What's New McNab

Auē. Becky Manawatu
The much-acclaimed winner of the Medlicott Acorn Prize for fiction in the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Award, Auē is the debut novel of West Coast journalist Becky Manawatu. Auē has been garnering rave reviews. To quote one of the award’s judges, “There is something so assured and flawless in the delivery of the writing voice that is almost like acid on the skin.”

A Book too Risky to Publish: Free Speech and Universities. James R. Flynn
Turned down by his usual publisher out of fear that they might face legal action, Flynn was compelled to find another who would not wilt in the prevailing climate of fear in the academy and the media. Flynn shows how the modern university, especially in the US but in other ‘Western’ countries too, has been steadily discarding its commitment to free inquiry and unfettered critical thought, succumbing to self-censorship and draconian restrictions on free speech.

Justice & Race: Campaigns Against Racism and Abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand. Oliver Sutherland
Retired DSIR scientist Oliver Sutherland spent years, from the 1970s onwards, documenting harrowing evidence of the child abuse taking place in state-run institutions, particularly of Māori children, despite the wilful silence and dismissal of successive governments. Sutherland finally got the opportunity to present his evidence to a Royal Commission last year. This book documents the struggles of activist groups Sutherland was involved in, like the Nelson Māori Committee and the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, to expose systematic racism in the justice system and the enormous abuses suffered by Māori children at the hands of those who were supposed to protect them.

Merchant, Miner, Mandarin: The Life and Times of the Remarkable Choie Sew Hoy. Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew and Trevor Agnew
Sew Hoy was one of Dunedin’s most prominent entrepreneurs, travelling here from Guangdong province in 1868, via the Victorian goldfields having already been out to the San Francisco rushes. He established a store in Stafford Street where he traded supplies to the goldfields and facilitated the arrival of fellow Poon Yu Cantonese miners. He invested in his own mining ventures and developed new gold-dredging and hydraulic sluicing technologies making him a wealthy man. This is the fascinating story of the life of one of our most interesting early settlers.

The authors will be speaking about the book at a talk on Sunday 8th November. Booking essential.

Pay Packets & Stone Walls: A Memoir of Women’s Causes and Love of the Land. Elizabeth Orr
Elizabeth Orr is a key figure in the working women’s movement for equal pay and pay equity, having, as the chairwoman of the National Advisory Council for the Employment of Women, advised the government on the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1972. This act helped to reduce the gender pay gap from around 30% of ordinary hourly earnings to around 21% by 1984. She continued to be involved in the fight for pay equity during the eighties with the campaign that led to the passage of the Employment Equity Act 1990, an act which sadly was immediately repealed by the incoming National government. This is a lively memoir that should be read by anyone interested in the advancement of women.

Under the Covers. Jenny Lynch
Lynch started her journalistic career as the ‘Sunshine Lady’ in charge of the children’s pages of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1957 and finished up as the editor of the same illustrious publication from 1987 to 1994. In between she worked for various newspapers and magazines during what she calls the golden age of print journalism in New Zealand, with a short 6-month dalliance as a secretary at the Melbourne Playboy club in 1962. With print journalism entering a seemingly terminal decline in this country Under the covers is a welcome reminder of the vitality of print in its heyday.

Weed: A New Zealand Story. James Borrowdale
Award-winning journalist James Borrowdale takes us through a timely investigation of the country’s relationship to cannabis, the third most popular drug in New Zealand, behind alcohol and tobacco.