Cover Story
100 best books of 2008
Continued from page 8...
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF, by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, $59.99) . Barnes began the year with this meditation on death; by the end of it, he had lost his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, to a brain tumour. Woven into Barnes’ digressive, chatty philosophical essay are coronets of little stories: about himself as a boy, about his friends, other writers, composers, about music, medicine, sport and his grandparents. His musings on the big question of Being or Not-Being aren’t as gripping as the accumulation of riveting details about the many particular ways in which people actually die. And the book is at its most engaging when, like writer Alphonse Daudet, whom he quotes, he is not bidding farewell to, but remembering, “wife, family, the things of the heart”.
STREET WITHOUT A NAME: CHILDHOOD AND OTHER MISADVENTURES IN BULGARIA, by Kapka Kassabova (Penguin, $28) . After years of roaming the world, a gentle poet of rootlessness, Kassabova finally confronts the past the needles her “like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house”. Street Without a Name is really two books in one. The first half reconstructs Kassabova’s childhood up to the fall of communism, and her departure for “two small accidental splashes of land at the bottom of the world”; in the second half, she returns to Bulgaria as an adult, her ambivalent travels revealing a place that is familiar and yet utterly strange.
Biography
THE BOLTER: IDINA SACKVILLE, THE WOMAN WHO SCANDALISED 1920S SOCIETY AND BECAME WHITE MISCHIEF’S INFAMOUS SEDUCTRESS, by Frances Osborne (Virago, $37.99) . Why can’t New Zealand politiians have racy in-laws like this? Sackville is the great-grandmother of Osborne, wife of British Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. Hers was a life “little hampered by convention”, as a disapproving Daily Express puts it. She was sexually insatiable; five times married and five times divorced, yet he greatest offence to an emphatically upper-cased Society was not her adulterous shenanigans but that she conducted them so openly, rather than under the hypocritical cover favoured by her peers (and, indeed, Peers). A sympathetic portrait that captures a lost age and class.
BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS: JOSEPH NEEDHAM AND THE GREAT SECRETS OF CHINA, by Simon Winchester (Penguin/Viking, $40) . A fascinating account of the extraordinary career of Cambridge biochemist Needham, who, in his magnum opus Science and Civilisation in China, overturned forever assumptions that world-changing inventions were exclusive to the West. Infused with a sense of wonder, vitality and adventure, Winchester’s biography resonates with some of his eccentric subject’s own remarkable energy.
FACING THE MUSIC: CHARLES BAEYERTZ AND THE TRIAD, by Joanna Woods (Otago, $45) . The Triad was a journal for the arts that ran for 32 years from 1893 under the editorship of Baeyertz, a marvel of New Zealand journalism whom Robin Hyde described as “rather excitingly rude to almost everyone”. Sample rudeness: “What in the name of common sense does this mean? Rubbish, also bunkum and bosh.” Or: “Reason stands aghast to see such turgid verbiage committed to print.” And people think CK Stead is a tough critic. Woods’ meticulously researched and wonderfully readable biography shows us a society that was enthusiastically cultured in a far more democratic way than later generations, where the press – combative, arrogant, prescriptive, subversive, educative – was central.
HEAPHY, by Iain Sharp (AUP, $65) . An obvious master with pen and brush, Charles Heaphy had the ability to upskill himself to become an instant expert on convenient subjects, which also qualified him as a bullshit artist. He was a complex and contradictory individual, and a perpetual adventurer who craved recognition. Sharp has scoured sources with a forensic intensity in this heroic – and handsomely presented – attempt to unravel his subject. He concludes by reviewing history’s treatment of the man, and suggests his paintings are worthy of further discussion. Those images may no longer entice immigrants from the Sussex Downs to Johnsonville or Geraldine, but they still have the power to transport us to another time and place.
JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE, by Philip Norman (HarperCollins, $36.99) . Yoko Ono now says Norman has been “mean to John” but the author of Shout: The Beatles in their Generation had her cooperation and remarkable access to son Sean, family, friends and many who have seldom, if ever, spoken about Lennon. The result is a more measured and insightful counterbalance to Albert Goldman’s scurrilous and similarly brick-sized The Lives of John Lennon. Norman’s is a rounded portrait of a complex man, whose sexual desires saturate the book’s pages, along with his charm, quick humour and rare creativity.
