By Scott Hamilton

Book festivals will always be poor relations to gatherings of film and music lovers. It takes about ninety minutes to watch a film, and half an hour or so to see a band, but books can’t be consumed at such speed. Where film buffs and music fans use their festivals to watch movies and sing along to bands, gatherings of bibliophiles are necessarily dominated by talk about books.

Authors are accustomed to working in the cluttered solitude of their studies, and to expressing themselves through a pen or a keyboard, but at a book festival they are forced onto a stage, handed a mike, and asked to become, for an hour or so at a time, raconteurs, comics, and lecturers. Because some of the best scribblers are indifferent talkers, and some wretched writers do a good stand-up act or give a good lecture, festivals tend to offer a somewhat distorted picture of the literary world.

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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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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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Contributors Mylyn Kuve, Dr Alice Aruhe'eta Pollard, Catherine Adifaka, Taeasi Sanga, Ethel Sigimanu, Betty Fakarii and professor Marilyn Waring. Photo: PMC

When Solomon Islanders at the launch of Being the First were each handed a copy of the book, the general reaction was one of “awe”.

The book is the first ever to document the lives of leading Solomon Island women from their own point of view, and the first published historical account of achievements by local women over the past 50 years.

It was launched in New Zealand yesterday at AUT University.

“They all kind of picked it up and held it close to them – bringing it to their chest. It was quite emotional,” says Suzanne Bent-Gina in Honiara, describing how women responded when given a copy of the book to keep – free.

Bent-Gina, deputy director of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands’ (RAMSI) Machinery of Government programme, helped organise the book project as part of its component on women in government.

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By Keir Wotherspoon

There is a frenetic energy to Simon Schama when he talks about history, the kind of energy that you might expect from a highly excitable child caught in the ecstasy of their very favourite topic rather than a Cambridge-trained professor of Modern History. Schama appeared on Friday as part of the International Festival of the Arts Writers and Readers Festival, one of two talks that he was scheduled to speak at, and his only solo appearance.

During Friday’s sell-out session in the Wellington Town Hall, he nimbly darted in and out of the questions from interviewer Sean Plunket. Schama’s hands became so animated at one point that he whacked off his own lapel microphone, which had become so tangled that it forced him into a hunched position. “If I were a leprechaun, it’d be perfect,” he quipped to his audience, who even before the incident had perhaps noted something leprechaun-like in their lively speaker.

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Writers and Readers Week Preview: Peter Singer

By Jeremy Rose

Shortly after we launched the Scoop Review of Books, two years ago, I sent the philosopher Peter Singer an email asking him the following question:

“New Zealand is in the process of introducing a compulsory bio-fuel component in all fuel. The Green Party, and others, have introduced measures to ensure that the bio-fuel isn’t coming from unsustainable sources (and taking food out of the mouths of the poor) and as a result in the short term at least all of the bio-fuel is likely to come from tallow from the country’s very large meat industry.

“What would your personal position be? Would you give up driving a car rather than fill the tank with animal fat? How would you advise moral vegetarians and others to tackle the dilemma?”

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By Scott Hamilton

It is unusual for the details of an academic course to become a hot topic of conversation in the blogopshere, but over the last week or so a paper offered by Mohsen al Attar at the University of Auckland’s Law School has engaged the attention, if not the intellects, of scores of commenters at New Zealand’s most popular blog.

After Kiwiblog proprietor David Farrar posted a link to the outline of Mohsen’s paper, which is called ‘Colonialism to Golobalisation’, comments boxes quickly filled with denunciations of the propagandists for communism, political correctness, civil unions, and similar abominations who supposedly dominate Kiwi campuses.

For the keyboard warriors who fight for liberty at Kiwiblog and other red meat sites, Mohsen al Attar makes a perfect target: he is foreign-born, he has a Muslim name, he is preoccupied with the history of of Western imperialism, and he is unafraid to flourish fashionable if slightly obscure left-wing phrases like ‘counter-hegemony’ and ‘anti-globalisation’ in his lectures and texts.

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Colin Ward one of the English language’s most eloquent advocates of anarchism has died. The author of Anarchy in Action – a brilliant exploration of anarchist ideas – was 85.

The Independent has a good obit here.

And for a taste of Ward’s work here’s an extract from Anarchy in Action.

Anarchy and a Plausible Future

Anarchy in Action Originally published in Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1973). Excerpted in Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader (Oakland: AK Press, forthcoming December 2010).

For the earlier part of my life I was quieted by being told that ours was the richest country in the world, until I woke up to know that what I meant by riches was learning and beauty, and music and art, coffee and omelettes; perhaps in the coming days of poverty we may get more of these …
–W.R. LETHABY, Form in Civilisation

This book has illustrated the arguments for anarchism, not from theories, but from actual examples of tendencies which already exist, alongside much more powerful and dominant authoritarian methods of social organisation. The important question is, therefore, not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society. Is an anarchist society possible?

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