Veteran sports hack Joseph Romanos reviews My Life, My Fight by Steven Adams with Madeleine Chapman. Disclaimer: Madeleine Chapman is a staff writer at The Spinoff. This review was commissioned independently by our books editor, Steve Braunias. To judge by his autobiography, Steven Adams must be about the most down-to-earth, unprepossessing 25-year-old multi-millionaire on Earth. … Read more
Investigative reporter Nicky Hager reviews the new memoir by one of the world’s most renowned investigative journalists, Seymour ‘Sy’ Hersh. There are only a few people I have really looked up to in my life, in the sense of thinking about their life admiringly as I wonder about what I am doing with my own. … Read more
Tina Shaw reviews Fiona Kidman’s powerful and haunting new novel based on the short life and brutal death of Albert Black, hanged at Mt Eden jail in 1955. Fiona Kidman is adept at casting her imagination into the past and bringing to life significant characters and times. She stepped back to the Sydney and New … Read more
Michael Field reviews a new study of Niue’s role in World War I, when Sir Māui Pōmare despatched 150 Niueans to fight in a mysterious war. Millions of dollars have been spent in adoration of New Zealand’s mythology which says sending 18,000 men to die in the Great War made us a really great nation. Gallipoli, … Read more
Anthony Byrt reviews an exciting new study of Pablo Picasso, genius and visionary, who comedian Hannah Gadsby called out as a disgusting #metoo pig. One way to measure Picasso’s greatness is that he’s never far beneath the surface of our collective cultural consciousness. His monumental anti-fascist statement Guernica, for example – his second-most important painting … Read more
Chloe Blades finds joy in a memoir of the Obama Presidency by a millennial stenographer, who is instructed to ‘exude femininity in a strictly non-sexual way’. Since The Donald was sworn in as leader of the free world, raucous exposés have made their way out of the White House and into the once resistible American … Read more
Danyl Mclauchlan reads the 1977 book Bob Jones on Property, and wonders about the role it played in creating today’s distorted housing market. Sir Bob Jones has been in the news a bit recently. In February he published a column in the NBR suggesting that Waitangi Day be abolished and replaced with “Maori Gratitude Day”, in … Read more
“I am wary of reading any more feminist manifestos these days because they are very exhausting! Who the fuck just loves themselves all the time?”, writes Charlotte Graham-McLay, in her review of a brilliant new memoir hailed as a feminist manifesto but it isn’t, really. All I want famous women to talk about these days … Read more
Louisa Kasza reviews Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room, which is hailed in this week’s New Yorker – alongside the US edition of Can You Tolerate This? by Ashleigh Young – as one of America’s best new books. A cool, Joan Didion-esque breeze of seeming indifference blows through the writing of US novelist Rachel Kushner. The … Read more
Book of the Week: Matt Vance reviews an investigation into “the freaks, maniacs and the greed-addled madmen” who obsessively collect, plunder and steal bird specimens. What is it about birds and obsessives? Birds, like no other animal, seem to bring out the freaks, maniacs and the greed-addled madmen of infinite detail. In June 2009, Edwin … Read more
George Henderson gets to grips with the subject of New Zealand’s white, lucrative, high-fat, glutenous gold: milk. There is probably no food that tests our individual tolerance as much as milk. Personally, I can’t stand the stuff, yet I love some of its products. If you’re gluten intolerant or allergic to wheat, you just avoid that … Read more
Linda Burgess celebrates a collection of reviews and essays by the great New Yorker writer Lorrie Moore. Someone has decided that Lorrie Moore’s writing is so good, and so lasting in its impact, that it’s worth gathering up 30 years’ worth of her pieces in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The … Read more
Pip Adam won the Acorn Prize for best novel of the year at the recent 2018 Ockham New Zealand national book awards. Is her book actually any good? Readable? Likeable? Brannavan Gnanalingam – a losing finalist – makes his assessment of her story about fashion hags and bustling millennials on K Road. I held my breath while … Read more
Broadcaster Kim Hill reviews the year’s most sensational memoir of family dysfunction, violence, apocalyptic visions, and survival. Memoirs are by their nature spoilers. We know already that the author survived trials and hardship because here’s the book. And so many now: since the modern “misery-memoir” genre (happiness writes white, after all) was boosted in part … Read more
