Colin Hogg reviews Sinatra: The Chairman, by James Kaplan (Hachette, $40). According to this new book, the only reason the mobster Sam Giancana didn’t have his famous troublemaking pal Frank Sinatra knocked off was that he loved the singer’s voice so much. It was a lucky thing for Sinatra the infamous killer was a fan, … Read more
Morgan Godfery’s collection of new progressive thinking is weighed down by a lot of old left ideas, writes Ben Thomas, from the other side of the political divide. The tagline of BWB Texts is “short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers”, although a more appropriate description of its latest anthology, The Interregnum: … Read more
Linda Burgess urges you to read a new novel by a modern master – My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Random House.) Elizabeth Strout is my current literary crush – though I’m fairly sure that this time, it’s the real thing. She is fabulous. Damn her, she knows everything, and she puts just a … Read more
Holly Walker reviews American Housewife (Doubleday, $43) by Helen Ellis. If the rumours are true, not only do we have another season of The Bachelor and a New Zealand Survivor to look forward to, but soon the Real Housewives franchise will hoist up a gilt-framed mirror in Herne Bay and show the rest of us … Read more
Dad Art, the new novel by Damien Wilkins, is launched tonight at the writer’s festival in Wellington. Charlotte Grimshaw arrives ahead of the party to consider the book’s virtues and flaws. Michael Stirling is on his own. He has separated from his wife, his much-loved daughter has left home and his father is in a … Read more
Thom Shackleford grins and bears it as PJ O’Rourke comes across in an 844-page greatest hits package as that blowhard at the party who’s had a bit too much to drink, thinks he’s hilarious and sometimes is but mostly you just want to punch in the face. The first thing you notice about this anthology is … Read more
Former criminal lawyer Ross Burns assesses Ian Wishart’s new book on the Marlborough Sounds killings, Elementary (Howling at the Moon, $38.99) Nothing about the Sounds murders has been elementary. Following the disappearance of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope from Furneaux Lodge on New Year’s Day 1998, there was a huge, albeit apparently flawed, police investigation. … Read more
Duncan Greive watches the ’70s style politics show The Nation, and finds a lot to love. TV3’s The Nation isn’t that old. It was founded in 2010, but despite the flash modern set and the lively twitter conversation which accompanies it, the show might be the most old-fashioned to air on New Zealand television. It returned to … Read more
Guy Somerset takes on the new novel by Julian Barnes. Martin, Ian, Julian – those Brits, how they like to dabble in Eastern Europe. For the most part, it’s been reviewing the latest Bohumil Hrabal or Ivan Klima in one of the weekend newspapers or an approving nod to Milan Kundera or Josef Skvorecky in … Read more
Lindsey Dawson has been binge-watching Mozart in the Jungle. Despite being about fuddy-duddy music, it won two Golden Globes this year. She can understand why. What’s the story? The New York Symphony Orchestra. It sounds grand but this fictional institution is fighting to maintain reputation, cash flow and audience. Enter ageing maestro Thomas, played with … Read more
Aaron Yap watches Fabrice Gobert’s The Returned, a moody French supernatural series where the dead come to life in a quiet alpine town. In Val Lewton’s 1943 film I Walked with a Zombie, there’s a terrific exchange between its protagonists, Betsy (Frances Dee), a nurse travelling to Saint Sebastian, and Paul (Tom Conway), a plantation owner whose wife she’s been … Read more
Madeleine Chapman has been renovating houses with her parents for many years, living out the entire premise of Our First Home NZ. So how does the show stack up to the reality? “If boring is what you’re best at, well, you better get out of here right now.” It was a controversial opener from Our First Home’s … Read more
Calum Henderson watched the first episodes of Family Feud and was transported back to the glory days of New Zealand reality television. 2015 will go down in history as TV3’s year of reality, when big franchises like The Bachelor and X Factor and The Block formed an imposing fleet of multi-night battleships, destined to sail … Read more
The X Files is known for both its brilliance and dreadful inconsistency, but did the latest episode drop the ball completely? David Farrier laments what has happened to his favourite show. According to my hazy memory of the Bible, at some point God got annoyed at the great teamwork humans were demonstrating as they came … Read more
