New Zealand Books

I have been traveling around New Zealand for 5 months and a friend and I took this book with us on a road trip around the South Island. It was a sore disappointment.

The directions in the book are horribly vague, sometimes to the point of nonsensical. Using "a repaired fence" is a poor idea of a landmark, as 4 years out after the publication of the guide the fence is no longer there. Be prepared for very unclear directions that refer to such movable items as "park benches" and "lone bathrooms" or "a fallen log" (in the woods? who would have imagined!)

Additionally, I was really startled to discover that only by comparing this book to the earlier version did some information become clear. There are bits of information in each that are not synthesized across both, so only by stopping into a bookstore briefly to consult the earlier guide did we discover that several of the sites we had intended to visit were not accessible to the public -- handy information to include in the second guide.

This guide requires a LOT of legwork by the reader. (Perhaps only by the GPS coordinates do the directions become clear, I didn't try.) After doing a lot of independent research and consulting several maps and local tourist information sites did we finally find a majority of the sites. Very very poor organization and information. While this book and its predecessor are the only detailed guides published for those searching the Lord of the Rings sites, they still require close study and a lot of external work.

Above all, what the book is lacking is clear direction and a good editor. The organization is very confused so that stories of being on the set are mixed with recommendations for non-LotR related tours and good wineries for lunch breaks, on top of the sub-par directions. While this gave a great sense of the author's enjoyment of the research process, it really doesn't add to clarifying the purpose of the book as a Location Guidebook.

A poor book with very little method to its madness: it's haphazard, ambiguous, and ultimately frustrating to put to use. I HIGHLY recommend that no one rely on this book as their sole guide to finding locations.

(I also find it underhanded and shady that the author reviewed his own book on Amazon. Given that the information in his head didn't translate wholly to the page, a five-star review might only be applicable from the same.)

I purchased this book after visiting New Zealand. Specifically, the area where Rohan was set up. I would not have bought this book otherwise, but it became a nice companion when i wanted to remember the lay of the land and the challenges one only experiences in New Zealand. To get to this place, one must walk from a road, across a cow field, through 3 rivers (ice cold and too wide to jump, mind). So for me it was worth it. If you don't have an unusual love for the films or another big reason to get this book, you're probably wasting your money.

I bought this while in New Zealand, in Mt Cook Village.

Though My wife and I hadn't planned a "Lord of the Rings Tour", we did enjoy noting when our current stop was used as filming location.

I sympathize with both Mr Brodie and the reviewers wanting more maps.

While it may not have been his intent, it is called a "guidebook", and even a casual reader like myself would have appreciated more maps. But it doesn't detract from the fact that this is a fun book, with lots of vignettes and pictures.

I've been on two trips to New Zealand and used the first guidebook on the first trip and the revised edition (after Two Towers) on the second trip. The revised edition was much improved over the original one. I visited probably 80%+ of the sites in the book between the two trips. The guidebooks give a lot of interesting trivia about filming LOTR and can certainly help you decide what to visit, how accessible it is and how to plan a route. As all have stated, the problem is that the directions get you sort of there, within a hundred meters if you're lucky, and the pictures are marginally helpful. On the second trip I brought a portable DVD player with the LOTR DVDs and I found the relevant scene in the film while I was at the location, so I could make a positive identification and not have to wonder if I was at the right rock or tree. It was particularly useful at Mavora Lakes, Poolburn and Whakapapa, for example, where so much of the scenery looks the same throughout the whole site. Otherwise, without the DVD, about the only thing to do when you get to Whakapapa using the guidebook is to just look around and know that it was used for the Mordor locations. With the DVD you can identify the exact spot where the opening title for Two Towers was filmed, among other venues. If you don't want to drag a DVD player with you, another option I would recommend is to print out screen caps from the films of those locations you really want to identify and take along a notebook filled with them. Either option is a must for identifying, for example, the Legolas rock at Deer Park Heights, particularly since the rock was flipped 180 in the film. Ian's book is a good start, but its utility will vary for each person depending on just how precise you want to be in saying "I was there."

What a blast. We took the original edition on our tour two years ago and will be taking the extended edition this year. We also took a GPS with us and called our tour, "GPS to Mordor: there and back again," and dutifully listed the references we achieved in our trip diaries. Through unseasonal sleet and floods and snow we had more fun than anyone deserves hunting the references and squinting at the photos. "It's this tree. No No. It's that one." We went places we would never have dreamed of going otherwise, met fantastic people and saw astonishing country given a specific quality of discovery by finding the associations. Travels by quotation: "We're going to Rivendell to see the elves," was a particular triumph. The additional trivia of filming and background simply added pleasure to the reading at night while checking the next day's itinerary. Without being a textbook, we certainly found it got us where we wanted to go as close as we needed to get there (except for the parts of NZ that were under water at the time). Think of it as an invitation to get out of the house and go find your own adventures.

I had watched the movie so I thought the book would be just as good or better: NOT!!! The lack of dialouge is disconcerting,and you never really get a grasp on the characters. Written correctly this would have been an excellent book, however when a book becomes a chore to finish, it is hardly an enjoyable experience. The movie is fantastic. Save your money {and your eyes} and rent the video!

While I agree this was one of the rare cases where the film was actually better than the book, had it not been for the book and subsequent movie my daughter and I would not have started what would be the beginning of a deep interest in Maori culture and a trip there where we stayed on Maori land.
The stories I was told during my trip were very special and some mirror the trials of the indigenous people of this country, also known as Native Americans. It opened me up to a place on this planet I may not have ever considered visiting. Now I can not wait to get back!

I had watched the movie so I thought the book would be just as good or better: NOT! The lack of dialouge is disconcerting,and you never really get a grasp on the characters. Written correctly this would have been an excellent book, however when a book becomes a chore to finish, it is hardly an enjoyable experience. The movie is fantastic. Save your money {and your eyes} and rent the video!

