Mini reviews of Healthy Bastards, Affection and Your Shout.
The advice, backed by general easily-understood information on basic medical facts, persuades the reader to take seriously the need to do all the things most people know are essential for healthy living.
The effort is certainly commendable and it is to be hoped that many will - in spite of the sloppily dressed author on the cover, complete with the iconic stethoscope - find it light reading with a serious message.
However, the fear of the reviewer is that people in most need of the advice are the least likely to buy, let alone read, the book.
Anyway, top marks for trying, Dr Baldwin. - Ted Nye
While Kneen does not claim to have been an abused child, so often the trigger for later troubles, it is clear her childhood was so circumscribed as to be a kind of mental prison and must have contributed to the development of the obsessive aspect of her personality.
She herself describes this book on her blog as a "sexual memoir" and she is very well known in Australia as a writer on erotic themes.
But I wondered about and was saddened by the personality revealed a layer or two down from the relentless repetition of superficial encounters that forms a large part of the story.
It is a well-written tale, often very amusing, definitely for adults, and likely to provoke a good deal of thought about the differences between physical sex and the variety involving the mind. - Bryan James
The sub-title accurately conveys the flavour - "A toast to drink and drinking in New Zealand" - and the text ranges over some well-travelled history.
It is amply illustrated, and there's probably a book itself in the way the advertising industry has gone about selling alcohol over the decades of legislative change.
The author asserts that it is now impossible "to imagine a New Zealand society without alcohol".
Why this should be so is well canvassed, in a rather blokey fashion, but I think the author makes a very telling point when, after describing the worst excesses of the infamous "6 o'clock swill", goes on to describe the latest menace, largely brought about by the contemporaneous lowering of the drinking age and supermarket alcohol sales: "The new swill". - Bryan James
