raw materials are extracted or grown, as the product is processed or manufactured, as it is transported to us. It occurs while we own the product – through the energy it consumes, or the toxins it emits. It occurs after we have finished with it and sent it for dumping or recycling.

But when we buy product we are not told about these costs. In general, the companies that profit do not have to tell us. Nor, generally, do they have to take full responsibility. They may not even be fully aware themselves of the impact of their products, either on the environment or on people’s health and welfare.

Each of these three books is an attempt to address this issue – to explore the ‘life cycle’ and ‘environmental footprint’ of the stuff we buy: one by telling us about it, one by arguing that we should be told more, and one by offering a solution.

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Shirley Shackleton was married to the late Channel Seven reporter Greg Shackleton, one of five Australian television journalists who were killed in Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in 1975. Shirley has asked the Scoop Review of Books to re-publish the following article (which first appeared on crikey.com). The article refers to Shooting Balibo by Tony Maniaty reviewed below.

I’m trying to think what to do about a recently published book – there is not much choice because of the laws of defamation. It’s ironic, anyone can print what they like and get away with it. Why? There is no protection in law for the dead, that’s why. A live person cannot even use the D word against someone who is assassinating a dead person’s character because of the likelihood of being charged with defamation. Since the D word does not exist in law regarding a deceased person, it cannot be used to defend them.

The Oracle who wrote this book D’s my husband in every possible way.

Greg Shackleton can be described by a whole raft of D words. Determined, dashing, desirable, delectable, decent, dedicated and Daddy. However the only word that matters is dead.

Because of this book he has to die over and over and over again.

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Poet and doctor Glenn Colquhoun gave the following extraordinary oration at this year’s meeting of the Royal College of General Practitioners conference in Wellington. Glenn has kindly agreed to let us republish it.

THE Wolffian ducts are embryonic structures in mammals. Under the influence of testosterone they form the internal genitalia of the male: the epididymis, the vas deferens and the seminal vesicles. They also have a role in the generation of the kidney as well as of the Mullerian duct, a precursor of the female reproductive tract. Disturbances of testosterone metabolism give rise to a number of disorders affecting their development including complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, 17B hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency, LH receptor mutations and 5a reductase deficiency.

Most of this I learnt this in medical school. I don’t know why I remember it now. More useful information has long since disappeared but the Wolffian ducts remain a magnificent testimony to the fact that I once knew something, a great pyramid perhaps, hinting at a previous civilization. I regret few people with disorders of their Wolffian ducts have ever been patients of mine. In fact, apart from a few of the old favourites, I don’t often see much of what I learnt about in medical school at all.

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Shooting Balibo: Blood and Memory in East Timor, by Tony Maniaty

Sydney: Viking, 2009. Reviewed by MARCUS O’DONNELL

EARLY on in Tony Maniaty’s Shooting Balibo we come across Herman Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and John Dos Passos. We quickly get the message that this is as much a journey of the imagination as it is a travelogue, memoir or investigation. Maniaty tells us that when he went to East Timor as an ABC reporter in 1975, just before the ill-fated journalists, his travel reading was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here we get a sense of the young journalist’s ambition, his questing commitment to follow the story, just as Ahab follows his whale.

But in retrospect it also tells us how large the 1975 events at Balibo have figured in Maniaty’s life. Shooting Balibo narrates his recent return to Timor, as an advisor to Robert Connolly’s film Balibo and marks the first time he has returned to the tiny island nation since he fled just before the Indonesian invasion in 1975. In a sense, the book is still about him following the whale.

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Banquo’s Son by T K Roxborogh

Penguin, $37.Reviewed by SARAH GUMBLEY

Four hundred years later, Shakespeare’s works remain not only relevant, but also enjoyable, and here one of his plays is the subject of the latest piece in New Zealand writing. Banquo’s Son is a fresh and original take on Macbeth. For fans of the Scottish play, the book attempts to answer some of the many questions left lingering in their minds at the end: What happened next? Did the witches other prophecies come true? What happened to Banquo’s son?

Banquo’s Son, the first tale in a planned young-adult trilogy, takes up where Shakespeare’s play left off: Duncan is King, and leading a peaceful rule after years of Macbeth’s evil antics. The story follows young Fleance, known as ‘Flea’, son of the murdered Banquo. Flea is discovered wandering in the woods alone, having just witnessed his father’s murder and barely escaping with his own life. The humble pair, Miri and Magness, who discover him, take him in, and raise him as one of their own.

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The Guardian has reported that a poetry installation of Sue Hubbard’s “Eurydice” in the Waterloo underpass has been painted over.

Eurydice

I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,
the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

More…

by SIMON NATHAN

MICHAEL KING is remembered for his writing of New Zealand history as well as for his generous support of other writers. After his tragic death in 2004, a group of friends and associates set up the Michael King Writers’ Centre. During Labour weekend 2009 the Centre organised a three-day residential workshop at Vaughan Park Retreat Centre on the North Shore with the theme, Shifting Sands: changing perceptions in history and biography. I was delighted to be one of twenty writers selected to attend. All of us had some writing experience, and were involved in different aspects of researching and writing New Zealand history and biography.

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Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, edited by George Burchett and Nick Shimmin; foreword by John Pilger.

Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 314 pp. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

WILFRED BURCHETT’S legendary ‘warning to the world’ eyewitness account in the Daily Express, exposing the horror of the United States nuclear genocide in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made global headlines on 5 September 1945. Almost four decades later, in his final book, Shadows of Hiroshima, he returned to this nuclear nightmare and reflected on this racist experiment against an already defeated enemy and a history of cover-ups over the ‘atomic plague’.

A few weeks after typing the last footnotes for the book in Sofia, Bulgaria, he suffered a stroke and died aged 72 on 26 September 1983. This last of 31 books in an extraordinary journalism career was written at a gloomy time for the Left globally. The Soviet Union was bogged down in its own ‘Vietnam’ in Afghanistan, victorious Vietnam had become isolated as a totalitarian Stalinist regime, and Western countries were supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

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Rose Bible by Hanahiva Rose

By JEREMY ROSE

Okay, describing the above photo as banned might be pushing it a bit. My daughter, Hanahiva, is in year nine at Wellington High School and was asked by her art teacher to create a “controversial” piece of art. The Rose Bible, above, is the result. Hanahiva was happy with it and asked whether a photo of the work could be included in her portfolio for her end of year parent teacher meeting. The request was denied by her form teacher on the grounds that some people might find the Rose Bible offensive.

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NZSAS – the First 50 years by Ron Crosby

Penguin Viking, 2009, $65.

Khaki Angels – Kiwi Stretcher-bearers in the First and Second World Wars by Brendan O’Carroll

Ngaio Press, Wellington, 2009

Reviewed by KERRY TANKARD

My grandfather’s war began shortly after he won the Wellington Cup at Trentham in 1940, and ended in the North African Desert, captured by Rommel as a part of the NZDF Expeditionary Force there, after which time he was captive in Germany as a POW. Two of my maternal great-uncles died in the mud of Northern France during the Great War, as well.

Both these recently published histories made me reflect on the experiences of these family members and the impact they made upon my life.

I found the stretcher-bearers’ histories – many based on interviews with surviving members – more sympathetic, although the illustrations are the kind that were never shown in the press at the time. The medical corps took many who didn’t want to see active service or fire a shot at war, including conscientious objectors and those with minor physical failings – but as a consequence of tending wounded and dying, and dealing with battlefield corpses, they were more often right at the front lines.

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