Our reviews of the latest books from home and abroad.
That's why Her Life's Work - Conversations with Five New Zealand Women, by Deborah Shepard, (AUP, $45, pbk) is of some importance.
Dr Shepard interviewed Gaylene Preston, Merimeri Penfold, Margaret Mahy, Jaqueline Fahey and Anne Salmond about their work, their lives as women through a turbulent period in the modern history of women, their challenges to be heard or noticed, and the emotional and practical demands made upon them in their combined roles as artists, wives and mothers.
In reading these interviews, I was constantly reminded of that rather overused but here appropriate term "multi-tasking". Our country would be all the poorer without these women and their achievements, and I would suggest to parents of teenage girls of high-school age who may be troubled about their guidance and mentoring that this book would make a fine Christmas present. Reading these accounts of determination and persistence might just spark a greater self-belief.
- Bryan James
Cull writes colourfully to describe the often extreme outcomes which ever-changeable weather causes in these parts, while also providing meteorological lessons for those who might welcome such instruction.
The work of highly-talented Otago Daily Times photographers, much of which illustrates in striking fashion the effect of weather in all its moods, aids and abets spectacularly the author's prose. Included too are Maori tales apposite to the subject.
- Clarke Isaacs
That may have been a reason why the store was the focus of a riot by the unemployed that took place one Saturday morning during the height of the 1930s Depression; but by the 1950s Wardell's had become a "foodmarket".
By the end of the 1970s, the family business had been sold to Wilson Neill, and by the end of the decade the George St Wardell's store was no more.
Its history, and that of the intermarried Wardell and Anderson families in Otago, is well told in Ian Dougherty's High Street Shopping and High Country Farming (Mahana Trust, $40, pbk).
The book (really a booklet) is essentially a family history (it includes an extensive family tree), but wider historical interest will lie in an account of a family of importance to business and agriculture in the province.
- Bryan James
So, too, will be the name of its founder, Robert Laidlaw, who, like another Dunedin resident, James Fletcher, discovered Auckland was the place from which to start a national organisation in the early 1900s.
Dr Hunter is a professional business historian and his account of the company is thorough, though it sometimes reads as if the public relations department had too great an influence - but you cannot expect absolute objectivity in such a publication.
Company centenaries should be occasions for celebration, and the lavish illustrations make this one so. I was interested to read how another well-known South Island company, Calder Mackay, became involved in the Farmers' conglomerate.
- Bryan James
