Journalism; Language; Memoir; Art/Design; FoodThe best books of 2004, as chosen by the Listener's reviewers - Elizabeth Alley, Nick Bollinger, David Cohen, Charlotte Grimshaw, David Hill, Rachael King, David Larsen, Philip Matthews, William McAloon, Paula Morris, Matt Nippert, Carl Shuker, Terry Snow and Denis Welch.
JOURNALISM
MY TRADE, A short history of British journalism, by Andrew Marr (Macmillan, $69.95).
Marr, the BBC’s political editor, fossicks happily around in journalism’s murky riches from before its modern 18th-century roots up to Iraq war coverage, using candour (“The dirty art of political journalism”) and humour (the section on journalists, “The snobs and the soaks”). Having risen from self-described trainee hack to political journalist, columnist and radio and TV presence, he describes his brief, disastrous term as editor of the Independent newspaper and weighs up the characters of Fleet St (David Montgomery, Mirror group head, thought of himself as World War II general Monty, but the ranks called him Rommel “because Monty was on our side”). General readers should enjoy the insightful sections on what is news, how newspapers go together and how broadcasters work.
TELL ME NO LIES, edited by John Pilger (Random House, $45).
This book reads like a roll call of the last 60 years’ best investigative journalism: Seymour Hersh on My Lai, Robert Fisk on Lebanon, Paul Foot on Lockerbie, Jessica Mitford on the California funeral industry and Pilger himself on Cambodia and East Timor. There are also gems from lesser-known writers, such as the German reporter who disguised himself as a Turk in order to experience life as an immigrant worker – the coalface of globalisation never looked so dark or nasty. Serving as the ultimate bluffer’s guide for a liberal dinner party, this book should restore the faith of a New Zealand audience that still remembers Pilger’s testy tête-à-tête with Kim Hill.
LANGUAGE
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss (Profile Books, $35).
Journalist and language evangelist Lynne Truss began crusading in earnest for proper punctuation and correct grammar after she was moved to protest angrily outside a cinema that advertised the film Two Weeks Time, minus apostrophe. She paraded with a large apostrophe on the tip of a stick. Truss acknowledges that her inner stickler might annoy, and parts of this lively 209-page book can be didactic, about exclamation and quotation marks, for example. But Truss’s vivid take on mistreated apostrophes (Dicks in tray. Prudential – were here to help you. Please replace the trolley’s – the trolley’s what?) is alone worth the book.
THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester (Oxford University Press, $42.95).
The appeal to readers everywhere to help with published quotations illustrative of words, was the masterstroke in compiling all 414,825 words of the giant 12-volume first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1928). Under the aegis of several editors, and finally the great autodidact James Murray, the planned 10-year project took 71 years (“a” to “zyxt”), 16,000 pages, six million quotation slips and cost £300,000. Winchester’s book is rich in lightly worn erudition and measured entertainment, centred on the spirited volunteer contributors like Dr William C Minor, the surgeon of Crowthorne, who sent quotations from his library in his sitting-room cell in the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
MEMOIR
WHERE I WAS FROM, by Joan Didion (Flamingo, $34.99).
What is the meaning of California? In this entrancing memoir, the state’s greatest essayist reflects on the pioneers, including her own ancestors, who crossed the continent but left the past behind – they buried the dead and kept on moving. “For most of my life,” she writes, “California felt rich to me: that was the point of it, that was the promise; the reward for having left the past behind.”
CHRONICLE OF THE UNSUNG, by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press, $34.99).
Down and out of it in Sydney and London. Edmond’s slim art-and-drugs memoir Chemical Evolution ended with Edmond leaving New Zealand at the end of the 1970s for pastures green. Chronicle of the Unsung picks up the story. Edmond is an erudite and digressive writer and his memoirs intersect with musings on art and writing – this is indeed a “travelogue of the mind”. He gets a ticket to scout film locations in Fiji, and walks into Rabuka’s coup. He takes acid on Kawau Island, and “the stars flared like coloured stones”.
DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM, by David Sedaris (Abacus, $34.95).
“Every family has a secret,” says Alan Bennett, “and the secret is that it’s not like other families.” Sedaris is still mining the secrets of his odd upbringing in this latest essay collection. Things never work out for the Sedaris family – vacation homes don’t materialise, rich relatives dislike them – but if “things worked out, you wouldn’t have been happy for us”, says Sedaris. “We’re not that kind of people.” There aren’t screech-out-loud pieces like “The Santaland Diaries”, but Sedaris is as strange (“I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket”), funny and unsettling as ever.
