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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008 by Mark Young

Meritage Press, San Francisco and St Helena, 2008

A Pelt A Shrub A Soil Sample by Ross Brighton

Neoismist Press, Christchurch, 2009

Reviewed by SCOTT HAMILTON

Mark Young is an enigmatic figure in the history of New Zealand literature. Although his earliest poems were published fifty years ago, the shape and extent of his achievement is only now becoming clear. When he was still in his teens, and still living with his parents in Hokitika, on the remote West Coast of the South Island, Young began to write poems that owed little to the literature that was being produced in New Zealand’s metropolitan centres. Largely unaware of the work of post-war Kiwi poets like Allen Curnow and James K Baxter, the teenage Young took much of his inspiration from translations of European and Latin American poets – Lorca seems to have been a particular favourite – and reproductions of modernist paintings. He wrapped the exotic, often surreal images these influences gave him in language that was, for its time, exceptionally colloquial and direct.

Read more »

River of Blood: Tales of the Waiatoto by John Breen

Longacre Press, 192 pp. $40. Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

The area south of Haast, on the West Coast of the South Island, remains one of the most isolated parts of New Zealand. Fearsome mountains, dense forest, hazardous flood-prone rivers prone, and high rainfall that can last for weeks combine to make this an unwelcoming place. But within such difficult country, the Waiatoto valley stands out as a place that most people avoid. Over 40 kilometres long, it is choked by moraines and landslides, with steep gorges and little flat land. It starts at Terminal Lake, draining glaciers on the northern side of Mount Aspiring. There are no precious resources such as gold or pounamu, and it is a route to nowhere. Those familiar with the literature of the mountains may have heard of the Waiatoto diaries, written by Charlie Douglas when he explored the apparently never-ending valley from January to May 1891 (and forming a chapter in John Pascoe’s book, Mr Explorer Douglas). The evocative names of tributaries, ranging from Seething Stream to Glistening Torrent, were all given by Douglas.

Read more »

Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Published by Virago. Paperback edition $30. Reviewed by JANE BLAIKIE

Home is the hugely successful third novel by US Midwest writer Marilynne Robinson – its unlikely subject, the exploration of tensions in the family of a dying protestant minister.

Like its predecessors, Home has drawn numerous accolades and a prestigious prize – the 2009 Orange Prize. Robinson’s 2004 Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 1980 Housekeeping won a PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel – and appeared on lists by Time and the Guardian of their 100 best novels.

The books seem such unlikely winners because how can minute examinations of the inner lives of flawed and ordinary people, set in small towns in the Midwest in the 1950s, hold the interest of someone reading today?
Partly, they do because of the writing – meditative, superbly graceful and a balm to fractured sensibilities. Which begs the question, does anyone have sensibilities these days? – and it seems they do.

Read more »

By Craig Sisterson

With New Zealand Book Month now upon us, it’s the perfect time to take the opportunity to support and celebrate local writing by reading some recently published New Zealand fiction. It’s unfortunate that, despite New Zealand having local writing talent capable of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys) to create world-class tales (appreciated overseas, even contending for and winning international awards), overall we don’t (yet) seem to encourage, promote, and buy our own stories in the way many other countries do theirs.

It’s a real shame; we have no problem accepting, even expecting, our countrymen to excel on the world stage in other arenas, such as several sports, but many of us still seem to have the erroneous belief that our own storytelling isn’t as interesting or as good as that originating overseas. Fortunately, this (unwarranted) cultural cringe seems to have lessened recently when it comes to New Zealand music and film – so hopefully, we’ll soon similarly mature when it comes to buying more (quality) local fiction.

Read more »

The Prophet and the Policeman: The Story of Rua Kenana and John Cullen By Mark Derby

Craig Potton Publishing. $40. Reviewed by TIM BOLLINGER

The story of charismatic Tūhoe leader Rua Kenana, his foundation of a ‘New Jerusalem’ in the Urewera mountains, and his ‘defeat’ at the hands of an armed raid by Police on his settlement in 1916, is a story that’s been told many times.

The writings of Judith Binney, Peter Webster and Jeffrey Sissons in particular spring to mind, but everyone from Michael King to Vincent Ward has had something to say about this colourful episode in New Zealand’s history.

It’s a fascinating tale of power politics and cultural convergence set in modern times (almost within living memory), peppered with elements of biblical fable, legal drama, a ‘shoot-out’, a model for Māori political independence, and even some intriguing developments in indigenous architecture.

Read more »