What's New McNab.
Bill Birch: Minister of Everything. Brad Tattersfield
Widely reviled as the minister responsible for implementation of the Employment Contracts Act, Birch was a key player in the major events and policy agendas of the Muldoon, Bolger and Shipley-led National governments. Although often not as ideologically committed to the policy prescriptions of the Business Roundtable as some of his peers he was seen as a safe pair of hands when it came to seeing through legislation to its conclusion earning him praise as ‘minister of everything’.
Husna’s Story: My Wife, the Christchurch Massacre & My Journey to Forgiveness. Farid Ahmed
Husna Ahmed’s last act, after she had already led other women and children to safety, was returning to Al Noor mosque in the middle of the murderer’s shooting rampage to search for her husband Farid, a paraplegic who relies on a wheelchair. Determined to honour his wife’s memory, Farid has written this book for her, a selfless and brave woman who was dedicated to volunteering in her community and educating its children.
Life as a Casketeer: What the Business of Death Can Teach the Living. Francis and Kaiora Tipene
The stars of the hugely successful TVNZ show The Casketeers, Francis and Kaiora Tipene have made a huge splash in the TV world in the, perhaps unlikely and often misunderstood, profession of funeral directors. Here they describe how they ended up becoming ‘casketeers’ and how their work is shaped by te Ao Māori and its specific approach to death and dying.
McCahon Country. Justin Paton
Well-respected curator and art-writer Justin Paton takes a personal journey through the work of New Zealand’s most celebrated modernist painter Colin McCahon and his relationship to the New Zealand landscape. Paton takes us from ‘Here’ to ‘There’ through a series of thematic sections, exploring the richness of McCahon’s work and how it rewards the patient viewer. A great companion to the current Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition of McCahon’s Otago landscape paintings, A Land of Granite, amongst which is the Library’s Otago Peninsula.
No Maori Allowed: New Zealand’s Forgotten History of Racial Segregation: How a Generation of Māori Children Perished in the Fields of Pukekohe. Robert E. Bartholomew
US-academic Robert Bartholomew’s polemical book No Maori Allowed documents the shocking and appalling history of discrimination and segregation endured by Māori in and around the town of Pukekohe right up to the early 1960s. This is a story that has not been widely told, overshadowed perhaps by more dramatic episodes like the struggle at Parihaka, but it is one that needs to be heard and acknowledged by Pākehā in a world where white supremacists are making concerted efforts to legitimise their ideology of hate and fear and we continue to live in the shadow of the massacre in Christchurch.
Not in Narrow Seas: the Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand. Brian Easton
Described by fellow-economist Shamubeel Eaqub as a “walking enyclopaedia of New Zealand’s economic history”, Easton has written, “a history of New Zealand from an economic perspective” that will appeal to a wider range of readers than a dry quantitative economic history. This book feels like it is the culmination of a life’s work analysing and writing about the New Zealand economy and is the first general overview published in over thirty years.
Tooth and Veil: the Life and Times of the New Zealand Dental Nurse. Noel O’Hare
Much maligned by New Zealand schoolchildren as the ‘murder house’ the school dental surgery undoubtedly did a lot for the nation’s dental health. For the women who worked there it was an uphill battle to have their work recognised for its true value – they were underpaid, overworked and poorly resourced. School dental nurses organised and through their union, the Public Service Association, they marched en masse to parliament in 1974 to present a petition to the Kirk government demanding a long-overdue pay rise and an end to authoritarian discipline. It was one of the PSA’s greatest victories. This is their story.