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Fat Science: Why Diets and Exercise Don’t Work – And What Does. Robyn Toomath.

Auckland City Hospital physician Robyn Toomath shows how the rise of obesity in the developed world is due to the rise of high calorie industrially-processed foods in our diets, saturation advertising and increasingly sedentary lives. Well-meaning education campaigns around dieting and exercise are ineffective. What is required to address the obesity epidemic is a society-wide approach with strong government regulation of the food and advertising industries.

A History of New Zealand Literature. Ed. Mark Williams.

In this first overarching history for almost two decades, 25 thematically-organised essays by leading scholars trace the genealogy of New Zealand literature from colonial beginnings to the development of a national canon. Special attention is devoted to the lasting significance of colonialism, the Māori renaissance and multiculturalism to New Zealand literature.

Hoopers Inlet: A History of Hoopers Inlet Located on the Otago Peninsula of New Zealand. Ian J. Smith.

Ian Smith has produced an incredibly detailed social history of the area around Hoopers Inlet on the Otago Peninsula, replete with hundreds of photographs, maps, diagrams and family trees of the principle settlers.

In Love With These Times: My Life with Flying Nun Records. Roger Shepherd.

Then record shop employee Roger Shepherd recounts how he came to set up the label responsible for creating the ‘Dunedin Sound’ and much more, in between beers at the Gladstone Hotel.

Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II. Eds., Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla.

One of the enduring legacies of the Second World War in the South Pacific is a generation of children born to indigenous women in the many different Pacific island societies where the U.S. had military bases. The essays in this book document the lives of these children who more often than not grew up fatherless as a result of race-based U.S. immigration policies that prevented servicemen from marrying ‘across the color line’.

The Prison Diary of A. C. Barrington: Dissent and Conformity in Wartime New Zealand. John Pratt.

An important historical document, this diary, which was found written in the margins of two books belonging to the author after his death, opens a window onto the treatment of conscientious objectors by the New Zealand state during World War II. Well-known at the time, Barrington was a leading Christian pacifist and national secretary and president of the New Zealand Christian Pacifist Society, a society he set up in 1936 along with the Rev. Ormond Burton. John Pratt provides an insightful commentary and tries to answer the question of why the New Zealand state was far less tolerant of pacifist objectors to the war than either Australia or Britain.

Rushing for Gold: Life and Commerce on the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia. Eds., Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser.

This fascinating new anthology looks at the strong link between the gold rushes that occurred in Australia and New Zealand in the mid-19th century, particularly those in Victoria and Otago. The essays range across migratory patterns, goldfields politics and commerce to race relations and the contemporary interpretations of goldfields’ history in the heritage tourism industry.