The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw

$38.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

Brave, explosive, and thought-provoking, this is a powerful memoir. 'It's material, make a story out of it,' was the mantra Charlotte Grimshaw grew up with in her literary family. But when her life suddenly turned upside-down, she needed to re-examine the reality of that material. The more she delved i nto her memories, the more the real characters in her life seemed to object. So what was the truth of 'a whole life lived in fiction'? This is a vivid account of a New Zealand upbringing, where rebellion was encouraged, where trouble and tragedy lay ahead. It looks beyond the public face to the 'messy reality of family life - and much more'. ...Show more

Kate Edger: The life of a pioneering feminist by Diana Morrow

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

In 1877, Kate Edger became the first woman to graduate from a New Zealand university. The New Zealand Herald enthusiastically hailed her achievement as 'the first rays of the rising sun of female intellectual advancement'. Edger went on to become a pioneer of women's education in New Zealand. She also w orked tirelessly to mitigate violence against women and children and to fortify their rights through progressive legislation. She campaigned for women's suffrage and played a prominent role in the Women's Christian Temperance Union and in Wellington's Society for the Protection of Women and Children. Later in life she advocated international diplomacy and co-operation through her work for the League of Nations Union. Diana Morrow tells the story of this remarkable New Zealand woman's life and, in the process, provides valuable insights into the role of women social reformers in our history and Edger's place within a distinctive strand of Christian feminism. ...Show more

Towards Compostela: Walking the Camino de Santiago by Catharina Van Bohemen

$38.00 NZD

Category: Travel Narratives

Catharina van Bohemen walked the Camino de Santiago in 1998. Jenny Shipley was New Zealand’s prime minister, Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky was exposed, the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Northern Ireland, and the Russian rouble nearly collapsed. Catharina’s marriage had ended and she’d left the Auckland home where she’d raised her children. Cellphones were increasingly common but none of the pilgrims she walked with had them. Her journal was the most important thing she carried. Pilgrims to Compostela simply start walking; they stay in refugios and carry a passport or credencial that is stamped along the way. Walking is physical and it reminds you of yourself in the world – you hear your breath and the scrape of your boots on the track; the straps bite your shoulders; you feel and hear your heart beat. You can move as fast as only you can move, and what you see while walking becomes infused with what you remember. Walking becomes as much a journey through your own inner landscape as the one you’re passing through, and moves you towards a new way of seeing. And acceptance. Catharina’s story is written with restraint, beauty, wit and insight, accompanied by the drawings of Gregory O’Brien. ...Show more

Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail: The Diary of a Country Vet by Danielle Hawkins

$38.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

Due April 2021 Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail is the funny, illuminating diary of a year in the life of a New Zealand farm vet. With a husband and two children, 1200 sheep and 400 cattle, farm dogs and pet lambs, pigs bent on excavation and a goat bent on escape, country life is never dull. From calving cows to constipated dogs, weddings to weaning lambs, daffodils to ducklings to droughts, each season brings new challenges and delights. Sometimes it's exhausting but it's almost always a lot of fun - anyway, it's all part and parcel of the life of a Kiwi mother, farmer's wife and vet. ...Show more

This Pakeha Life: An Unsettled Memoir by Alison Jones

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

This book is about my making sense here, of my becoming and being Pakeha. Every Pakeha becomes a Pakeha in their own way, finding her or his own meaning for that Maori word. This is the story of what it means to me. I have written this book for Pakeha - and other New Zealanders - curious about their sen se of identity and about the ambivalences we Pakeha often experience in our relationships with Maori. A timely and perceptive memoir from award-winning author and academic Alison Jones. As questions of identity come to the fore once more in New Zealand, this frank and humane account of a life spent traversing Pakeha and Maori worlds offers important insights into our shared life on these islands.       Author Biography: Alison Jones is an educational researcher and a Professor in Te Puna Wananga, the School of Maori and Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland. Her first book with Kuni Kaa Jenkins, He Korero: Words Between Us - First Maori-Pakeha Conversations on Paper (Huia, 2011), won the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards, the PANZ Book Design Award, and the Best Book in Higher Education Publishing (Copyright Licensing New Zealand) in 2012. Tuai: A Traveller in Two Worlds, co-authored with Kuni Kaa Jenkins, won best illustrated nonfiction book at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. ...Show more

