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It has been many years since an author has produced a New Zealand press history that has so resolutely taken to task previous research in this field. But David Hastings has done this with his new book on the early newspaper scene in Auckland, Extra...
‘You know why women don’t want to be Orators, because they don’t want to show their breasts in public.’ This is how Samoan High Chief Tagaloa spoke, squinting through his leathery brown skin framed by a light trim of siga (white hair) as he spoke to...
My dog-eared yellow-covered copy of the late Robert Hunter’s Warriors of the Rainbow still has pride of place among my bookshelves. It was inspirational in many respects before I embarked on Rainbow Warrior I’s journey to the Marshall Islands in May...
The embers of the ongoing debate about the paucity or otherwise of in-depth foreign affairs coverage in New Zealand media will glow a little more brightly with this offering from Mike McRoberts. McRoberts’ trips abroad in his dual role as newsreader...
Biography is currently one of the most popular literary genres but New Zealand writers seem to choose their subjects from quite a narrow range of sportsmen and military figures. Few have chosen to write about historic media individuals. The last one...
Russell CampbellL, author of Observations: Studies in New Zealand Documentary has been described as a ‘partisan reporter’, the book as a ‘series of dispatches from the front’. Aligning the author on a series of borders between intellectual and...
It is not the place of this review to make judgement on the rights and wrongs of what is going on in the Middle East. But it seems axiomatic that Western journalistic coverage of the region’s conflicts can be little more than blinkered without a...
As the songman of freedom lies dying from an Indonesian bullet, his spirit spawns a great tree of life, feeding the irrepressible spirit of West Papuan liberation. The Birds of Paradise, for so long held prisoner by the Java warlord demons of...
In this short, but interesting book, Robert Patman argues that US policy failures in the lead up to and aftermath of the October 1993 ‘Blackhawk Down’ incident in Mogadishu facilitated the conditions for the terrorist attacks on the US mainland in...
Nicky Hager's main charge in Other People’s Wars is that New Zealand’s defence and foreign affairs establishment has developed a culture where some senior officers ‘wanted to obey the government only when they agreed with it’, and otherwise ‘quietly...
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