Nelson journalist Charles Anderson reviews 438 Days, by John Franklin, a modern classic of narrative journalism. The forever temptation for a journalist is to make it absolutely explicit in their story that he or she has engaged in actual journalism. These days, some readers might be confused as to what ‘actual journalism’, actually means. To … Read more
Instagram celebrity Max Key made his radio debut last night. Somewhere in suburban Auckland, Calum Henderson was listening and judging. Without ever really trying, I seem to have spent a lot of time in the past year looking at Max Key’s abs, staring into his gormless photo face, admiring his impossibly precise haircut. He is, … Read more
Simon Grigg examines 550 exhausting pages of often intense events, music, movies, books, essays and violent conflict as analysed in 1966, by music savant Jon Savage. David Bowie died while I was reading this book and there was a sort of clearly unintended irony in the fact that the biggest musical event of 2016 will be the … Read more
On Friday the 2016 Billy T nominees all played a showcase at Auckland’s Q Theatre. In the crowd, somewhere near the back, Duncan Greive watched and judged. The Billy T award is probably the coolest award in New Zealand. There’s just one given out each year – if you miss out, suck it up. It … Read more
Rosemary McLeod reviews Unearthly Landscapes, New Zealand’s early churchyards, cemeteries and urupa by Stephen Deed (Otago University Press, $50.00). Death can bring out the worst in people. Families seethe their way through funeral services, burials and lawyers’ offices, and yes, they also mourn the person who has gone forever, though they have different ways of … Read more
Stephanie Johnson reviews Sir Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes, a forensic account of his doomed marriage to poet Sylvia Plath. There are people who still blame Ted Hughes for the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath, who famously gassed herself soon after he left her. Their two small children, Frieda and Nicholas, were in … Read more
Ruby Porter reviews Murray Edmond’s first book of prose, four wild visions of a surrealist New Zealand featuring everyone from Winston Peters to Franz Kafka – ‘a kind of punk rock Fred Dagg’. Strait Men and Other Tales is Murray Edmond’s first book of prose – four linked short stories, dark and funny, artificial and … Read more
Patricia Highsmith’s second novel The Price of Salt dealt with an obsessive lesbian relationship in an era of homophobia so severe her agent warned of career suicide. Peter Wells reviews the book, reissued and retitled Carol, and finds a ‘daring masterpiece’ which offered a glimmer of hope in the ‘gloom zone’ of the 1950’s. Graham Greene called her ‘the … Read more
John Fogerty wasn’t the only member of Creedence Clearwater Revival – he wasn’t even the only Fogerty – but the meticulous perfectionist was the band’s guiding light and driving force. CCR fan and New Zealand author John Summers writes on Fogerty’s memoir Fortunate Son. The room looked out to a grass quad, a sunny spot among … Read more
David Bowie gave Lou Reed a new lease of life when he helped to create the classic Transformer album – and was repaid with jealousy and loathing, according to Howard Sounes, author of Notes from the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed. I do like a biography that doesn’t spare the awful truth about its … Read more
Last night’s Oprah Winfrey show at Vector Arena was more akin to a religious revival than a speaking engagement. Anny Ma tells how she felt the full force of the Oprah Effect. Oprah has God, but I have Oprah. Sorry, Jesus. An Evening With Oprah was the single most inspiring 2.5 hours of my entire … Read more
Duncan Greive watches as Ferndale endures a hostage crisis on a Christmas cliff for the ages. They’ll never beat the truck. That’s the yardstick against which all of Shortland Street’s Christmas cliffhangers will be measured, and invariably come up short. It was the first time the show embraced the dramatic tension afforded by a break, … Read more
Sarah Forster reads a newspaper set in the kids book by Bob Kerr, Changing Times. Bob Kerr’s Changing Times: The Story of a New Zealand Town and its Newspaper is easily one of the cleverest books I have seen all year. He’s a wonderful artist, and his book is the result of working on it for … Read more
Wellington author Linda Burgess chooses this and that and above all she chooses the book you want to buy several copies of this Christmas – The Scene of the Crime, by Steve Braunias (no relation to the Spinoff books editor). Thinking of what to recommend from what I’ve read this year, I realise how much of the … Read more
Wellington journalist and former books pages editor Ruth Nichol chooses the novel that many of our experts also chose. Just go and buy it, okay? I briefly thought Anne Tyler’s latest novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, would win the Man Booker Prize. What’s not to like – it’s clever, witty, wise and much more complex … Read more