An Awfully Big Adventure: NZ WWI veterans tell their stories, by Jane Tolerton (Penguin, RRP $45): Journalist Jane Tolerton helped set up the World War I Oral History Archive back in 1987, and using those interviews, she has compiled a…
Category: General non-fiction
European take on young NZ
An Indescribable Beauty: Letters home to German From Wellington, NZ (1859-1862), by Friedrich August Krull (Awa Press, RRP $38): A century and a half ago, a young German man set sail on a four-month journey on the Swedish ship the…
Lynch delivers a fresh approach to happiness
Screw You Dolores, by Sarah-Kate Lynch (Random House NZ, RRP $30): In the first book in her “Wicked Approach to” series, author Sarah-Kate Lynch tackles the tricky subject of happiness. Life can be a bit of a roller-coaster and while…
Drug companies’ tactics in spotlight
Bad Pharma, by Ben Goldacre (Fourth Estate, RRP $35): This latest book by British doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre takes an often uncomfortably close look at what is happening in the global pharmaceutical industry. I’m not anti-medication by any…
Farmers’ heritage: gritty determination
Carse Head & Crichton Park Farms: A story of the land and its people By Margaret Pullar (Wrights Hill Press, $49.50) Intergenerational histories are treasures for local communities, telling the stories of the people who built the present. In this…
Killer’s web of deceit ably described
The Black Widower, by Charles Lavery (Mainstream, RRP $35): It was a case that shocked everyone on both sides of the world: Malcolm Webster was convicted of murdering one wife in Scotland and trying to kill a second wife in…
Korean War veterans’ voices
The War That Never Ended: NZ Veterans Remember Korea, as told to Pip Desmond (Penguin, RRP $45): It’s been called the forgotten war, but for the New Zealanders who served in the Korean War during the 1950s, and their families,…
Behind the scenes at museums
The Owl that Fell from the Sky: Stories of a Museum Curator, by Brian Gill (Awa Press, RRP $35): Museums are interesting places and it is the natural history collections that are often the most interesting. Author Brian Gill has…
How an American city boy became a Kiwi farmer
Moon Over Martinborough, by Jared Gulian (Random House, RRP $40) We have all had our moments where we have thought “this could be the life”. You may have stood in a paddock or an orchard, the sun streaming down, looking…
The cat that captured a heart
After Cleo Came Johah, by Helen Brown (Allen & Unwin, $35): This is the sequel to New Zealander Helen Brown’s lovely bestseller Cleo, which told the story of the death of Helen’s young son Sam and how the arrival of…