Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age

by Rebecca Priestley. Auckland University Press, 2012, 284 pp. $45

Reviewed by Simon Nathan

New Zealanders are proud of their nuclear-free stance and our green, “100% pure” image. So it comes as a surprise for many people to realise that only a generation ago there was widespread enthusiasm for New Zealand to be part of the nuclear club. In 1966 I was delighted to get my first job as a young geologist with the DSIR, looking for uranium on the West Coast. Within my working life, attitudes have changed so much that prospecting and mining uranium are now banned in this country.

The publisher’s blurb rather misleadingly labels this book an alternative history of nuclear New Zealand. Not so – to date this is the only comprehensive account of New Zealand’s nuclear story, documenting the way public attitudes have changed over the years. It is a work of considerable scholarship, based on a PhD study, but is easily accessible. As a popular columnist, Rebecca Priestley has the gift of making complex issues understandable, and the story she tells is fascinating.

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Touchstones: Memories of People and Place

by James McNeish. Vintage, $30.

Reviewed by Richard Thomson

In his memoir Touchstones James McNeish starts by picaresquely evading autobiography, while deploying his considerable storytelling abilities in the service of steely control over how much of himself he will reveal.

’Godstrewth, Jamie,’ his father bursts out, in an immediate and marvellous manoeuvre of distraction. It turns out Dad’s been staring at a ram’s penis ‘of the most enormous proportions’.

So, having established a comparative subtext of paternal disappointment, our hero sets out for Europe at the end of the 1950s aboard a Norwegian freighter. A series of adventures follows, which allow McNeish to create character sketches of the people he met and who helped to make ‘me what I am, as a writer’. He is I think correct to assume that they are all – despite or because of their narrative function as yet more rams’ penises – vastly more intriguing than the callow youth from Remuera.

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Press Release – Writes Hill Press

The escape stories of Sergeant Bruce Crowley dcm New Zealand prisoner of war in Greece and Germany 1941-1943 as told to Julia Millen Writes Hill Press for Bocoman Ltd, Wellington, 2012 • ISBN 978-0-473-21416-6 Click for big version. Read more »

Erewhon Calling – Experimental Sound in New Zealand

Edited by Bruce Russell. In association with Richard Francis and the (CMR and Audio Foundation, 2012)

Reviewed by Sarah Jane Parton
In Erewhon Calling – Experimental Sound in New Zealand, editor Bruce Russell repeatedly states that the aim for this book was not to create a comprehensive survey of sound art and experimental music in New Zealand. I can’t help but wonder if he is being intentionally self-deprecating, as a reflection the national cultural tendency that he so accurately identifies: “we regard boasting about (or even referring to) one’s own achievements as the height of ill-breeding.” Is he scared of offending those he has neglected to mention? Is he fending off anticipated criticism? I can’t quite figure it out because, as far as I can tell, this is the most comprehensive survey anyone could hope to achieve. This is the Bible of sound art and experimental music in New Zealand. Read more »

Press Release – Hachette NZ Ltd

Valerie with Phil Gifford The story of one of New Zealand’s greatest sporting champions and much-loved Olympian Read more »

English Language As Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures ed. Vaughan Rapatahana and Pauline Bunce (Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters, 2012)

Reviewed by Mark P. Williams

The English language is a monster bent on devouring weaker language cultures, this is the thesis of the editors of English Language As Hydra.

Rapatahana and Bunce’s book offers a trenchant critique through wide-ranging analyses, drawing on a mixture of years of experience and detailed case study. The writers collected here are a mixture of language teachers, writers and theorists from diverse cultural backgrounds including notable figures such as Malaysian National Laureate Muhammad Haji Salleh, and world-renowned Kenyan playwright, novelist and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Read more »

Press Release – Lisa Scott

Travels with My Economist by Lisa Scott Hilarious, pithy and poignant, Travels With My Economist is an elephant ride of a book. Read more »

Press Release – Paul Dibble

“Paul Dibble has not made anything where you might ask if it is not too small. Too large, you could think for a moment, before you realise that the size is exactly what it has to be. Read more »

A Wanted Man by Lee Child (Bantam Press 2012)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

Jack Reacher does it again. This man doesn’t have nine lives; this is his seventeenth adventure. This formidable giant of a man enters the book with a decoratively broken nose, takes incredible risks and makes them credible. Or rather writer Lee Child makes them credible for the duration of the reading journey as he holds us on our belief threshold through a few thicks and many thins. The first page provides a corpse in a green winter coat which clearly didn’t stop him getting cold, and there are more corpses to meet along the way. Read more »