I picked up Once Were Warriors because, like most other people, I had seen the movie and was expecting a riveting tale. This is, however, one of those rare cases where the movie surpasses the book in almost all facets.
The story is set against the backdrop of a government housing project in New Zealand and describes the trials and tribulations of a Maori family living on the dole (unemployment). The main characters are the parents, Ruth and Jake Heke, and some of their children, Nig, Booggie and Grace.
The movie (unlike the book) is fraught with emotion and sorrow, and you are swept into the netherworld of Maori society almost against your will. Perhaps if I hadn't seen the movie, I wouldn't have been expecting as much from the book and would have been less disappointed and more forgiving towards the author.
Unfortunately the bland and ineptly described milieu, the one-dimensional characters and lack of dialogue punctuation in the book gives a feeling of emptiness and you are left wanting more.
The story itself is not badly constructed and I could be charitable and say that Alan Duff employed the aforesaid writing devices to emphasize the soullessness of the society he describes. Regrettably he disproves this theorem by descending into a mire of soppiness at the end of the book.
He allows the characters to become pathetically clichéd and tries to turn a fictional account into a self-serving sermon on the moralities of his society. Both the book and the believability of the characters are devalued and made to suffer for this cheap trick of his.
On the positive side, the book initially makes a powerful statement about the effects of developed societies intruding into more primitive ones. The feelings of displacement and defeatism of a conquered nation are also explored as well as the impact they have on the psyche of the subjugated culture.
In conclusion, I would not recommend this book to anyone not extremely devoted to the Maori culture and the societal difficulties of New Zealand. There are many better books available in terms of the emotional, societal and familial structure issues this book attempts to explore.
If, however, you like your moralizing fed with a big spoon and rammed down you throat, this is the book for you.

An earlier reviewer who said skip this and see the film was on the mark.
There's no doubting that this is an incredible powerful and important story (hence the 3 stars).
However, to describe the writing as heavy handed is an understatement. Unlike Lee Tamahori (film's director)Duff seems incapable of letting his characters and the situations they find themselves speak for themselves. When you've created characters as powerful and memorable as Jake and Beth it's so unecessary. The fact that Duff feels the need to intersperse the narative with his simplistic moralising means by the end you find yourself spend more time wishing he'd shut up than worrying about the fate of the family.
The film however is a masterpiece. Astonishingly powerful performances, and the direction pulls no punches whilst allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions. Duff could have learnt much, however from he's done since it doesn't seem that he did.

I have travelled to New Zealand many times. When in bookshops I always take a peek in the section they have for NZ, and enjoy travel literature on the topic. Reading a book on one's journey through this country is like taking a mini trip back there again, a place I am very fond of. I've never had a bad experience there. It's a place I have gone alone for months at a time, and a place I have gone with family and friends. This book however, was so negative! He spends most of the story whining about his recently ended relationship, complaining about the weather, and his health problems. He seems to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder, which results in poor experiences with locals as they don't appreciate his negativity (and sometimes rude demeanor). There are points when he complains about the eco-tourism and the lack of environmentally friendly tourist attractions (jet boats and such), yet fails to have a bigger picture that New Zealand is much more advanced than most countries in limiting this activity thanks to it's citizens voting for preservation and supporting their Department of Conservation. No place is perfect, but in the bigger picture, NZ is far more ahead in this subject than most countries, and I mean MOST. I am saddened that he tends to place himself in situations where he invites negative experiences. Finally, if you are reading this book having little experience in NZ, please keep these things in mind, as it is an amazing place with some of the most kind and interesting people you'll ever meet. Aside from 2-3 tourist towns, which cram the typical stuff down your throat, it's one of few places you can go that is safe and you can get happily lost on a beautiful beach or mountain, all your own.

First off, I loved this book. I have a great desire, if not budget, to see New Zealand. This has only increased my longing to visit this country. Stevenson's writing is very subtle in its humor. I laughed more reading this book than any other travel book I have read before. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in travelling and especially in New Zealand.

Andrew Stevenson has successfully accomplished what very few others are able to do.
He has written a travel guide that is actually enthralling to read. From its pages you will gain a wonderful sense of the flora, fauna and people of "The Land of the White Cloud."
Although the title suggests it to be a book on hiking... it is not. It is a personal account of his time in New Zealand, where he spends 4 months marching through some of the most beautiful places on earth.
The casts of characters that he introduces us to are not "over the top" hard to imagine people, but... simply the everyday folks of New Zealand and the foreigners that are vacationing there too.
I look forward to reading all of Mr. Stevenson's works.
Andrew... if you ever need a hiking buddy... drop me a line!

I found this to be an interesting book. If you want to learn all about New Zealand, its flora and fuana, or great "tramps" (hikes, for you and me), this isn't the book for you. However, it is an enjoyable light read, giving the reader interesting snapshots of life in NZ. Stevenson meets some interesting people along his journey and I found the way in which he shares their stories much more engaging than most of his descriptions of his walks in the woods. Yes, at times the book strains credulity and some of the characters may seem a bit cliche, but I, too, stood in wonder of many of the situations he encounters. Ultimately what comes through is that New Zealand is a land both unlike any other and exactly like home, too.

I very much recommend Andrew Stevenson's "Kiwi Tracks," equally well for those who do and do not know personally New Zealand's natural and cultural landscape and her Great Walks. I myself fall somewhat in between these categories - having explored the South Island only, during some six visits in the last 20 years, always tramping, always in awe.

He tells well how the Great Walks (the term had not existed in my early tramps) have turned from a few persons in lonely huts to nearly hundreds of packed-in campers on solo or guided tours -in just a few short decades. Also his South Island walks were unusually impaired by a massive snow storm and so come across a bit off-putting.

Stevenson gave me the best-yet view of what I have been missing in the North Island ("away from the Mainland," as he quips).

Overall, his book is a beautiful, honest, and detailed travel narrative (thank goodness for someone taking the time to name by name the many fauna and flora experienced). But it is markedly canted by his own ah, delicate emotional state during the journey. The book's dust jacket warns us: "... whatever you have in your rucksack, the heaviest baggage is what you carry inside." Stevenson's emotional center of mass during his trip clearly is located a bit outside himself and he is prone to tip over emotionally during the journey. His honesty about this both hurts and helps the narrative - it does give the reader a reference point: The author is working hard to discover that which is truly important to himself in his journey, as well as puzzling over that same question for New Zealand - the colonist vs. native Maori views of national politics, natural heritage, and future directions.

