Category Archives: Adult non fiction

The Broken Book by Fiona Farrell

Posted by Abbie Jury in Adult non fiction and tagged with

The unanticipated delight of December was reading this book. I just didn’t want it to end. Farrell’s facility with language, her mastery of writing techniques, her personal view of the world and her ability to weave together a whole range of disparate thoughts and strands into a satisfying reading experience are superb. It is also a really interesting phenomenon which I suspect we will see a great deal more of – a creative response to the personal stress of the Christchurch earthquakes. That is why it is a broken book. What started as a travel book about walks here and abroad by acclaimed NZ fiction writer, Fiona Farrell, deviated from the planned routes when her life was thrown entirely off balance by the quakes. She lives on Banks Peninsula. The result includes accounts of four walks (two in France, one in Dunedin and one in Christchurch), interspersed with 21 haunting poems about the earthquakes, all linked by a personal narrative which is poignant, understated yet remarkably coherent.

The Broken Book

It is not without wider interest and humour. The dissertation on consumption (the Menton walk) was fascinating while the details on Robert Louis Stevenson (the Cevennes walk) were repellent. Her explanation of school hierarchy made me laugh out loud: “At high school, life became more serious. I was in 3P1. P for Professional. The girls in 3P2 would become nurses and primary-school teachers. In 3C for Commercial they would work in offices and do typing…. But the girls in 3P1 were destined for higher things. They did Latin and would go to university…. They would read Cranford and Jane Austen. They would become familiar with the habits of the rural gentry of nineteenth-century England.”

I found this book from one of our leading contemporary writers an absorbing and rewarding experience to read.

The Broken Book by Fiona Farrell (Auckland University Press; ISBN: 978 1 86940 576 2) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

The History of the World According to Facebook

Posted by Abbie Jury in Adult non fiction and tagged with ,

History of the World According to FBThis is a really funny book for adults who are on Facebook, so understand how it works. The entire book is set out as a Facebook Wall. The very first entry is The Singularity from 13 billion years ago. We progress to The Big Bang and then The Universe posts birthday party photos. From there we frolic through history, using Facebook actions and applications. Juliet Capulet is tagged in Romeo Montague’s album. Marie Antoinette asks whether Guillotine is a new designer. Neil Armstrong curses auto correct when his status update becomes: “That’s one small step for man, one gonad swap for manatee”. Osama Bin Laden updates saying: “Pizza delivery? I didn’t order any pizza” and Seal Team Six hits the thumbs up button.

It is by an American so has a bit of a bias towards recent American history but there is detailed layer upon layer, joke upon witticism upon pun, line by line. It is hilarious and makes the perfect gift for somebody who has a Facebook presence and a reasonable general knowledge. I am looking forward to the Twitter parody which I am sure must follow in due course.

The History of the World According to Facebook by Wylie Overstreet (Harper Collins; ISBN: 978 0 06 207618 2) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

Himalayan Hospitals: Sir Edmund Hillary’s Everest Legacy by Michael Gill

Posted by Abbie Jury in Adult non fiction and tagged with

Himalayan HospitalsI suspect my sole criterion for reviewing this book is the fact that I lost a brother in the mountains there and I am guessing that my editor did not realise that in the intervening 28 years, I have assiduously avoided anything to do with the Himalayas in the media. But I must have absorbed a certain amount of information by osmosis. This book sat, ignored, in my pile of review books for too long until I plucked up the courage to confront my demons. What a treat I was avoiding in this handsome book.

New Zealand has a special relationship with the Himalayas and its people, driven by Sir Edmund Hillary’s success in conquering Mount Everest and his subsequent charity and aid work in the area. He focussed first on schools but then on hospitals and healthcare from the sixties onwards. What this books shows is that the volunteers who staffed those hospitals, young doctors and their partners from New Zealand and Canada, were equally remarkable and special people. The majority of the book tells the stories of these intrepid volunteers, often from their very candid correspondence home to the sponsoring organisation, the Himalayan Trust. Working in one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable areas, they had to be enormously resourceful and resilient. Usually the only westerners, they forged relationships and personal friendships with the Sherpa people and the result is a privileged insight into the lives and culture of those people.

