Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World by Steve Braunias

Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World by Steve Braunias – review

Steve Braunias encounters an unending string of recluses, loners, divorcees, oddballs and obsessives in his travels through “the edge of the world”.

By Peter Riordan In Books

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13th December, 2012

A foreigner reading Steve Braunias’s study of small-town New Zealand might decide we’re a nation of complete misfits, so liberally are its pages sprinkled with unappealing characters squatting in dilapidated digs. The hapless reader would certainly not think we possessed anything readily identifiable with that word in the book’s title, “civilisation”. Indeed, the picture to emerge of hidden-away New Zealand is so depressed, so depressing and, in parts, so alarming that any intending visitor, having read Braunias’s book, would probably cancel his or her airline booking ...

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