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Leviathan - Book Review by Tim Neale
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An extraordinary journey into the underwater world of the whale. What is the true nature of the whale? Why does it fascinate us? All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed with these creatures, from the huge skeletons in London's Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. In 'Leviathan', he seeks to locate and identify that obsession.
Book review by Tim Neale of TimeOut Bookstore, Mt. Eden, Auckland - Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare (9780007230136, Fourth Estate Ltd.).
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Mr. Gloomingdale's Downpour - Children's Book Read Aloud
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New Zealand author and illustrator Andrew Conlan reads his wonderful children's picture book Mr. Gloomingdale's Downpour.
Mr. Gloomingdale has been grumpy for so long that he can't even remember why he was in a bad mood in the first place. When he wishes for sunshine and light to go away and leave him to be gloomy, his wish backfires in a way that he doesn't expect!
Mr. Gloomingdale's Downpour is a charming illustrated story for all children starring an endearingly grouchy character that learns a valuable lesson about helping others.
ISBN: 9780986454929, Published by Gracewood Hollows, RRP $NZ17.99 Paperback.
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Music by Kevin MacLeod |
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Brooklyn - Book review by Carole Beu
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Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth.
Book review by Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop, Ponsonby, Auckland - Brooklyn by Colm Toibin (9780330425612, Picador).
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Miles From Nowhere - Book Review by Sarah Webster
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Teenage Joon is a Korean immigrant living in the Bronx of the 1980s. Her parents have crumbled under the weight of her father's infidelity; he has left the family, and mental illness has rendered her mother nearly catatonic. So Joon, at the age of thirteen, decides she would be better off on her own, a choice that commences a harrowing and often tragic journey that exposes the painful difficulties of a life lived on the margins.
Book review by Sarah Webster of TimeOut Bookstore, Mt. Eden, Auckland - Miles From Nowhere by Nami Mun (9781844085446, Virago Press).
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Charlie Higson at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Charlie Higson wrote four thriller novels for adults in the early 1990s and recently wrote a series of five James Bond books for a younger readership. He has now launched a new horror/zombie/adventure series for kids, The Enemy, with book 2, The Dead, due out in 2010. He appears in the comedy series 'Bellamy's People', a new show he has once again co-created with Paul Whitehouse. Charlie lives in London.
Danger Society: The Young Bond Dossier (2009) is published by Penguin (ISBN 9780141329048).
Video produced for http://bookTV.co.nz by CLIP Video, http://clipvideo.co.nz |
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Will Grayson, Will Grayson - Book review by Carole Beu
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In alternating chapters, the authors track two teens, both named Will Grayson, who accidentally meet halfway through the novel, perhaps changing the trajectory of both of their lives. One Will is vintage Green: a smart nerd whose rules to live by include "don't care too much," with a scene-stealing sidekick-Tiny Cooper, a large, flamboyantly gay classmate intent on staging an autobiographical musical. The other will (lowercase throughout) is angry and depressed; the one bright spot in his existence is an online friendship with "Isaac." When will agrees to meet Isaac one night in Chicago, readers know nothing good will happen-and they will be wrong.
Book review by Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop, Ponsonby, Auckland - Will Grayson, Will Grayson by David Levithan and John Green (9781921656231, Text Publishing Co.).
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Major Pettigrew's Last Stand - Book review by Carole Beu
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The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
Book review by Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop, Ponsonby, Auckland - Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (9781742371849, Allen & Unwin).
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Alison Wong at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Alison Wong's debut novel As the Earth Turns Silver is a 2010 NZ Post Book Awards finalist. Her poetry collection, Cup, was shortlisted for the Best First Book of Poetry at the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and in 2009 she received the Janet Frame Award for Fiction.
As the Earth Turns Silver (2009) is published by Penguin (ISBN 9780143011675).
Video produced for http://bookTV.co.nz by CLIP Video, http://clipvideo.co.nz |
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Did You Really Shoot The Television? by Max Hastings - Book Review by Doris Mousdale
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Max Hastings's account of his family's tumultuous 20th century experiences embraces the worlds of fashion and newspapers, theatre and TV, pioneering in Africa and even -- his father's most exotic 1960 stunt -- being cast away on a desert island in the Indian Ocean.
Book review by Doris Mousdale of Arcadia Bookshop, Newmarket, Auckland - Did You Really Shoot The Television? by Max Hastings (9780007271719, HarperCollins).
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Band of Gold by Deborah Challinor - Book Review by Doris Mousdale
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On the goldfields of Ballarat, vows are broken - can a wounded heart ever forgive?
When the Yarrowee River bursts its banks, Rian Farrell, a dashing Irish sea captain and part-time gunrunner, disappears in the torrential flood. Believing herself a widow, the headstrong and passionate Kitty Farrell's heart is left in tatters after the sudden death of her beloved husband. In her grief, she finally succumbs to the attractions of his long-time shipmate, Daniel, who has loved her from afar for many years.