This could have been a worthy but dry book. It is anything but dry. Each person has a story worth telling and it is an absorbing read whether you work from beginning to end or browse randomly. It is a big book, beautifully presented as befits Craig Potton Publishers, with plenty of photographs documenting the times and the people.

The author is a New Zealand doctor and a mountaineer who has been involved with the Himalayan healthcare project from its inception. It should be noted that these remote hospitals are now run by fully qualified Sherpa doctors – the ultimate measure of success for any aid project.

Himalayan Hospitals: Sir Edmund Hillary’s Everest Legacy by Michael Gill (Craig Potton Publishing; ISBN: 978 1 877517 43 3) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

Old Bucky and Me by Jane Bowron

Posted by Abbie Jury in Adult non fiction and tagged with

Old Bucky & MeChristchurch no longer features in our news each day. Unless one has close contacts there, it is easy to forget what a radical, life changing experience the earthquakes have been for everyone there. Jane Bowron gives us a diary record of a day to day life changed in so many ways – first coping with the obvious privations and difficulties with regard to power, water and sewage (or the lack thereof) and then adapting to the new reality of living in an inner city neighbourhood within the cordoned off zone, now minus its former facilities and with a considerable exodus of residents.

The subtitle is “Dispatches from the Christchurch Earthquake”. The instalments, sometimes daily but stretching to weekly as the initial shock wears off, cover the period from two days after the February earthquake until August this year. They were first published in Wellington’s Dominion Post. The author is an experienced journalist and writer and the chapters are a uniform length which makes it deceptively easy reading. There is no high drama. It is generally matter of fact, interspersed with wry humour and a sense of the ridiculous. Quite simply, it is a remarkable contemporary record of a major event in this country’s history.

Old Bucky and Me by Jane Bowron (Awa Press; ISBN:978 1 877551 30 7) reviewed by Abbie Jury.

A Home-grown Cook. The Dame Alison Holst Story

Posted by Abbie Jury in Adult non fiction, Cookbooks and tagged with

The Dame Alison Holst StoryThis is Alison Holst’s 100th book but it is not a cookbook. She has written her memoirs. Her down to earth style made me think of the phrase: “an ordinary person doing extraordinary things” but I am not sure that is true. I think her matter of fact delivery and lack of obvious ego mask the fact that she is a genuinely extraordinary person who has achieved quite extraordinary things in her life and exerted considerable influence on the cooking, eating and domestic habits of a nation for forty five years. I credit her with our decision to buy a deep freeze in early seventies when they were still very new. She taught us how to get the best out of microwaves, slow cookers and bread makers. She expanded the repertoire of flavours and dishes at the most basic, domestic level. She has tirelessly championed the cause of learning kitchen fundamentals and making nutritionally-sound family meals the glue that holds family together. One cannot describe those as the achievements of an ordinary person.

Her memoirs record an early life circumscribed by the social and economic conditions of the time, although the outstanding success of all three Payne daughters suggests a somewhat richer and more aspirational upbringing than was usual. There is an interesting thread of social history weaving through this book, giving a context to everyday life from about 1890 (when the author’s grandmother set sail for NZ) to 2011.

The lack of emotion and the understatement gloss over the remarkable personal achievements of managing a demanding career involving extensive travel both domestically and overseas and a very public persona when it was still early days for women to continue careers into their married lives. Not only that, but she had a husband with a demanding career and two children. To hold all that together and to maintain a stable home life which still endures to this day must have taken both stamina and skill well beyond the norm. It may fall to a biographer to record the greater picture of the achievements of this remarkable but modest woman.

Lest readers feel short-changed, there is a small section at the end of the book with the author’s 17 all time favourite recipes. It includes the best ever Christmas cake (in my opinion) – one rich in mango, papaya and pineapple where the mix contains as much ground almond as flour. I have been making Anne’s Oaty Pancakes for two decades without realising it was a Holst recipe but this was the first time I tried Cinnamon Oysters.

A Home-grown Cook. The Dame Alison Holst Story by Alison Holst with Barbara Larson (Hyndman; ISBN: 1 877382 67 1) reviewed by Abbie Jury.