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 »

Another World is Possible” essay competition

In 1913 a young labour activist (and future prime minister) named Walter Nash ran a nationwide essay competition on the subject “What Socialism Is”. Forty entries were received and the winners were published in the weekly newspaper, the Maoriland Worker.

A hundred years later the Labour History Project Inc., which researches, records, preserves and promotes the history of working life in Aotearoa/NZ, is holding another essay competition to inspire debate on alternative futures. At a time when people internationally are turning against economic policies that further inequality, and when conventional political solutions are losing their authority, the Labour History Project (which is not affiliated with any political organisation) welcomes entries from progressive New Zealanders of all ages that offer visions and pathways for a fairer and brighter society.

And the Scoop Review of Books will publish the winning essays and any others that the judges deem to have merit.

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 »

Gun Machine by Warren Ellis (Jan, 2013) Mulholland Books/Hachette

 W: www.mulhollandbooks.com

Review by Mark P. Williams

Warren Ellis writes astute, accurate fictions about the role of information in society.

He’s explored digital information’s possible and actual relationships to truth and deception through technology in the longer graphic novel series Transmetropolitan, about futuristic gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem, and in a more contemporary thriller framework through the episodic spy thriller Global Frequency. Now, in his second prose novel, he gives us a contemporary police procedural through which information flows in torrents in both electronic and more nebulous ways. Stylish and economically written, Gun Machine is part police thriller and part philosophy of information; it’s a darkly humorous and incisive meditation on the contemporary city scape.

All of Ellis’s fictions are structured by ethical questions about the implications of information networks for social relationships, whether that means the consequences for local people of global actions, or the feel of living in online worlds while trying to maintain offline relationships. Read more »

Rationis Defensor: Essays in Honour of Colin Cheyne Edited by James Maclaurin (Springer, €99.)

Reviewed by Charles Gibson

People often ask me what philosophers have accomplished in the last hundred years. The popular conception is that while science seems to be advancing technology and knowledge daily, philosophy is still a pastime for people who wish to relax in their armchairs and debate the existence of God. This portrait of philosophy is a false one, but convincing people can be difficult. So from now on when somebody asks me what philosophers have been up to, I can direct them to a copy of Rationis Defensor.
This collection of recent philosophical papers, edited by head of Otago University’s philosophy department, James Maclaurin, provides a nice selection of the current debates and crucial issues at play in philosophy. It includes a diverse sampling of philosophical disciplines addressing issues in epistemology (theory of knowledge), philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophical logic.

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Next Year in Diego Garcia – Jean Claude de L’Estrac,
Translated by Touria Prayag (Elp: Mauritius, November 2011)

Review by Vaughan Rapatahana

The very best way to commence this review is to quote the very first paragraph from this important and well-researched book in its entirety:

This story is one of deceit, lies and cowardice. Perhaps worse; it is the story of the British Foreign Office admitting that large sums of money were at stake in Whitehall negotiations which led to the butchering of the Mauritian territory. The decision to rip the Chagos archipelago from the mainland was thus sealed as was the fate of its inhabitants who were forced to leave their birthplace to make room for the Anglo-American military base, Diego Garcia.

In fact what the Anglo-American conspiracy did to the Chagossians was and remains to this very moment, a major crime against humanity – which may well be the only legal recourse left for these displaced and distraught and brave people to fight with. The selfsame conspiracy has steadily forsworn them at every gain they ever made – culminating in the 20 December, 2012 European Court of ‘Human Rights’ further denying them any redress in terms of a chance to return to their now uninhabited islands, because they had already accepted the munificence of British recompense more than once over the years, commencing after a court battle in 1982. Although they did receive some pittance in 1978 from Mauritian authorities who had sat on that British ‘largesse’ for five years previously!. Case closed. Read more »

The Soul Seekers Series: Echo by Alyson Noel

Reviewed by Maria Robinson, age 14

What do you get when you mix romance, fantasy, magick, Native American spirit animal guides, a family of Richters, a prophecy, and forces of good and bad … with some seemingly ordinary teenagers who are determined to follow their destinies and protect the Lowerworld from evil?

The result: Echo, the second book in The Soul Seekers series by popular YA author Alyson Noel.

Daire is a soul seeker. Dace is her boyfriend, and twin of the villainous Cade. Cade and the Richters are trying to take over the Lowerworld; Daire and Dace want to preserve it. Read more »