The Secret Life of James Cook by Graeme Lay (Fourth Estate, $36.99)

Reviewed by Judith Nathan

Graeme Lay’s novel covers the life of Captain James Cook until July 1771 when he returned to England from his first, three-year voyage to the Pacific. It is an easy and engaging read, soundly based on previous research.

For Cook’ s early life, the author has had a free hand as very little is known about the farm boy from a small inland Yorkshire village who moved to the port of Whitby and later joined the navy. Lay depicts a lad whose education was sponsored by his father’s employer (a recorded fact) who then recommended him as an apprentice to a grocer, partly on the strength of his mathematical abilities. Cook falls in love with the sea (and, unluckily, also with an ambitious servant girl), becoming apprenticed to a ship owner and then, at the advanced age of 26, leaving town to join the navy. Read more »

House of Earth by Woody Guthrie (HarperCollins/infinitum nihil, 2013) Introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp

Reviewed by Mark P. Williams

Woody Guthrie’s novel House of Earth is a fiction out of time which comes to us as a kind of haunting.

Written in the 1940s and lost amongst a collection of papers and letters for many years, House of Earth is a novel of specific time and place which, although speaking in the voices of a wholly different generation, forms an apposite assemblage with our own time and place.

Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp’s introduction to House of Earth gives an informed overview of Guthrie’s life, his work as a folk singer, archivist of folk songs and storyteller contextualising House of Earth as Guthrie’s meditation on life in impoverished conditions. They compare the text respectfully to those of John Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence for its blend of ‘earthiness’, in the linked senses of authenticity and sexual frankness, and broad social vision.
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Anti Lebanon by Carl Shuker (counterpointpress.com/products/anti-lebanon, http://carlshuker.com/)

Reviewed by Pip Adam

I feel like I’ve spent a long time waiting and hoping for a novel like Anti Lebanon by award-winning writer Carl Shuker, a New Zealander based in London. Yesterday I was speaking with a friend who is in a position where she can read and write most of the day. “What you realise,” she said, “when you’re engaged so intensely with and by fiction is the possibilities it holds.”

While other artists conjure fractal landscapes from computer algorithms and evoke experience in more and more colour, the writer has what they’ve always had: a story and a choice to make about how to tell that story. A book like Anti Lebanon demonstrates that the novel isn’t finished yet, that we haven’t come to the end of the possibilities of story, that we can keep pushing this funny little form and it will break and re-animate and keep us happy for a lot longer yet. Read more »

The Runaway Toilet by Jane Buxton, illustrated by Richard Hoit (Puffin, $19.99)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

Young children love toilet jokes, and this time the ultimate joke is that Philip the runaway toilet avoids his pre-determined career and ends up doing a more pleasant duty, “…cos I believe life should be fun, not full of wees and poos!”.

Relying as much on Richard Hoit’s lively illustrations as on its punchy rhyming lines, the story is aimed at pre-schoolers through to about age six. I watched a mother read it to her boys aged four and six, and all three of their expressions were priceless. The four-year-old, dressed as a Ninja, was transfixed and solemn throughout the first reading, while his older brother, enticed away from the television, wriggled and smiled gleefully at those special words. Read more »

Fever by Mary Beth Keane (Simon & Schuster 2013)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

I first heard of “Typhoid Mary” when I was kid; my father’s idea of a relationship with his children was to fire facts at them, sometimes but not always in context. Anyway, I knew enough to always wash my hands.

Little was known about transmission of disease until the late nineteenth century, and chlorination of water supplies didn’t begin until early in the twentieth. The need for sanitation and hand-washing was recognised by many but hygiene practices were not always adhered to.

In Fever, the fictionalised story of professional cook Mary Mallon’s life as a typhoid carrier, there’s back story, front story and everything in between. Read more »

Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV 2012 by FESTA Festival of Transition Architecture Published by Free range Press, Wellington.

Reviewed by Bronwyn Hayward

Publisher: http://www.projectfreerange.com/

On first impression, Christchurch: the Transitional City Pt IV seems more like an artefact than book.

It is a solid object of delight in an era of eBook and twitter. There is something wonderfully permanent about this small, heavy (394 pages) full colour volume, bound in thick, smooth manila cardboard with a double fold.

Christchurch: The Transition City is also an important project, one which documents a significant period of rupture in New Zealand’s political and economic landscape through the lens of the Christchurch earthquakes.

