Fukushima: Japan’s Tsunami and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns, by Mark Willacy (Macmillan, RRP $40): Three years ago, and just a couple of weeks after the deadly Canterbury quake, Japan was also hit by a big quake. While…
Month: May 2015
King and Maxwell more enjoyable in right order
King and Maxwell, by David Baldacci (Macmillan, RRP $38): In what at first appears to be a straightforward story, a teenage boy is told his father – a soldier – has been killed in action in Afghanistan but then something…
Behind the speech synthesiser, a wit
My Brief History, by Stephen Hawking (Bantam Press, RRP $35): There’s a lot more to uber-genius Stephen Hawking than a big brain and a debilitating illness, and this memoir offers a glimpse into what makes the man tick. This is…
Engaging tale set in China
Blood Brothers, by Carole Wilkinson (Black Dog Books): As a young novice monk in a Buddhist monastery, Tao’s life is simple, ordered and inward looking. All that changes when Kai enters his life. Kai is a young dragon whose arrival…
The ugly face of war
Reconstructing Faces: The Art and Wartime Surgery of Gillies, Pickerill, McIndoe and Mowlem, by Murray C Meikle (Otago University Press, RRP $60): While the horrors of war are something we would all rather avoid, sometimes it is through those horrors…
Riveting morality study
Kiss Me First, by Lottie Moggach (Macmillan, RRP $38): The internet is an easy place to hide, to lie and to be completely absorbed by. It can be a place where you trust someone so completely that you can…