The Misadventures of Polly Gillespie - Reports from a Riotous Life by Polly Gillespie

$38.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

With a great deal of humour and honesty Polly Gillespie walks the reader through some of the ups and downs of life, with advice, warnings, and stories simply involving the awkwardness of being Polly. (She says that at the very least these will make you feel normal.) She has been on radio and in magazine s continuously since 1991, and is a much-loved personality whose escapades and down-to-earth advice to others have fascinated and entertained listeners for many years. With empathy and self-deprecation, plus a world of experience, she hopes to make you feel better about your own misadventures and by way of her unfortunate experiments with life she might even prevent you from going through some of the same things. If nothing else, you will get some great yarns from someone who apparently has resilience and experience, but more likely bad eyesight, an open mind, and a warm heart. Chapters include- Life Lessons; Being a Woman; Our Bodies; Sex and men and sex; and Family. Hang on tight, it's going to be quite a ride! ...Show more

Shirley Smith: An Examined Life by Sarah Gaitanos

$20.00 NZD

$40.00 (50% off)

Category: NZ Biographies

Shirley Smith was one of the most remarkable New Zealanders of the 20th century, a woman whose lifelong commitment to social justice, legal reform, gender equality and community service left a profound legacy. She was born in Wellington in 1916. While her childhood was clouded by loss - her mother died when she was three months old and her beloved father, lawyer and later Supreme Court Judge David Smith, served overseas during the war - she had a privileged upbringing. She studied classics at Oxford University, where she threw herself into social, cultural and political activities. Despite contracting TB and spending months in a Swiss clinic, she graduated with a good Second and an intellectual and moral education that would guide her through the rest of her life. She returned to New Zealand when war broke out, and taught classics at Victoria and Auckland University Colleges, before marrying eminent economist and public servant Dr W.B. Sutch in 1944, and giving birth to a daughter in 1945. She kept her surname - unusual at the time - and poured her energy into issues of human rights and social causes. She qualified as a lawyer at the age of 40, and in her career of 40 years broke down many barriers, her relationship with the Mongrel Mob epitomising her role as a champion of the marginalised and vulnerable. In 1974, Bill Sutch was arrested and charged with espionage. After a sensational trial he was acquitted by a jury, but the question of his guilt has never been settled in the court of public opinion. Shirley had reached her own political turning point in 1956, with Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian crisis, but she remained loyal to her husband, and the ongoing controversy weighed heavily on her later years. Shirley Smith: An Examined Life tells the story of a remarkably warm and generous woman, one with a rare gift for frankness, an implacable sense of principle, and a personality of complexity and formidable energy. Her life was shaped by some of the most turbulent currents of the 20th century, and she in turn helped shape her country for the better. ...Show more

The Mirror Steamed Over - Love and Pop in London 1962 by Anthony Byrt

$20.00 NZD

$45.00 (55% off)

Category: NZ Biographies

In the early sixties at the Royal College of Art in London, three extraordinary personalities collided to reshape contemporary art and literature. Barrie Bates (who would become Billy Apple in November 1962) was an ambitious young graphic designer from New Zealand, who transformed himself into one of po p art's pioneers. At the same time, his friend and fellow student David Hockney - young, Northern and openly gay - was making his own waves in the London art world. Bates and Hockney travelled together, bleached their hair together, and, despite being two of London's rising art stars, almost failed art school together. And in the middle of it all was the secretary of the Royal College's Painting School - an aspiring young novelist called Ann Quin. Quin ghost-wrote her lover Bates's dissertation and collaborated with him on a manifesto, all the while writing Berg: the experimental novel that would establish her as one of the British literary scene's most exciting new voices. Taking us back to London's art scene in the late fifties and early sixties, award-winning writer Anthony Byrt illuminates a key moment in cultural history and tackles big questions: Where did Pop and conceptual art come from? How did these three remarkable young outsiders change British culture? And what was the relationship between revolutions in personal and sexual identities and these major shifts in contemporary art? From the Royal College to Coney Island and Madison Avenue, encountering R. D. Laing and Norman Mailer, Shirley Clarke and Larry Rivers, The Mirror Steamed Over is a remarkable journey through a pivotal moment in contemporary culture. ...Show more