While relating the pristine and inutterably amazing natural beauty of this land, not the least being the almost inconceivable human innocence and generosity of its citizens, he gives us a tutorial in NZ's basic dilemma. When he asks a fellow tramper to quote the best and worst of his travels: [I paraphrase] "The worst is to see the landscape so corrupted by commercialism so quickly." (You can guess - the bus tours, helicopters, jet boats, egregious mountain re-landscaping.) "The best is that New Zealand is still so unbelievable beautiful." This echoed within me, watching once-quiet towns transformed at the snap of a dollar into teaming Disneylands.

Stevenson shows us, by example(s), of how New Zealand transforms and helps its visitors. A German therapist suggests that tramping holds more value than health insurance premiums. I am inclined to agree.

Of the highest value to me in the book is that Stevenson gives us some great insight into the NZ national values debate (still-ongoing) contrasting (via his hitchhiker's car-cabin testimonies) the views of the progeny of the more recent Western, rough-hewn pioneers against the natural spiritualism of
Maoris, who also gave him rides, and to whom he related more. He shows us that the people of New Zealand must finally listen to the Maori, and strive to preserve their naturalist vision (in the face of adventure bungee-jumping tourism). Between the lines, he shows us that the dialog must go both ways,
especially when facing the World's money, foreign buyers and the touristic denizens of the new millennium.

I have not recieved the book at all

regards
Bhaskar Poojary

First off, it's difficult writing any book that generalizes about a country and culture so hats off to the author for trying. The info is probably more relevant to someone going to Western Australia 5-10yrs ago. I moved from Vancouver, Canada to Sydney, Australia to live and find the info mostly outdated. Some of the cultural conflicts such as misunderstanding what it means to be invited for tea are more applicable to the older generation. Sydney is a fast paced city of 4million. The younger generation, under 40, are very similar to people in Canada/US/UK. If you're coming from a Western english speaking nation, I don't believe this book is going to be your assimilation bible. If you're coming from a non-Western culture, I think you'll be better off reading Australian newspapers and watching Hollywood movies. You'll get along fine in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - never been to Westcoast but I assume Perth or any other modern Australian city will be the same.

"Culture Shock! Australia: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette" by Ilsa Sharp is a guidebook to living in Australia. This book is not a travel guide, but rather a guide to the people and culture of the country. The main audience for this would be someone who intends to spend a lot of time in Australia, but it can also help business travelers, and even tourists.

I know someone who just moved to Australia from Asia, and from what I have been able to determine, this guide appears to be fairly accurate. I am looking forward to my visit there, which should also give me a better idea on just how accurate it is. Be sure to get the latest edition, as it was updated in 2005 and it is clear from my reading that there were substantial updates.

The author, Ilsa Sharp, migrated to Western Australia, and that personal experience clearly was a big asset to her in putting this book together. I did sense a bit of a bias towards Western Australia in her examples. To be fair, I was more interested in Eastern Australia, and so the bias may have been in my reading as well. In either case, she certainly does try to cover most of the country, and if I were to pick the one area where there was the least amount of information it would be Tasmania.

The book is broken down into 10 sections. These include a quick introduction, followed by basic information. Next is a discussion of the people, the society, and moving there. It then gets to some more specific areas such as food, entertainment, slang, and business. It then finishes with an A to Z section covering many basic facts about the country, some key figures both historical and modern, and it even has a short culture quiz.

As someone from the United States, this book is probably not as useful to me as it would be to someone coming from a much different culture. Not to say that Australia is just like the United States, but clearly the two are much closer than people from other countries from Asia and the Middle East. Even so, I think the book was fairly useful in understanding some of the societal differences between the two countries. This is one book that is easy to recommend.

This book does contain some interesting information on Australian culture, and on what makes Aussies tick. But I found the writing style to be particularly annoying; even painful. The Australia book available within the "Culture Smart" series, while offering less detail than this book, is far easier on the eyes and mind.

An American friend, five years in Australia, lent me her 1999 version of this book. I've been here two years, from England, so I found it interesting. I agree that it has been inconsistently updated, and the Australia of 1991 seems to have been different in many ways to the Australia of 2004. Also, life in Perth must be different to that in Brisbane, where I live, 2,700 miles away. For a start, they play Australian football (and soccer) whereas Rugby League is the main game here.

It would be highly surprising if the author's views/perceptions and mine tallied 100%, but in fact they do quite a lot. I was interested, for example, in her correct perception of sport being a good conversation topic, not least at dinner parties. Coming from a somewhat bourgeois part of the south of England, I found that a most refreshing change.

One problem the book has is that it sets out to be amusing (successfully) and serious: on tax for example. For the serious side, some of the drier books on living and working in Australia, or emigrating here, are better.

Finally, I found myself liking the author and her style. She comes across as pleasant and with a light touch.

This book will remind you that politicians and businesses are crooked everywhere, that the indigenous always get screwed, and that little countries are often mistreated by their larger "friends." Pilger is ferocious and he is happily much more intellectually honest than say, Michael Moore. His socialist hopes for Australia seem dated considering the country's amazing financial success under Mr. Howard, but his fears of media concentration and the purchase of influence seem particularly timely. Pilger makes a strong argument that Australia's relationships with Britain and the USA are coercive and exploitative. The thoughtful reader will find themselves re-examining the nature of the Alliance and "special relationship" and what these ought to be like.

In order to gain a critial understanding of this book it is important to understand the genre of writing it typifies. Succinctly put, true to its journalistic origins, it is close to the thick description of an ethnographer, but lacking any of the associated methods or comparative data which would have helped to contextualise the claims. Along with other contemporary practitioners of this dubious art, such as Bill Bryson for example, once having read Pilger, one is simply left wondering about the clear (over) reliance on anecdotal evidence. How representative are the claims? Is Pilger any more insightful, or rather less glib and superficial, than the object of his critique i.e. those who have a vested interest in preserving/marketing the officially sanctioned national mythologies of Australia?