The consequences are disastrous, and will challenge Kitty Farrell both physically and mentally. The resulting novel is a heady mix of powerful relationships and memorable, passionate characters, whose compelling story plays out against a skilfully depicted and utterly realistic backdrop of Old Ballarat.
Book review by Doris Mousdale of Arcadia Bookshop, Newmarket, Auckland - Band of Gold by Deborah Challinor (9781869506346, HarperCollins).
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As The Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong - Book review by Carole Beu
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From the late nineteenth century to the 1920's, from Kwangtung, China to Wellington and Dunedin and the Battlefields of the Western Front -- A story of two families.Yung faces a new land that does not welcome the Chinese. Alone, Katherine struggles to raise her children and find her place in the world. In a climate of hostility towards the foreign newcomers, Katherine and Yung embark on a poignant and far-reaching love affair . . . .
Book review by Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop, Ponsonby, Auckland - As The Earth Turns Silver by Alison Wong (9780143011675, Penguin).
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The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver - Book review by Carole Beu
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Winner of the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver's ambitious new novel, her first in nine years (after the The Poisonwood Bible), focuses on Harrison William Shepherd, the product of a divorced American father and a Mexican mother. After getting kicked out of his American military academy, Harrison spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo; and their houseguest, Leon Trotsky, who is hiding from Soviet assassins.
Video book review by Carole Beu of the Women's Bookshop, Ponsonby, Auckland - The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (9780571252640, Faber and Faber).
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Yiyun Li at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Yiyun Li has had stories and essays published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories and elsewhere.
Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) won the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, the Guardian First Book Award in 2006, and the California Book Award for first fiction. It was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and the Orange Prize for New Writers, and made into an award-winning film directed by Wayne Wang.
Her debut novel, The Vagrants (2009), is set during a time of the anti-Communist groundswell in late 1970s China.
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Sarah Thornton at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Sarah Thornton is a Canadian writer and sociologist of culture. Since 2003, she has been investigating the social dynamics of contemporary art.
Her second book, Seven Days in the Art World (2008), is a witty series of non-fiction narratives, revealing the inner workings of the institutions that contribute to an artist's place in art history. Based on intensive ethnographic research (i.e. hundreds of hours of participant observation and in-depth interviews with over 250 people), the book is an international hit, translated into ten languages.
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Ian Wedde at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Ian Wedde is a poet, fiction writer, critic and art curator and the author of 13 previous collections of poems, five novels, short stories, essays and criticism, and the editor of several anthologies and art catalogues.
He was awarded an Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2006, and was the Creative New Zealand / University of Auckland Michael King Writer in Residence in 2009.
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Colm Toibin at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Colm Tóibín is one of Ireland's most well-known writers.
He has written six novels including The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Master (2004), for which he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2006, and his latest novel Brooklyn (2009), winner of the 2009 Costa Book of the Year.
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Witi Ihimaera at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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Witi Ihimaera (Te Whanau-a-Kai) is a novelist and short story writer who has published 11 novels, 6 collections of short stories, written new work for opera and screenplays, and edited numerous anthologies. His novel, The Whale Rider, first published in 1988, was made into an internationally acclaimed feature film in 2002, directed by Niki Caro.
He has also written a screenplay adaptation of his novel The Matriarch. Witi was one of five Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureates in 2009, and he was also honoured with New Zealand's premier Māori arts award Te Tohu Tiketike a Te Waka Toi in January 2010.
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John Carey at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2010
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John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, a distinguished critic, reviewer, broadcaster, Booker judge and the author of many books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray. His celebrated polemic What Good are the Arts? (2005) provoked much debate and discussion.
A regular critic on BBC2's Newsnight Review as well as chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times, he also edited The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias. His most recent work is the acclaimed biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (2009).
John divides his time between a home in Oxford and converted 18th century farm cottages in the Cotswalds. His interests, other than 'writing to stimulate and involve the general reader', are keeping bees and printmaking.
Produced for bookTV.co.nz by CLIP Video, Auckland, clipvideo.co.nz. |
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REVIEW: Whitcoulls Kobo eBook Reader Reviewed
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Blogger and Digital Publishing Forum Director Martin Taylor reviews the new Kobo eReader, now available in New Zealand through Whitcoulls stores and online.
Produced for bookTV.co.nz by CLIP Video production services, Auckland, clipvideo.co.nz. |
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Book Review: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky
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Reviewed by Lily Richards, Unity Books Auckland.
An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace's Infinite Jest tour
In author David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love.
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.
Produced for bookTV.co.nz by CLIP Video, Auckland, NZ, clipvideo.co.nz. |
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BookTV.nz is New Zealand's channel for watching and sharing web video book reviews, book trailers, author videos, video book readings, new book news, and anything book-related. Follow bookTV.nz to receive notifications of the latest videos.