Ralph Hotere - The Dark is Light Enough: A Biographical Portrait by Vincent O'Sullivan

$45.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

Vincent O'Sullivan's compelling, nuanced portrait of the great New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere brings the man and his art to life. Ralph Hotere (Te Aupouri and Te Rarawa; 1931-2013) was one of Aotearoa's most significant modern artists. Hotere invited the poet, novelist and biographer Vincent O'Sulliva n to write his life story in 2005. Now, this book - the result of years of research and many conversations with Hotere and his fellow artists, collaborators, friends and family - provides a nuanced, compelling portrait of Hotere: the man, and the artist. ...Show more

Upstream on the Mataura: A Fly Fisher's Journey to Source by Dougal Rillstone

$40.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

Dougal Rillstone was born in Gore, close to the Mataura River, over seventy years ago. The river was both swimming pool and playground during his childhood. One summer's evening, while he stood chest deep in a long pool, facing downstream towards the fading light, he became mesmerised by the sight of ri ppling rings left by rising trout on the otherwise smooth surface. He has been haunted by moving water ever since. In Upstream on the Mataura, Dougal has captured the essence of his lifelong connection with the Mataura River. While angling, and fly-fishing in particular, anchor his attachment, the book is as much a meditation on landscape and moving water as it is about angling. It is also about the communities the river runs through, the friendships sustained by fly-fishing, and a love of the river and its tributaries. The first section of the book offers a clear-eyed view of the beauty, challenges and hardship involved in his 240-kilometre walk upstream from the coast at Fortrose to the source of the river, in the Eyre Mountains. Following are twelve stories that traverse his connection with the river, from his earliest recollections through to the present time. ...Show more

Not That I'd Kiss a Girl by Lil O'Brien

$37.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

A heartbreaking and hilarious true story of coming out as gay in New Zealand. Lil O'Brien accidentally outed herself to her parents at the age of nineteen when they overheard her talking to a friend about liking girls. Half an hour later she found herself on the side of the road, with instructions to co me back and pick up her suitcase the next day. What follows is a heartbreaking yet hugely funny story of a young Kiwi girl - the deputy head girl from a posh private school - coming to grips with her sexuality in the face of stark disapproval from her parents. Bit by bit, Lil finds the inner strength to pull herself into an entirely new world. Along the way she's called out for looking too straight in a gay bar, tries to break in to the lesbian in-crowd and figures out how to send her internet lover back to America. She falls in lust over a knotted soccer shoelace, explores how the hell to have sex with a girl and dates four women at once - unsuccessfully. Lil's story is an insightful and honest look at how you figure out whether you're gay, bi or whatever - and deal with what comes next. It's an essential read for anyone who's had to fight for who they are and what they believe in. ...Show more

Farm for Life by Tangaroa Walker

$38.00 NZD

Category: NZ Biographies

The awesomely inspiring true story of how Tangaroa Walker turned his life around through farming - and how what he learned can help anyone succeed. Tangaroa Walker's early years weren't easy. Born into a gang family, he was adopted out twice and attended six different schools before he was six. He only went to high school to play rugby. Today, he is a true community and industry leader, running a successful dairy farm in Southland, NZ and reaching millions as the much-loved face of Farm4Life with his straight-up, crackup, honest videos covering everything from cow farming to goal-setting; fishing to family life; management to mental health. This is the story of how he did it - the good and the bad times, and all the lessons he's learned along the way (so you don't have to). ...Show more