GHOST DANCE, by Douglas Wright (Penguin, $39.95).
Like Wright’s best dance works, this wonderful memoir combines an elegiac sense – meditations on the proximity of death (Wright has been HIV positive since 1989) – with an energetic, lusty sense of humour. In tracing his story, Wright is also tracing the movement of marginalised New Zealanders towards the centre of the culture. How fitting that Janet Frame should have been a friend and mentor.
ART/DESIGN
HANDBOEK: ANS WESTRA PHOTOGRAPHS, edited by Luit Bieringa (Blair Wakefield Exhibitions, $80).
One of the year’s best exhibitions also provided one of 2004′s best books. Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs is a stunning and substantial contribution to New Zealand art history. Given the nature and scope of Westra’s work, make that New Zealand history, period. As well as an introduction by exhibition curator Luit Bieringa, the book features essays by eight writers. There’s plenty for them to work with, as Westra has directed her lens across New Zealand’s cultural and social borders for nearly 50 years. Beautifully designed and splendidly printed, Handboek provides a comprehensive account of Westra’s achievement.
JOHN KINDER’S NEW ZEALAND, by Ron Brownson, with contributions from Peter Shaw, Michael Dunn and Roger Blackley (Godwit/Auckland Art Gallery, $49.95).
If the church was Reverend John Kinder’s vocation, then art could be described as his true calling. That’s one impression that emerges from this superbly produced volume, published to coincide with Auck-land Art Gallery’s exhibition of the same name. Kinder’s exquisitely detailed watercolours show New Zealand with typical colonial idealism, but it’s his photographs – of Maori, of museum collections, of the landscape as tourist playground or exploitable resource – that really make the book. Not that it’s a straightforward contrast between the imagined and the real. The essays show the complex ways in which photography and painting co-existed in Kinder’s world-view, and how that view was seen in his time.
AT HOME: A Century of New Zealand Design, by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Godwit, $69.95).
“At last we have it. Here is a large and long-awaited book that anyone with an interest in design in this country will find an indispensable reference for many years to come. Researched and written by a widely acknowledged authority on the subject, tested in many a classroom (though it is certainly not dryly academic), At Home describes the transformations of the New Zealand home, both inside and out, from its English origins in the 1900s.” – Peter Shaw (Listener, November 13)
TOSS WOOLLASTON: A LIFE IN LETTERS, edited by Jill Trevelyan (Te Papa Press, $59.95).
In selecting for publication 419 letters from the more than 2700 she uncovered, Trevelyan gave priority to letters about the theory and practice of Woollaston’s art. Try this, from 1971: “when you paint a landscape you aren’t making visible again what is already visible – the physical landscape – you are making visible your feelings when you look at it. If they are really your own then they were never visible before and you have done what art should do – make something unseen visible for the first time.” This fine book does something similar: it lets us see Woollaston’s art anew.
FOOD
THE PEDANT IN THE KITCHEN, by Julian Barnes (Atlantic Books/The Guardian $24.95).
Raised in a generation that precluded middle-class English boys from learning the secrets of the kitchen (along with the voting booth, the pew and the marital bed), Barnes came late to the culinary arts, determined to overcome his background of soggy beetroot sandwiches and fluorescent bacon chop. After early and disastrous experiments involving mackerel, martini and breadcrumbs, leaving guests drunk but still hungry, he learns that becoming a pedant in his own kitchen means finding the balance between dogged slavery and harmonious creativity, and that cooking is the transformation of uncertainty into certainty, via fuss. This is a gem of a book for the foodie who doesn’t need another recipe book but identifies with all the ambiguities of gastronomic precision. Witty, entertaining and funny, Barnes writes far more endearingly about food than he generally does about women. It’s unmissable.
FEAST, by Nigella Lawson (Chatto & Windus, $79.95).
Food “is the vital way we celebrate anything that matters”, says Lawson, and this beautiful book, as useful and user-friendly as How to Eat, is stuffed with recipes for every possible celebration. Included are recipes for the usual high days and holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter) and more, from the sublime (Venetian and Georgian) to the ridiculous (midnight feasts and Halloween treats). Unlike too many bossy celebrity chefs, the author doesn’t want to be a “kitchen dictator” – “This is not so much a recipe, more an enthusiastic suggestion” – and through Lawson’s cheery, chatty instructions and asides, Feast communicates pure greedy joy.