Marion McLeod reviews the new memoir by English novelist Rose Tremain, who summons up memories of a girls’ boarding school smelling of “unwashed armpits, dirty hair and menstrual blood.” It’s not strictly relevant, I know, but 10 years ago I interviewed Rose Tremain at her flat in Tufnell Park. I liked her enormously, and not only because she … Read more
Louisa Kasza reviews a bright, expansive novel that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the New York drag queen scene of the 1980s. Joseph Cassara’s novel The House of Impossible Beauties charts the highs and deadly lows of gay life in 1980s New York City. Angel, Venus, Juanito and Daniel are all members of … Read more
Steph Matuku reviews the new book by Parris Goebel – dancer, superstar, role model for Polynesian youth. Parris Goebel is so driven and motivated I had to read the book lying down just to catch my breath. Short story: realised at a very young age that she loved dance and dropped out of school at … Read more
“There is nothing more miserable, pointless, expensive and anxiety-provoking than going through life worrying that some food you ate will give you cancer,” writes George Henderson, in his review of a new study which considers the food we eat, and what it’s doing to our bodies. Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarrelling … Read more
All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books celebrates the rich, fascinating history of New Zealand literature. Today: Scott Hamilton Hamilton notices something missing in the long, feverish construction of New Zealand literature – the rest of the Pacific. Near the end of his life, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about the reappearance of the … Read more
“Tyrants around the dinner table, fake news inside our heads”: Charlotte Graham-McLay celebrates the new novel by Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw. When I was a kid and nicked books from my parents’ bedroom because I’d run out of my own (the trick was to write down the page the bookmark was on, demolish the whole … Read more
Simon Sweetman goes all-out fanboy of a new, tortured memoir by Suede frontman Brett Anderson. The very best music memoirs ignore the tenets of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. They are about the life, the context in and around the music. And they are about the writing. And so it … Read more
Steve Braunias reviews a new biography of Prince Charles by way of wondering when a full account will ever be given about New Zealand’s royal family and the kiingitanga. One of the great forbidden stories of New Zealand journalism is a portrait of the court of King Tūheitia Paki. It’s not exactly open government at … Read more
Cigarettes, once sold in brightly coloured packets that were highly appealing to children, will now be drab and mostly covered by dire warnings. The Spinoff’s smoking correspondent Alex Braae reviews the new plain packaging. I remember watching New Zealand play in the Benson and Hedges cricket World Series when I was a kid. In fact, … Read more
Stephanie Johnson luxuriates in the new Julian Barnes novel – a story of adultery which “wrestles with the deepest conflicts of human existence.” Julian Barnes may be seen as a leading exponent of the Hampstead novel. This is, in England, a pejorative term, even though great writers such as Margaret Drabble and Margaret Forster have … Read more
Elizabeth Alley celebrates the latest novel by the masterly New Zealand writer Vincent O’Sullivan. Is there anyone else like Vincent O’Sullivan? His new novel traces several generations of a New Zealand family, from 1947 to 2004 with the brief, revealing return to 1938 at the book’s end; it opens as the novel’s over-arching character, Stephen, leaves … Read more
Linda Burgess reviews the biggest-selling book at the New Zealand Festival in Wellington in the weekend – Salt Fat Acid Heat, a cookbook like no other. At one of Samin Nosrat’s two sessions at the New Zealand Festival’s writers and readers festival in Wellington last weekend, Nosrat referred to herself as a stalker. This, she explained, was … Read more
Michele A’Court grapples with an uncomfortable truth about the Rose McGowan memoir – it’s a diatribe that tells us how to think. It is a tricky thing to review a memoir, particularly one as dark as this. What you want to do is talk about the book – the writing, the storytelling, the structure and … Read more
Two refugees are shut in a small cage and fed through a hole in the wires: Stephanie Johnson reviews The Cage, the claustrophobic, dystopian novel by Lloyd Jones. The back cover blurb for The Cage describes the contents as “a profound and unsettling fable”. It’s a little-known fact that very often writers themselves pen these descriptions … Read more
Rachel Stewart reviews the bovine love letter, The Secret Life of Cows. Even though I’m likely New Zealand’s harshest critic of modern dairy farming, I’ve always enjoyed the company of cows. I’ve worked with them for years. And played with them. And frolicked in the grass with them. And slept with them. As a kid … Read more