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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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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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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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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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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Press Release

Alan Greenspan has been judged the economist most responsible for causing the Global Financial Crisis. He and 2nd and 3rd place finishers Milton Friedman and Larry Summers have won the first–and hopefully last—Dynamite Prize in Economics.

In awarding the Prize, Edward Fullbrook, editor of the Real World Economics Review, noted that “They have been judged to be the three economists most responsible for the Global Financial Crisis. More figuratively, they are the three economists most responsible for blowing up the global economy.”

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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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