Judged by this criteria, Pilger is unsuccessful in his endeavours. A more useful starting point would be to question the extent to which Australian society is the product of an internal developmental process. Some data for contextualising the country in such global terms can, for example, be found in the excellent comparative study, "How Australia Compares". Complementary to this piece, a more sophisticated [than Pilger]theoretical attempt to flesh out the social forces shaping Australia can generally be found in the work of sociologist Peter Beilharz. For an informative attempt to weigh up the extent of any ideological manipulation of Australian history, it is worth checking out the writings of Stuart MacIntyre, including the co-edited volume, "The History Wars". Finally, a search for Elaine Thompson's research on Australian egalitarianism would assist in rounding out a critical understanding of this important topic.

My concern is that without the benefit of understanding causation, process etc, readily available in these aforementioned works, Pilger by extension leaves his readers with nothing other than the cliched inference that all countries attempt to suppress secrets/social divisions for the sake of the upkeep of their nationalism. But in the final analysis, how informative are these kinds of generality, really?

Or rather, to turn against Pilger the kind of simplistic analogy frequently deployed by journalists of his ilk, one might conclude that he has succeeded only in holding a magnifying glass up to his topic . What is clearly needed though is a more penetrating x-ray vision.

Yeah, Pilger does tend to shout, as reviewer G. Rogers ("Trouble in Paradise") correctly points out. But shouting isn't always just to "make up for the weakness of the argument". It can also signal exasperation. Or a desire to warn, alert, awaken.

As an Australian, I found this book a revelation when I read it twenty years ago. Particularly his well annotated discussion of the events that led to "The Dismissal" of 11 Nov 1975.

That was a deeply strange and troubling time in the Lucky Country (cf. Australian_constitutional_crisis_of_1975 at Wikipedia), and Pilger's chapter casts real light on it, without depending on "deep throat/cigarette man" anonymous informants for either his insights or his information.

Sidebar. I navigated to this page today because of a sentence I read this morning: "Israeli security officials said they were looking at ways to force Hamas from power, and were focusing on an economic squeeze that would prompt Palestinians to clamour for the return of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' ousted Fatah Party." (Amy Tiebel, Canadian Press, 14feb06).

It just rang a bell, that's all.

I give the book five stars because it blazed new territory when it was written, and has been ignored and insulted rather than discredited in the years since. Anyone interested in Australia (other than as a meaningless tourist destination) should at least consider reading this fine and passionate book. Highly recommended.

John Pilger delivers. Like his books on international affairs, this one, dealing with the oppression of the Australian aborigins is quite revealing. It is, as another reviewer remarked, an eye-opener. If more journalists would do the right research and were courageous enough to reveal what they have found rather than dance to the tunes of corporate media, the fight for justice for the minorities and the aborigins (to name a few) would be even stronger. This book by John Pilger is therefore an excellent work that contributes to this important struggle.

This is the history that is sadly missing from the corporate press and the Australian education system.

I spent 6 years learning about the folkloric mythology of the Aussie battler, without even 5 minutes covering the massacres that took place within a 30km radius of my school. Essential reading for issues from the First Fleet to the coup in 1976.

On the plus side, this is indeed a proper 'boys own' story and is very well written. Unfortunately, the reader becomes quickly aware of the arrogance of Hillary. Clearly he is a gifted climber who possesed endurance way beyond that of the average human. However, this is over-shadowed by the authors arrogance as he tells the reader how much better he was than those around him.

In a way i wish i had not read the book as it has shattered a romantic illusion I had of what Hillary was really like. It also made me very sympathetic of those who had to endure him in the ice packs of Antartica and the isolation of the death zone of Everest.

Sir Edmund Hillary was clearly a remarkable man with his life marked particularly by the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest. The descriptions of the climb to the summit of Everest along with Tenzing Norgay are particularly interesting, especially his discussion of the period immediately flowing the first ascent when immense pressure was brought on Tenzing to say that he had reached the summit first. However, Everest was not the only adventure for Hillary. Other trips to the Himalayas and to other parts of the world are described and give you an idea of Hillary's overall achievements.
The most meaningful parts of the book to me were Hillary's efforts to lead the way in helping the Sherpas by building schools, hospitals, and pipelines. Also, the chapters detailing his upbringing give you a good idea of how far he had come from his early days in a beekeeper's family. The chapter about the plane crash in Nepal that took the lives of his wife and daughter was extremely emotional.
However, the book does have its slow moments. I found the sections about the journey to the South Pole to be tedious and confusing. A good map would have helped. Hillary's writing style is fairly pedestrian, but he does give a number of examples of where he thought he fell short as a person, husband, and father. His extreme confidence in his own abilities shows through during the book.
All in all, the book is certainly worth reading if you are interested in Edmund Hillary or mountain climbing.

Unless Edmund Hillary can produce definitive evidence that A.) George Mallory and Andrew Irvine did not reach the summit of Mt. Everest in 1924 or B.) that Tenzing Norgay was not actually the first to set foot on the summit, he cannot truthfully bill himself as "The First Person to Conquer Everest."

I remember how exciting it was for those of us in London for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation (on June 2, 1953) to find out that Mount Everest had been climbed at last! And Sir Edmund Hillary's story of how he and Tenzing Norgay did it is terrific and even to my suspicious eyes seems sincere.

The portion of the book I was most curious about dealt with the Antarctic Expedition of 1957 to 1958. Hillary was the leader of the Ross Sea Party, which was to was to lay provisions between the Ross Sea and the South Pole to support the crossing of Antarctica by the Transpolar Party, starting from the Weddell Sea. The Transpolar Party was led by the overall expedition leader, Dr. Vivian (Bunny) Fuchs. The two parties reached the South Pole in January, 1958 after which they made it to the Ross Sea in less than six weeks. As the two parties neared the Pole, the telegrams between Bunny and Hillary were in all the newspapers. Vivian had told the story from his point of view in his 1958 book, "The Crossing of Antarctica," and even though that book also included eighteen pages written by Hillary, I was glad to see more of what Hillary had to say, especially with his perspective of writing about it so much later.

This entire book is worth reading and tells us plenty about the life of a successful adventurer.

