Ring around the city: Wellington’s new suburbs, 1900-1930 by Adrian Humphris and Geoff Mew

Steele Roberts Publishing, 200 pp. $45. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

Like most early New Zealand settlements, Wellington was sited on the edge of a good harbour. But there was little flat land around the harbour, and the town was boxed in by steep hills. By 1900 it was overcrowded, land prices were rising, and new suburbs were urgently needed on or beyond the hills. The key to the development of Wellington’s suburbs was a network of electric trams which were able to climb the hills and provide rapid transport to outer suburbs.

This book tells the story of Wellington’s suburbs using Kilbirnie and Kelburn as examples. Trams provided access to Kilbirnie and Hataitai (and later Miramar and Seatoun) while access to Kelburn came from the privately-run Kelburn cable car.

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Don McCullin supporting the Freedom of the Press: 100 Photographs, edited by Jean-François Julliard

Reporters sans Frontières, 2009. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

THE PARIS-based global media freedom group Reporters sans Frontières has carved out an innovative niche for its brand of fund-raising books in defence of the endangered journalist species. The latest addition is another fine collector’s item—100 iconic war and social disorder imagery from British photojournalist Don McCullin.

His Sleeping with Ghosts collection (1995), a retrospective of his war photography, particularly struck a chord with me. And this RSF collection of some of his most famous photographs (and many lesser known ones) is just as evocative, at times chilling, filled with anguish and suffering, or just disturbingly reflective.

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Beyond the Battlefield: New Zealand and its Allies 1939-45 by Gerald Hensley

Penguin Books, $65. Reviewed by DENNIS ROSE

A few years ago I visited the grave of a friend’s brother who had fallen, in April 1945, crossing a river near Faenza in Northern Italy. Despite kiwi fruit growing in the fields next to the cemetery it seemed a long way from home.

Gerald Hensley’s Beyond the Battlefield, published by the Penguin Group, with acknowledgements to the National Army Museum, outlines New Zealand’s foreign policy before and during the Second World War. It helps explain that remote grave by tracing the political and military decisions that deployed New Zealand servicemen, and women, to many of the main theatres of war. The span is similar to that of F.L.W. Wood’s official war history volume The New Zealand People at War: Political and External Affairs, but with a primary emphasis on external affairs and much assisted by access to British, American and Australian (but not Russian) archives. It is a well-researched, well-presented, and stimulating review.

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Press Release

New book examines global winds of change blowing through Samoa and the Pacific

From fales to fridges, coconut palms to cell phones, Samoa is a country in the midst of globalisation and technological change.

The Warm Winds of Change: Globalisation in Contemporary Samoa (Auckland University Press), an absorbing study of the impact of this worldwide phenomenon on a small island nation by Cluny and La‘avasa Macpherson, was launched last night at the 11th Pacific Islands Political Studies Association Conference in Auckland, New Zealand.
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Castles in the Sand: what’s happening to the New Zealand coast? by Raewyn Peart

Craig Potton Publishing, 276 pp. $50. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

My father was a land developer, responsible for some of the earliest coastal subdivisions on the Kapiti coast in the 1920s and 1930s. Before he died in 1953 he was becoming disturbed at the way development was changing the nature of the small beach community at Paraparaumu beach. Half a century later he would hardly recognise the densely settled urban area he helped create.

In this well illustrated book, Raewyn Peart has documented how New Zealanders have used and modified the coastline, and the problems this has caused. Published by Craig Potton Publishing in association with the Environmental Defence Society, it is a readable and thought-provoking book that raises questions about whether some wild and beautiful coastal areas should be off-limits for development, and whether local communities can maintain the nature of the environment they live in against the pressures of commercial developers.

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A New Zealand Book Council film using paper craft animation to promote books and reading has become a YouTube hit, reaching a worldwide top 10 in the viral video charts.

The film, which uses paper cut animation of Maurice Gee’s novel Going West, was launched on YouTube a fortnight ago, and has since been viewed more than 330,000 times. It has inspired more than 1000 tweets on Twitter, 439 blog posts across the world, and has reached number 9 in the Viral Video Chart compiled by Unruly Media (http://vvc-origin.unrulymedia.com).
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ESCAP brings Noble Laureate Stiglitz to Myanmar to advise on economic policy and rural poverty reduction

Bangkok (UN/ESCAP Information Services) — Nobel laureate Joseph E.
Stiglitz will visit Myanmar at the invitation of the United Nations
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) to advise
on development policies and poverty reduction, especially in the rural
area.

Prof. Stiglitz will speak at a round table and development forum organized
by ESCAP with Myanmar’s Ministry of National Planning and Economic
Development and Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation on 15 December in
the capital, Napyitaw. The forum will bring together the two Ministers from
Myanmar, U Soe Tha and U Htay Oo, in a dialogue with Prof. Stiglitz and
other eminent experts to discuss strategies for poverty reduction in light
of Asia’s regional and sub-regional experiences.

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Montana Award winning poet to be Victoria University’s 2010 Writer in Residence

Poet Jenny Bornholdt will be the 2010 Writer in Residence at Victoria University.

Earlier this year Bornholdt won the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry for her latest collection The Rocky Shore. The book is made up of six long poems that together form a moving autobiographical essay.

“The content and emotional range of the collection is remarkable—from reflections on the death of the poet’s father to the day-to-day details of ordinary domestic life,” says Director of Victoria’s International Institute of Modern Letters, Professor Bill Manhire.

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