Books
Books of the Year
by Listener writers
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NO SAFE HARBOUR, by David Hill (Mallinson Rendel, $16.95).
If bringing history alive is a virtue, you can’t get much better than this. Evocative, compelling and downright scary in its first-hand re-creation of the Wahine disaster, this book is a salutary reminder that, in any one year, some of the best writing is done for children. David Hill has been doing it for a long time and this is a triumph.
ROIVAN, by Glynne MacLean (Penguin, $16.95).
Part one of a young adults’ sci-fi series called The A’nzarian Chronicle follows the adventures of Roivan, an alien girl sent to teleport the void between the arms of the galaxy to find humans. Caught in the centre of a web of intergalactic political intrigue, she has a real power to make a difference in an adult world – so it should appeal to its intended teenage audience as much as it does to adult readers. It’s brilliantly imaginative and admirably gripping, but nowhere near as scary as its cover.
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE
PHOENIX, by J K Rowling (Bloomsbury, $49.99).
The plot-packed fifth Harry Potter instalment has some centaurs and dragon meat thrown in to disguise rather conventional origins, and it’s so long that it even wears our hero out. But there’s still plenty of life in Rowling’s series, especially now that Ron’s outgrowing the Invisibility Cloak and Harry’s started having teen domestics in teashops.
ALL I WANT IS EVERYTHING, by Cecily von Ziegesar (Bloomsbury, $18.95).
The latest in the racy Gossip Girl series, centred on teenage heroine Blair Waldorf, a little rich girl who does a lot of shopping, vomiting and gossiping. Kind of like Jackie Collins, but without the sex – and a hell of a lot funnier.
MUSIC
SOLID FOUNDATION, by David Katz (Allen & Unwin, $59.95).
An oral history of Jamaican reggae, told by more than 250 musicians, not all of whom are Rastafarians, and some who are not necessarily stoned. It’s a sprawling, fascinating story and Katz is a good-humoured and diligent guide: “One artist invited me to the countryside but neglected to tell me that on the return journey he and a colleague would be transporting a consignment of counterfeit Gucci bags and the largest quantity of marijuana I have ever seen.”
MR S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra, by George Jacobs and Bill Stadiem (Macmillan, $59.95).
A memoir of Frank Sinatra, as told by his chauffeur. “We learn which hookers sported what is now termed a Brazilian wax, which celebs of the time had a big dick (Frank, of course), where Frank liked a girl’s lingerie (‘on the floor’), that Frank’s bedroom was plastered with photos of his one true love, actress Ava Gardner a decade after she had left him … A compelling, affectionate and brilliantly written portrait,” wrote Greg Fleming (Listener, August 30).
POLITICS
THE CLINTON WARS, by Sidney Blumenthal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $49.95).
This sturdy 800-page repositioning of the President is a strong case for Clinton’s place in history and a pedantic rebuttal of criticisms both major and minor. Bore your friends and enrage your enemies with this detailed reference for who said it, who did it and the special interest groups who paid them. Can also be read alongside Howard Kurtz’s Spin Cycle and George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human for a Zapruder-like triangulation of America’s first and last media-transparent presidency.
A LONG SHORT WAR: The postponed liberation of Iraq, by Christopher Hitchens (Plume, $26).
Collected journalism that articulates Hitchens’s grounds for supporting the invasion of Iraq. As one might expect of a man who called himself a Trotskyite until 1989, he’s at his best when his back’s to the wall. “Regime Change” is a polemical master-class: how to construct an argument, how to deconstruct the argument of an opponent: how to hold a position, when even the succour of minority support for one’s position is evaporating. Whatever one’s opinion of this year’s events in Iraq, Hitchens engages in a level of debate largely absent from his side of the argument, and this alone makes this short book a necessary read.
ART
COLOUR, by Victoria Finlay (Sceptre, $29.99).
In which an art journalist writes about colour. Yes. She tells great stories about why some colours are so rare and so prized, and how colour is made into paint around the world in various cultures. “As Finlay explores the paintbox through her chosen rainbow of 10 major hues, she holds the reader in a warm, easy grip through transports both geographical and emotional … She does sweet justice to her obsessive interest, and delivers readers a charming gift, wrapped in affection,” wrote painter Grahame Sydney (Listener, July 19).
GOYA, by Robert Hughes (Harvill, $64.95).