I found this book a pleasant surprise, after having read a few mountaineering adventure books. If you are looking for one, look elsewhere; Hillary climbed Everest, but did not have any major mountaineering accomplishments thereafter. Instead, we see the picture of a simple man, a very likeable and sincere one, with flaws and virtues.

We can see his sneakiness in going for the south pole despite orders not to, we can see his dedication to the people of Nepal, we can see his somewhat estranged relationship with Tenzing and the tensions that arose after Tenzing said he had reached the summit first. The discussion is a futile one, but it seems to put a damper on the relationship.

In this book we also follow his life, not just his great conquests. We see the backstage of the lecture circuit he went through after Everest, then the honors he received and his attempt to maintain some normalcy in his life. Overall, it is a very good life book, and despite it being filled with adventures, we see the character of a person that is much more than simply an adventurer.

I came upon Carl McDaniel's "Paradise for Sale" because I had to write a paper on phosphate mining on Nauru for my Environmental Science class. His book covered many of the aspects I needed for my paper including a good history lesson on phosphate, the island itself as well as the history of phosphate mining on Nauru. The only downfall of the book was the "we're doomed" vibe I got while finishing pretty much every chapter.

If you want to learn anything about Nauru, don't bother. If you have a significant emotional investment in the idea that the earth is doomed and western culture is raping the planet, then this is the book for you. Just be sure to read it by candlelight so you aren't guilty of intellectual dishonesty (no animal fat or paraffin candles allowed, either).

But then intellectual dishonesty is at the very core of this book. The Nauran people, who you would think play the central role in this undeniable environmental tragedy, are mere scenery. The authors never bother to provide anything other than shallow reporting of their culture, history or current situation. The fact that the authors are lamenting on their behalf is presumably adequate. Similarly, as pointed out in another review, the authors wrote most of the book without bothering to visit, then spent thousands of dollars to ride on a gas-guzzling, ozone-destroying jet to add some credibility to their preconceived notions. And the whole analogy of Nauru (small isolated island with limited resources and diversity) as Earth (large, diverse lots of resources) is simplistic, but really relevant? The authors never really bother with relevance, because hey, simplistic analogies speak for themselves. In any case, the authors don't seem to have any serious credentials (other than burning sincerity and concern, which is often all you need in some circles), so it is hard to give much credence to what they say about science or anything else.

But what I found most offensive was the authors' condescending western liberal intellectual "gee aren't the natives cute and oh-so-wise" view of certain non-western cultures that they annoint as being "in tune" with their environments. They give a number of examples, but the one that sticks in my mind is the Ladhki (sp.?) people, who supposedly live in harmony with their harsh mountain environment. The authors concede that this culture has a high infant mortality rate, but that individuals who make it past the age of five generally enjoy a long healthy life. Well, that's just fine isn't it? As long as it's someone else's babies who are dying. . . But then that is the real problem, isn't it; too many people. If they would just stop reproducing (or living, at least since premature death is the unspoken aspect of "living in harmony with the environment) and aspiring to the same quality of life that the authors enjoy (well, they probably feel suitably guilty about it), everything would be fine.

Make no mistakes; turning a tropical island into a lunar wasteland is a terrible thing, and the people who have to live there probably wish things were different. But this is so blindingly obvious that a whole book on the subject would be (and is) ridiculous.

This book wasn't too bad. It has a good point, but the author does a lot of extrapolating and does not give a really good solution to the problem of resource overuse. Also, the author insults much of modern industrial society, but when he descibes his trip to Nauru, he mentions that he wants ice cream at one point and describes the food served there (beef, chicken, jello, and more) as good. Notice that these good foods and the availability of them are products of Western industrial society. Perhaps he is just another professor type who thinks he is above the common man because of his Ph.D and that people will not see the hypocrisy in his ideas and actions.

This is a book on the scale of "Silent Spring". Listen and heed it's message; this earth, our home, is in trouble. "Paradise for Sale" shows us, with fascinating and disturbing examples and in graphic detail, what can happen to the earth if we don't start changing our way of life. The good news is that it can be done but it has to start NOW! Read this book, it's important.

The story of Nauru may well be the story of the modern world writ small and fast! In `Paradise for Sale' Carl McDaniel and John Gowdy trace the history of Nauru, a tiny south-Pacific island, to explore how and why so-called `modern' humans come invariably to live beyond the means of nature and seem blinded to the warning signals of ecological collapse.

Nauru is a nearly circular islet virtually on the equator with a diameter of only six to seven kilometers. Prior to its `discovery' in 1798, the island's human population was only about a thousand totally self-reliant Micronesians. "In the absence of trade or other contact with the outside would, the people of Nauru developed a self-contained, durable society" (p. 14). They lived harmoniously within the bounds of nature, sustained comfortably by plentiful fish, coconuts, pandanus fruit, and a variety of other natural and cultivated crops.

In 20th Century terms, the island's greatest boon (and most fatal curse) has been its rich deposits of phosphate. Phosphate is a vital constituent of fertilizer and once Nauru's bounty was recognized in 1900, the island's fate was sealed. Industrialization was imposed from without. In just a century of mining, mainly to the benefit of one colonial authority after another, Nauru's once verdant interior, or `topside', today lies devastated. Over 80% of the island is a desert wasteland.

As they watched their homeland and ecosystem being systematically dissipated across the globe, the native people of Nauru were quickly transformed from proud self-sufficiency to hopeless dependence on the global economy. Today, 10,000 inhabitants of the island's narrow coastal strip live almost entirely on imported goods - even their water must now be brought in from distant `elsewheres'. While for the time being Nauruans remain economically afloat on the bare leavings of their colonial legacy, their phosphate wealth is running out and the island is deeply in ecological and fiscal debt. There is no return to paradise, so where do Nauruans go from here?

That's the question McDaniels and Gowdy are really posing to us all. In microcosm, Nauru's modern history is the history of the industrial world. In country after country, industrial humans, thoroughly alienated from nature, have destroyed much of their own natural bounties, exceeded their domestic carrying capacities, and come to rely on commerce to sustain themselves. In ecological terms, many modern states `occupy' through trade and exploitation of the global commons, an area several times larger than their home territories. Their economies stay afloat on high-end manufacturing and the `knowledge' industries, but the biophysical basis of life is eroding away at an accelerating pace.