The Festival of Transitional Architecture team who drove the project set out to capture and record 155 attempts to re-establish urban community amidst the confusion and chaos that accompanied the 56 earthquakes at magnitude 5 or more which have followed Christchurch’s first quake on 4th September 2010.

While there have been many photo essays of Christchurch’s earthquakes, this book is different. Its focus is the urban environment and the uncertain struggles of a small provincial community to recover, and to assert something new in the face of a relentless, reinvigorated neoliberal economy. Read more »

Run by Tm Sinclair (Penguin Australia, March 2013)

Review by Mark P. Williams

Tim Sinclair’s Run is a Young Adult thriller set in the world of parkour.

Also called L’art du déplacement (131), parkour is a combination of street gymnastics and free running based on a clear philosophy of movement and lifestyle which emphasises freedom and creativity. To match its subject, Sinclair’s novel is written in free verse which it twists into shapes to accentuate the importance of movement to the narrator Dee.

The plot of Run explores the links between the philosophies of parkour and the struggles of suburban Australian teenage life, combining these with the suddenly more dramatic one of contemporary spying and surveillance. It’s an effective combination. Read more »

The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (re.press Melbourne, 2011)

Review By Vaughan Rapatahana

Publisher: http://re-press.org/

Wow!

This is not a book for the ‘average’ reader. It’s difficult enough for the mythical ‘trained academic’ to digest some of the somersaulting phrases and dense terminology sprinkled throughout its over 400 e-book only pages (downloadable for free, by the way) – more so in some chapters than in others, for this is a collection of policy statements and concomitant rebuttals by over 20 very distinctive and quite idiosyncratic writers. Take – purely as random – this sentence from Reza Negarestani:
 

The exclusive stance of the organism in regard to its path to death is the very expression of the insurmountable truth of death within the organic horizon as a dissipative tendency which is supposed to mobilize the conservative condition of the organism toward death

My overall feelings – at times – after reading some such sections was best summarized by: ‘how can these guys write like this and stand there straight-faced’?

Now to be fair to the contributors also, there is a tremendous amount of clever and radical and worthwhile thought throughout this tome too and it is because of this I will attempt to summarize the overall tenor of this book, for there is no way whatsoever in which one can delineate the details of each and every piece involved, in a book review such as this. Rather it is a dip-into book, methinks: one delves here and there as much guided by the author involved as by the topic pertaining. Read more »

Collected Poems 1956 -2011 by Peter Bland (Steele Roberts, $44.99)

Reviewed by Bill Nelson

Many a New Zealander will recognise Peter Bland as the outrageous conman in 1984 film Came a Hot Friday. It’s poetry not film, however, that’s been his lifelong companion. Beginning his craft over 50 years ago, Bland he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for services to literature in 2011. Now, at 308 pages, Collected Poems 1956–2011 gives a fascinating insight into the trajectory of Bland’s work through 13 published books and several continents.

As part of the ‘Wellington Group’ of poets in the early sixties that included Louis Johnston, Alastair Campbell and James K. Baxter, Bland helped shaped the style of a new New Zealand poetry that railed against the nationalist ideals of earlier poets. Later, work and family drew him back to the UK, his birthplace and the place he left for New Zealand at the tender age of 20, a few years after both his parents died. Reading this collection, it is obvious that this transience, personal loss and rebelliousness have shaped his life’s work. Read more »

Moshi Monsters Character Encyclopedia by Steve Cleverley, Lauren Holowaty and Claire Sipi (Dorling Kindersley/ Penguin, 2013)

Reviewed by Ruth Brassington

With this book’s pop-star magazine-style layout, I almost expected to read about Britney Spears’ favourite drinks and thinks. Instead, I enjoyed reading about the adventures of poor little Elwood, who bashes himself in the face with his shovel several times a day while sorting gifts, and about Icky the mysterious gloop supplier. Colonel Catcher is on the cover, not only by name, but as a 3D version – a small plastic character to retrieve from his cage of plastic.

Presented in alphabetical order, the Moshi Monster characters’ foibles are described in short bites surrounding their colourful portraits. Tamara Tesla is an ingenious inventor who hangs out at the observatory, creates tricky puzzles and is often seen “thinking hard”, while Peekaboo is often spotted wandering the Wobbly Wood path collecting leaves. Read more »