Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global by Paul Mason

Vintage. Review by Mark Derby

The 1831 massacre of silk workers in Lyon by the French National Guard.

‘History never repeats’ makes a catchy lyric for a Split Enz song but a flawed premise in daily life. Labour history in particular – the history of the labour movement and the social and cultural development of working people – seems to repeat generation after generation. New products and markets are constantly developed but wage earners face the same old struggles over wages, conditions, workplace harassment, tedium and layoffs. Unless they’re aware of the history of those earlier struggles, they may be forced to reinvent tactics and strategies to counter them, and fail to learn from past successes and failures.

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THE PRESENTATION of the inaugural Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, which was postponed when The Press Christchurch Writer’s Festival was cancelled due to the Canterbury earthquake, has been rescheduled for Tuesday, 30 November.

WHODUNNIT AND WHOWUNNIT? PANEL

The Award will now be presented at the conclusion of the ‘Whodunnit and Whowunnit?’ event, a cocktail function and author panel where three of New Zealand’s most outstanding crime writers will discuss storytelling, the state of modern mystery writing, and the books industry in general, to be held amongst the relaxed atmosphere of Visions on Campus Restaurant at CPIT city campus.

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Abortion Then & Now: New Zealand Abortion Stories From 1940 to 1980 By Margaret Sparrow

VUW Press. $45/$50. Review by Alison McCulloch

The grainy black and white image accompanying the introduction to Dame Margaret Sparrow’s powerful and heartrending book Abortion Then & Now: New Zealand Abortion Stories From 1940 to 1980 shows a fresh-faced young woman formally dressed in cap and gown, clutching a diploma and a posy of flowers. Contained within the caption information beneath is this surprising statement: “You are looking at a criminal.”

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The Politics of Genocide by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Monthly Review Press, 2010 U.S. $12.95*
Reviewed By Rick Rozoff Stop NATO

In 1895 novelist Anatole France – who in the same decade took up cudgels in defense of persecuted Armenians in the Ottoman Empire while also entering the lists on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus – wrote an essay in which he maintained that words are like coins. When freshly minted the images and inscriptions on them are clear. But by dint of constant circulation they become effaced until the outlines are blurred and the words unintelligible. Read more »

By Mary Varnham

In 2006 a modest paperback of just 25,000 words and one eight-page colour insert section won a Montana New Zealand Book Award in the awkwardly named ‘Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture’ category. How to Look at a Painting was written by a curator at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Justin Paton had produced wonderfully incisive texts for exhibition catalogues and academic works, but this book for Awa Press was his first work for the general reader. He wrote it over the course of one intense month. On the strength of the Montana Award, the book has to date gone into five reprints and a special hardcover edition. Creative New Zealand has sponsored the printing of an extract which went into 2500 gift bags at the Melbourne Art Fair. The book has been studied in numerous places, from high school art classes to overseas universities. It has changed people’s perception of art. This year it will be the basis of a 12-part television series, narrated by Paton himself, which will screen on TV One.

Would any of this have happened had the book not won the accolade of a major literary award? Maybe: How to Look at a Painting is one of those rare books with the power to inspire strong personal attachment, even (as we are often told by readers) a form of love. But maybe not: thousands of new books, local and imported, land on the shelves of New Zealand bookstores every year. Few of those published in New Zealand, lacking the massive pre-publicity of overseas blockbuster titles, sell more than a couple of thousand copies; most quickly disappear without a trace.

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Karst in Stone: karst landscapes in New Zealand by Jill Kenny & Bruce Hayward

Geological Society of New Zealand guidebook 13, $12 Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

Karst landscapes are some of the most unusual in New Zealand – distinguished by steep cliffs, sinkholes, caves, fluted rocks, and disappearing streams. Peter Jackson is fascinated by karst landscapes (although he may not use that technical term), and they appear many times in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They have also been a favourite subject for many artists, including Leo Bensemann.

Karst is caused by the action of water which has corroded easily dissolvable rocks such as limestone and marble. This booklet gives an overview of karst landscapes in New Zealand, and discusses how they form and the need for them to be treasured.

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Craig Sisterson takes a look at some recent bestsellers.

New Zealand readers love their crime and thriller fiction. Although we’ve been a little slow to embrace the fantastic, high quality writing now being produced by some of our own local writers, we certainly devour titles from international authors. A quick glance at the weekly bestsellers lists shows that crime and thriller titles not only regularly top the International Adult Fiction bestseller list, but in fact often take up the majority of the Top 10 positions. We love our fictional crime tales, that’s for sure.

In the past few weeks there have been new releases from several of the biggest names on the international crime and thriller writing scene. But which of these five international stars are continuing to produce high quality crime and thriller fiction that is well worth reading, and which are relying more on reputations or past glories?

Here’s a quick round-up.

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The Good Soldiers By David Finkel

Scribe Publications. Reviewed by SARAH CHANDLER

As the attention of the West shifts away from Iraq and increasingly towards Afghanistan, The Good Soldiers is a timely and quite exceptional insight into the experiences of US soldiers in Iraq at the height of George W. Bush’s ‘surge’ . Beginning in early 2007, the ‘surge’ involved sending an extra 20,000 US troops to Iraq in the hope of quashing sectarian violence.

Washington Post reporter (and Pulitzer prize winner) David Finkel embedded for eight months in Iraq with 800 US soldiers from an infantry battalion known as the ‘2-16’ Rangers, which had deployed to Rastimayah at the height of surge.

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By Scott Hamilton

During my PhD research trip to Britain in 2005 I became addicted to The Sun. I would arrange to meet British friends and research contacts in pubs in the East End of London or in Hull; they would arrive to find me nursing a mug of Tetley’s Ale and ogling the inner pages of Rupert Murdoch’s notorious tabloid.

It sounded unconvincing then, and will probably sound unconvincing now, but the truth is that I didn’t become an avid reader of The Sun because of the page three girls, or the celebrity tittle-tattle, or the reactionary right-wing politics. What fascinated me was the manner in which the paper’s articles were constructed. The Sun’s journalists – the term seems almost inappropriate – built their stories out of simple, active voice sentences linked together three at a time in paragraphs that had the terseness of bullet points. A story rarely consisted of more than half a dozen paragraphs. The vocabulary of the paper was determinedly concrete: abstract nouns and words of more than three syllables were hard to find. The paper’s editorials seldom departed from the strict rules that governed the rest of its prose.

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Press Release

With one in 13 of New Zealand’s native plants threatened with extinction, the authors of a new book hope to make Kiwis more aware of their plight.

Threatened Plants of New Zealand, published by Canterbury University Press, is a comprehensive, up-to-date account of New Zealand’s six extinct and 184 severely threatened native flora.

Combining precise botanical descriptions with lavish illustrations, the book provides an assessment of the degree of risk to each species, gives an explanation of the nature of those risks, looks at current conservation strategies and provides the characteristics of each plant for identification in the field. The book also includes distribution maps to show where the plants can be found and a full glossary of terms.

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