This pattern is clearly neither sustainable nor extendible to all countries, yet we rush madly to cast the three-quarters of the yet-to-be-developed world from the same mold. Read this book for a thumbnail sketch of this fatal process and for the seemingly radical but obvious steps that must be taken to ensure a humanely viable future. "The story of how the world came to be the way it is calls for a reoriented worldview directed toward enduring habitations. To choose and then to walk the path to an enduring civilization will not be easy..." (p. 174). The question is, must it be catastrophe that forces us to take even the first tentative steps?

Was Captain Cook viewed by Hawaiian people as a diety, specifically the god Lono? The author says not. This book by Professor Gannath Obeyesekere at Princeton University was conceived as a counter-argument to a theory proposed by Marshall Sahlins (in his 1981 book "Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands"), "who used the apotheosis of Cook to advance a certain vision of structural history"(p52). This book, then, is a counter to that book written by Marhsall Sahlins, who has since written a counter to Obeyesekere's counter. Without having read Sahlins's original work that prompted this reaction from Obeyesekere, and having not read Sahlin's subsequent counter to Obeyesekere's criticisms, it was difficult for me to come to any conclusions about this controversy.

To the uninitiated on the Captain Cook controversy, this volume was similar to wading through the House of Representatives' 1979 Report that concluded on the Lee Harvey Oswald controversy on whether he shot and killed President Kennedy that there were "other shooters" that day in Dallas. Like the 1979 Congressional Report, Obeyesekere's book was a difficult work to make sense of unless you were already familiar with what was already being said.

Having said that, that doesn't mean this book was not interesting - it was! It deals with the murder in 1779 of Captain James Cook at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. Sahlins has been saying that Hawaiians mistook Cook to be their god Lono because of the coincidental timing of his arrival at the time of their Makahiki festival. They believed Lono had returned in the flesh, in accordance with prophecy. Obeyesekere says that's all bunk! He says they knew he was a human - a chief of a sailing ship, and came to know him as a nasty, murderous servant of the British Empire, so they killed him to pretty much stop him. After he was dead, they gave him a burial fit for a king in accordance with custom.

Obeyesekere says the idea that Hawaiians believed Cook was Lono came from the European's own `we're better than you' mentality - they imagined themselves to be gods everywhere they were treated with South Pacific courtesy. The author chastises Sahlins for perpetuating the myth, saying "None of the new evidence substantiates Sahlins's thesis that the apotheosis of Cook is a Hawai'ian rather than a European phenonmenon; nor has he dealt adequately with the methodological criticisms that I made of his previous work, particulary those pertaining to source material" (p194).

Unfortunately, the reader can know no more of Sahlins and his theory from reading this book than what Obeyesekere is telling. That said, I did notice that the two authors could be talking cross-purposes to some extent. And on this point it may be helpful to think about Oswald and Kennedy again. Obeyesekere is stuck on the point of whether Cook was Lono or not. But Sahlins comes across as being more interested in structural cultural theory. By analogy again, probably Oswald did not shoot and kill JFK (it was likely a faction within the U.S. government that took him out - a faction that has evolved into the Bush Crime Community), but the fact that so many people continue to believe Oswald did it is a cultural phenomenon in itself. Likewise, the social construction of Cook's death on a Hawaiian level was the result of a " `structural crisis'" (p 182) in need of harmonious rendering to existing " `sociological category'" (p 183). Sahlins, as he is portrayed by the author, shows an interest in how culture and society clings to culturally-determined ideas such as my example of Oswald as JFK killer and his example of Cook as Lono because of structural determinism. This determinism is minimized and even partly dismissed by Obeyeskere when he appears to throw out the bath water with the tub.

In short, reading this book will require that you read two more by Sahlins. At times you may feel you were called to jury duty. But there is much more within these pages than the apotheosis of Captain Cook. There is also the lens of structural anthropology.

This book starts with a simple question and assertion. Most scholars claim Captain Cook was taken for a God when he arrived in Hawaii(much as Cortez in Mexico) but this book claims that this narrative is 'racist' and 'eurocentric' and a classic 'imperialistic myth'. The idea here is that the narrative assumed Cook was a god(not that he was mistakenly taken for one) because the racist Europeans of the 18th century beleived Europeans really were gods to the 'natives'.

But this argument falls apart when one realizing what it is based on. The book wants to be the new 'Orientalism' and the author claims that as a 'Sri Lankan' he is best placed to judge what Hawaaians a dozen generations ago thought of a European. How rediculous. THe difference between Sri Lanka in the 20th century and Hawaii in the 18th is as different as Captain Cook's culture in England in the 18th and the culture of the Hawaiians. The racist assertion that a Sri Lankan can better judge a Hawaiian than a European is unfounded, perhaps the best person to judge a Hawaiin is a Hawaiian but it doesnt logic that a Sri Lankan would be better than a British person.

Thus the idea presented her is simply wrong headed. It would have been better had this book re-examined how Polynesians and Hawaiians in particular viewed Cook, rather than claim that every piece of the Cook story is 'racist'. What was Cook supposed to do? Not sketch the people he encountered, not write about them, he was in fact being very forward thinking in bothering to learn about the cultures he visited.

Seth J. Frantzman

I bought this book because of a general interest in Hawaiian history and Captain Cook. I'm not a professional historian and don't have any comment on such matters as quality of footnotes. However, I thought this was an excellent, very readable book. Mr. Obeyesekere takes historical fragments - diaries, letters, and so forth, and re-constucts the last few days of Cook's life. It's done so cleverly, in such a readable style, that it reminds one of the end of a mystery novel, where Sherlock Holmes explains his reasoning to Dr. Watson. However, there's the similar suspicion that it's being too clever, and that the author is taking evidence to fit the conclusion, rather than the other way around.

Also of interest was the repeated theme of cultural imperialism, explaining how modern historians project their own cultural predjudices (in this case, the simple savage, and a view of religion that is decidedly rational and rooted in monotheism) onto foreign cultures, and the misunderstandings that naturally arise. There's a number of similar cases I can think of, where the common knowledge is so influenced - best example is the view that Cortez conquered Mexico as an unimpeded God, when a simple reading of Bernal Diaz shows that's not the case.

