Nov/Dec 2009 Highlights

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Coaxed to swing a racket while still in the crib, forced to hit hundreds of balls a day while still in grade school, Agassi resented the constant pressure even as he drove himself to become a prodigy, an inner conflict that would define him. Now, in his beautiful, haunting autobiography, Agassi tells the story of a life framed by such conflicts. Agassi makes us feel his panic as an undersized seven-year-old in Las Vegas, practicing all day under the obsessive gaze of his violent father. We see him at thirteen, banished to a Florida... read more

DoP November 2009, Wellington 275x210mm /240pp Hardcover The cargo and passenger vessels recorded in this book have provided regular and scheduled services across Cook Strait since the late 19th century, establishing and maintaining the vital link between Wellington and the South Island ports of Lyttelton, Picton and Nelson. Many will forever be a part of our nation's history. Most are forgotten in time. Described are the ships that, year after year, in war and peace, carried our commerce and families between north and south.... read more

Three brothers from a remote village in the Himalayas are driven by poverty to become monks. One becomes a famous masked dancer; the second an accomplished player of the Tibetan temple trumpet; and the third a great Buddhist scholar. A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death. A woman leaves her middle class family in Calcutta and her job in a jute factory, only to find unexpected love and fulfillment living as a tantric in a skull-filled hut in remote a cremation groun... read more

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County - to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto - pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. In a story spanning five decades, Last Night in Twisted River - John Irving's twelfth novel -... read more

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Celebrated storyteller Stephen King returns to his roots in this tour de force featuring more than 100 characters - some heroic, some diabolical - and a supernatural element as baffling and chilling as any he's ever conjured. On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as 'the dome' comes down on it, people runnin... read more

For Europeans during the nineteenth century, the Urewera was a remote and savagely enticing wilderness; for those who lived there, it was a sheltering heartland. This history documents the first hundred years of the ‘Rohe Potae’ (the ‘encircled lands’ of the Urewera) following European contact. Early in the period, the terrain was criss-crossed by missionaries, and (from 1866) by government troops. In 1866–67 large areas were taken by confiscation or forced cession. At the end of the fighting in 1872, by the agreed terms ... read more

Sam Hunt's life as a poet and performer has always strayed far off the straight and narrow, more akin to following a series of winding backroads that have led to places and people away from the mainstream. As a child, Hunt was surrounded by 'a lot of words, a lot of poems,' and from the age of eight, he knew he wanted to live the life of a poet. His parents and grandparents were his earliest influences, and later it was the likes of W. B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda and Dylan Thomas; while within New Zealand, Alistair Campbell, James K. Ba... read more

This magnificent book contains a selection of more than 200 images of New Zealand from the air. Taken from the White's Aviation collection at the Alexander Turnbull Library, these images of towns, cities, landforms and events were taken from the 1930s to the 1970s, and show a landscape still familiar in some cases and changed beyond recognition in others. These stunning black and white images represent an important phase in New Zealand's aviation, aerial photography and publishing industries, and are fascinating to look at. They co... read more