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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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 »

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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Zone of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes by Martin Edmond

Auckland University Press, 2007. Reviewed by SCOTT HAMILTON

Over the last couple of decades Martin Edmond has won critical acclaim and a considerable readership with a books that combine autobiography, history, and fiction. Edmond’s 1992 breakthrough book The Autobiography of My Father is a study of his own grief as well as a reconstruction of his father’s passage through postwar provincial New Zealand society; his wonderful 1999 volume The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont combines a hallucinatory journey in search of the late painter’s surviving canvases with memories of the recklessly experimental life Clairmont lived in the 1970s; Chronicles of the Unsung, which was published in 2004, moves between accounts of youthful wanderings in America, Europe and the Pacific and meditations on the fates of Rimbaud and Van Gogh; and the baroque masterpiece Luca Antara mixes memories of the seedy side of Sydney in the ‘70s and ‘80s with the bizarre and violent story of the first European visits to Australia.
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Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives.” Edited by Kate McMillan, John Leslie & Elizabeth McLeay.

Victoria University Press, Wellington. 2009. Reviewed by ALISON McCULLOCH

Second-wave feminism has been dead for some time now, though precisely when it took its last gasp remains unclear. Some locate the seeds of its destruction as early as the 1978 Radical Feminist Caucus at Piha, marked as it was by splits around questions of race, sexuality and class. “The women’s movement,” Sandra Coney wrote in 1993, “exists only in pockets, as rape crisis centres, refuges, groups against pornography and women’s centres.”

She and others were critical of the movement’s failure to analyse what went wrong, and in that same article, Coney wondered if those past mistakes could ever be learned from. “It is probably impossible for the old soldiers to do this,” she wrote, “because of bad histories and because they are still wedded to the old ideas.”

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The Kiwi Fossil Hunter’s Handbook by James Crampton and Marianna Terezow

Random House New Zealand, 207 pages. $40.Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN

Although there are many popular books on New Zealand plants and animals, our unique fossils have been largely neglected outside the technical literature. Yet fossils are the evidence for past life, and are found in most parts of the country. This book helps fill the gap. It has a practical approach, providing detailed accounts of 27 accessible localities around New Zealand where you can go and find fossils. Some of the localities are reserves, where you can look at and photograph them, but at many you can actually collect fossils yourself. I imagine that many budding paleontologists will be checking out localities close to where they live, but the book could also provide the basis for a 1-2 month fossil tourist trip around New Zealand.

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A People War: Images of the Nepal conflict 1996-2006, edited by Kunda Dixit

Kathmandu: Publication Nepa-laya, 2007. Reviewed by DAVID ROBIE

KUNDA DIXIT is a remarkable journalist and an inspiring communications innovator. He has been one of the visionary writers who have been able to make sense of development journalism and development communication theory and translate this into practice. A decade before this book, his Dateline Earth: Journalism as if the planet mattered (1996) became a sought after classic and should be in every South Pacific newsroom (but is actually in very few).

It should also be widely cited in Australian and New Zealand journalism schools as well. Reading it would contribute to more perceptive reportage of the region by young journalists. Dixit’s prophetic view that issues such as jungle families sickened by mine tailings, peasants impoverished by global free trade, countries harmed by toxic waste and general environmental neglect were often ignored is now widely accepted in the region with a wider range of environmental and human rights reporting now a normative.

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