I do have to complain, though, that a overly large portion of the book is given to the academic refutation of fellow scholar Mr. Sahlins. The author is challenging common thought, and I appreciate being able to read the debate with a prestigious scholar who represents the status quo. However, I thought it should have been made more distinct from the rest of the book - much interesting information is revealed in the argument, but it's comparatively dry reading.

Still, overall, this book makes for a very interesting read, and encourages one to re-examine their historical and cultural assumptions. I definitely think it's worth reading.

You have to give Obeyesekere credit for looking beyond the Makahiki festival, which dominates Marshall Sahlins' study of the apotheosis of James Cook. Obeyesekere sparked a minor maelstrom when he challenged the renown scholar's thesis that Cook was personified as a god by the Hawaiians. Obeyesekere looks beyond bicameral minds, and insists that the Hawaiians were fully conscious of their actions.

Cook was not the great god Lono, nor did he pretend to be. While his second arrival at the Sandwich Islands did coincide with the Makahiki festival, the Hawaiians did not deify him, but rather invited the Captain and his crew to take part in the ritual. Unfortunately for the Captain things seem to devolve afterward, and the Hawaiians killed him and several members of his crew.

Many have tried to piece together the tattered remnants of this story. Several of his crew kept journals and attempts were made after the fact to collect oral history from Hawaiians who were part of the cannibalistic ritual. Unfortunately, few of these accounts jive. Marshall Sahlins has done the most to try to piece together the events, but he seems to discount the Hawaiians ability for cognitive thinking, which tarnishes his work.

Obeyesekere attempted to draw Sahlins out, which he did with this book. Sahlins responded with the more scholarly but overbearing "How Natives Think," which he hoped would settle the issue once and for all. Unfortunately, Obeyeskere is not an anthropologist and his arguments tend to be a bit thin, but he does shoot plenty of holes into Sahlins' thesis.

In addition to asking some very important theoretical questions relevant to the practice of history and anthropology, Obeyesekere takes aim at Marshall Sahlins in this book. Sahlins went on to write a blow by blow response in the book "How 'Natives' Think: About Captain Cook, For Example" which should probably be read along with Obeyesekere's.

While I have only read selections of both, my feeling is that Sahlins has probably defended his honor, revealed big flaws in his opponent's arguments, but done little to blunt the critique Obeyesekere launches against the structuralist approach to the apotheosis of captain Cook. Even if some of his specific claims are called into question, Obeyesekere's best contributions are 1) showing the importance of "myth models" not only for natives, but for modern Western cultures and 2) showing that cultural specificity does not rob the "natives" of their capacity to engage in a kind of "pragmatic rationality" and we must hold open the possibility that considerable irrationality can creep into the "civilized" characters such as Cook.

Sahlin and other reviewers of this book argue that Obeyesekere simply reverses things, making the natives "bourgeois rationalists" and the Westerners irrational savages. I find this totally unpersuasive. His conception of pragmatic reasoning is flawed, but doesn't ignore the importance of culture in configuring the parameters of possible action.

Readers should be aware of what they are getting into before reading this book. This book should not be considered at narrative history of the events on the Bounty. It is more like a collection of essays. The author does provide spot narration of some the events, though these are non-linear. The author must assume that that reader is already familiar with the characters and events.
There are extended 'analysis' or essays on a variety of associated topics: from naval discipline to 18th century plays about Capt. Cook.

OK that is not exactly what I was looking for and I now I seek another, more conventional history to plug in the gaps not include here.

There are many lovely passages in the book, though I found myself skipping over many of the sections I was not interested in.

Social theorists have tried many definitions of human nature: human beings are the animals that make tools, that laugh, that play. I have another: Human-beings are history-makers. We eternally make our present by looking backwards. We present ourselves by expressing a significant past. To know us in our history is to know who we are. -Greg Dening (Performances)

At 4:30 A.M. on April 28, 1789 a series of events began which has ever since held a grip on Western imagination. Fletcher Christian lead a mutiny against Captain William Bligh aboard HMS Bounty. The aftermath of this rebellion included: Bligh's remarkable 4,000 mile journey with 18 loyal crewmen in an open launch; the sinking of HMS Pandora, which had been sent out to arrest the mutineers, with a loss of 34 men, including 4 of the Bounty crew; and the establishment of a weird sort of tropical commune on Pitcairn's Island by Christian and eight other men along with the Tahitian women (and a few friends and progeny) who may or may not have been the precipitating cause of the whole fiasco. Eventually Bligh would return to sea, three of the mutineers would be returned to England and hanged and all but one of the men on Pitcairn's Island would be murdered or die of disease.

Now there's obviously enough material there to justify the boatload of Bounty books, plays and movies that have poured forth in a steady stream over the past two centuries, but what Professor Dening has uniquely done is to consider the uses to which the story has been put over those years. He makes the convincing argument that Captain Bligh, contrary to popular imagery, was not particularly abusive of his men. Indeed, the title of the book is reflective of Dening's position that Bligh was mostly despised for the harsh language he used in upbraiding men, not for any physical measures nor for the quality of his command in general. Having made his case, Dening moves on to a consideration of why our historical understanding of Bligh requires that he be seen as an ogre. If the "reality" is that he was a fairly mild captain for his time, why do we, looking backward, see him as the very embodiment of tyrannical authority? Why are Christian and his cohorts seen as heroes, virtual freedom fighters?

The book is wide ranging, learned, entertaining and thought provoking, but its best feature is the balance that Dening strikes between the effort to present the story of the Bounty as ethnographic history ("an attempt to represent the past as it was actually experienced") and the realization that:

a historical fact is not what happened but that small part of what has happened that has been used by historians to talk about, History is not the past: it is a consciousness of the past used for present purposes.

Everyone who has ever been subjected to a history course in the modern university is familiar with the obsession with primary sources, the Left dictatorship which controls academia insists that the "truth" is to be found in the pamphlets and diaries and letters of the unimportant and the obscure, rather than in the texts and speeches of the great who shaped our understanding of events. Dening, on the other hand, understands that there is a fundamental dichotomy between the way participants experienced historical events and their importance to the society as a whole. In a very real sense, it is simply not important whether Christ was the son of God, whether England ruled the colonies harshly, whether Southerners fought for slavery, whether FDR ended the Depression, whether Nixon subverted the Constitution and Clinton merely lied about sex--what matters is that this is how we perceive these events. In Denings' felicitous phrase: Illusions make things true; truth does not dispel illusion.

GRADE: A-

"I am a professor of parables," writes author Greg Dening, "and the Bounty is a parable. Indeed, there is much parable about ourselves in our peculiarly twentieth-century representations of the past of the Bounty." Five of those representations have taken the form of film. Dening has added a sixth, in the form of a three-act academesque. Thoughtful prologue(s), entr'actes, and an epilogue link the narrative to its historical context, its local mise-en-scene, and its modern role as an icon of cultural literacy. The drama takes place aboard ship (a wooden world where the language of every action reverberates upon the soul of the voyage), on the beach (the place where the conquering sea meets the vanquished land, a transitive action complete with subject and object), and on the island (where sailors fall from grace with the sea, "bad language" in anybody's book). The entr'actes bring us face to face with rituals of sacrifice, peace offerings, and politics, a brash yet brilliant contrast of original Polynesian culture with that of colonizing England. In Dening's final analysis, it's all a matter of management - management of work and play, management of the "oeconomy," management of the sublime - all work together to form one unabridged narrative of drama at sea in the eighteenth century. Superb.

I, too, found this book to be a plodding bore. I did finally manage to get all the way through, but it took months of effort (got to get back to it--after all, I paid good money for it!). Way too scholarly for any except the most masochistic. Re-read "Mutiny on the Bounty" -- maybe not the historical accuracy wanted, but a wonderful read none-the-less!

Dening provides an interesting history of the Bounty story - what makes it different is his focus on the disparity between fact and the fiction that developed surrounding the characters of Christian and Bligh.

I liked the book (I read in twice, in fact), and I was a little put-off by the other online reviews. Maybe the book is, as another reader put it, "scholarly" but I didn't view that as a negative. All books need not be written for the average Joe (and, incidentally, cliometrics can be found in any decent dictionary) - so what's the problem?

An essential but not easy read for all Kiwis and anyone else interested in the land down under.

This book is essential to anybody interested in NZ history, and History in general. It is wonderfully written and summarises a detailed history of NZ very well. Highly recommended.

I should explain that I am an Australian (now also a NZ Citizen)who has lived in NZ for 36 years. Like most Australians, I was almost totally ignorant of NZ before coming here, but have tried to read what has become available over the years in order to gain a better understanding of my adopted country. That reading included the short Penguin history of New Zealand by Sir Keith Sinclair. That history was written with an emphasis on the Pakeha ('European') perspective characteristic of the times. Michael King's book redresses the balance and greatly emphasises the Maori perspective, and Maori/Pakeha relations. I found this fascinating and instructive, and not irrelevant to gaining a better understanding some current social issues. The book is strikingly coherent, and is an easy read because it flows so well. The book is an example of excellent writing. I am left, however, with a strange feeling of uease. Although the book is a long one, there is a feeling that it often just skims the surface. The big picture, as the author saw it, appears to have obscured or even obliterated other material. For example, one is none, or only a little, wiser about how New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, lived at home during World War II and the Great Depression. The author's admiration for NZ soldiers comes through strongly, but is not balanced by an adequate treatment of the appalling, unjust, and well-documented, abuse of conscientious objectors, particularly during World War I. He embraces the scientist Maurice Wilkins as a New Zealander who went abroad to pursue his career: in fact, Maurice Wilkins was born in New Zealand, but taken back to Britain by his parents as a small boy, and never returned. This may be the only inaccuracy in the book, but it does not inspire confidence in its complete accuracy. In short, this book is a good and compelling read, written from a particular point of view. It should not be read as the only account by people who want a balanced understanding of the short history of these islands. Tragically, the author is no longer alive to revise his work: one hopes that another historian will do so.

When I was younger my family and I lived in New Zealand. We moved back to the US while I was still in grade school and for the first time since then we went back this winter. Being older this time I had decide that I wanted to learn a little bit about NZ history. I was luck because New Zealand is such a literal society that they had more than enough suggestions for me. This book however was the book that came up most often when I asked book store. I was real apprehensive to get it though because it looked so long and I had really just been looking for something I could read while on vacation. I couldn't be happier with my decision in the end. For being so thick I was able to read this book in only a couple of weeks and I am not a fast reader. Not only was it a quality book that keep me reading it was also broken up into chapters and sections that made it easy to read. Not living in New Zealand or planning on going back as often as I would like, I only wanted information on certain aspects of NZ history. The way this book read I was able to get into the parts I wanted to and skim over some areas with out feeling like I was missing out on the flow of the book. It had everything I could have wanted to know and more in it. Good read.

Upon visiting New Zealand for the first time two years ago, an enthusiastic Kiwi colleague recommended Michael King's recently published Penguin History of New Zealand as 'a true page-turner'.

Five hundred and seventy pages later, I am almost prepared to agree. It may well be that not even John Grisham could write a true page-turner about this beautiful and endearing country's history. Regardless, Michael King has done about as superb job with the material in hand as one can imagine.

The reigning paradigm that makes itself felt throughout the book is the interaction between Maori and Pakeha, a troubled but not persistently bellicose relationship that colors nearly every aspect of New Zealanders' life up until the present time. Some of course will suspect that this is overstatement by an outsider who cannot know how genuinely normal life on these two islands is most of the time. Perhaps they are right, though it must be conceded that any single volume that attempts a sweeping history of the place must necessarily pay attention to this indivisible division among its mosaic of people.

It is the achievement of that very panoramic coherence and the readable - page-turning might be a stretch - manner in which it is presented that represents the late author's victory. He was patently a man both enamored with and to some degree frustrated by his land and its inhabitants. Just as evidently, he must have loved to talk about that place. Only one who first spoke often and well about it could write so eloquently of his number eight wire country, where almost anything is possible with a little grit and ingenuity. Even a page-turning history - we might finally concede - of New Zealand.