Sports Stories: Books from Te Pataka

This blog collects stories and writings of New Zealand sports people, from sportsmen on the field to TVNZ’s sports journalists, from dark horses to well-known champions. This blog also provides unique perspective to some significant sports people and events in New Zealand. Whether you are interested in rugby, cricket, rowing, soccer or Olympics, you will find something interesting to read.

A tingling catch : a century of New Zealand cricket poems, 1864-2009
“Edited by cricket follower Mark Pirie and foreword (and a poem) by well-known cricket historian, former national selector and former president of NZ Cricket, Don Neely. From Samuel Butler’s classic description of the visiting All-England XI in 1864 to Arnold Wall’s widely known First World War piece, ‘A Time Will Come’, to the ‘underarm incident’ of 1981 and more recent cricket poems. This book is sure to appeal to cricket lovers and poetry readers.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

The Awa book of New Zealand sports writing
“Triumphs, disasters, magic moments, and controversies abound in this collection of writing by top New Zealand sportswriters, including Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest, Jack Lovelock’s famous 1,500-meter victory in the shadow of Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Jean Batten’s daring, first solo flight from England to New Zealand. Politics and sports come together in a gripping account of the protests, arrests, and controversy surrounding the South African rugby team’s 1981 tour of New Zealand.” (Adapted from Amazon.com)

A life in sport / Telfer, Brendan
” New Zealand’s best known sports broadcaster Brendan Telfer looks back on his career and deals with the Olympic Games, test rugby, international athletics, apartheid in sport, and radio and television broadcasting since 1974. In this book he covers many controversial topics and provides a personal account of working in the field. Stories include the Goodwill Games, TVNZ insider’s view, and comments about Peter Snell, Murry Halberg, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, Carl Lewis, Bob Charles, Alan Jones and more.” (Adapted from the Catalogue) Continue reading “Sports Stories: Books from Te Pataka”

Adventurous Huts of NZ: books from Te Pataka

This blog explores huts in the high mountains, dramatic Fiordland or icy Antarctica. Some huts are located on this country’s beautiful landscape and make an internationally distinctive statement and icon, some are functional for local farming and mining, while others mark scientific importance across the ages.

A tramper’s journey : stories from the back country of New Zealand / Pickering, Mark
“A celebration of the culture and spirit of tramping in New Zealand. Mark Pickering takes both a serious and humorous look at tramping from a personal perspective. This is one of the few books on tramping which attempts to explain the appeal of an activity which can be strenuous, uncomfortable and often dangerous, but brings its own unique rewards as a result of the effort.” (Catalogue)

Huts : untold stories from back-country New Zealand / Pickering, Mark
“If huts could talk they could tell the whole history of the back country. Of Scottish shepherds who arrived in the high country with the fresh, vivid memories of the Highland Clearances. Of the flush and fury of goldminers and water-racemen in Central Otago. Of the patient and poorly paid jobs of boundary keepers, musterers and roadmen, who lived in tiny huts in the shadow of huge landscapes. Some of the 1500 huts in New Zealand tells the social and mountain history.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

The daily journal of an Antarctic explorer, 1956-1958 / Warren, Guyon
“Guyon Warren was one of a small group of men who spent 15 consecutive months in the Antarctic in the late 1950s. Warren was a member and geologist of Sir Edmund Hillary’s team travelling from South Pole to the Ross Sea. With his exploration on the ice he helped established Scott Base, right from the construction of the first hut. In this book he rewards you with insights into the day-to-day conditions experienced by himself and his colleagues in the Antarctic.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

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Illustrated Lives: Biographies and Memoirs in Graphic Novel Form

If you have never read a graphic novel – maybe because you find yourself reluctant to pick one up or assume that they’re all superhero stories or just for kids – perhaps an illustrated biography or memoir might tempt you to give them a try. Illustrated biographies are a very popular genre and there are plenty of them to get into. Perhaps you could give one or two of these suggestions a go?

Johnny Cash : I see a darkness : a graphic novel / Kleist, Reinhard
“Cash was a 17-time Grammy winner who sold more than 90 million albums in his lifetime and became an icon of American music in the 20th century. Graphic novelist Reinhard Kleist depicts Johnny Cash’s eventful life from his early sessions with Elvis Presley (1956), through the concert in Folsom Prison (1968), his spectacular comeback in the 1990s, and the final years before his death on September 12, 2003.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

It’s lonely at the centre of the Earth : an auto-bio-graphic-novel / Thorogood, Zoe
“The 2023 Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award winning cartoonist, Zoe Thorogood, records six months of her own life as it falls apart in a desperate attempt to put it back together again in the only way she knows how. It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth is an intimate and meta-narrative look into the life of a selfish artist who must create for her own survival. A poignant and original depiction of a young woman’s struggle with mental health–through the ups and downs of anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome–as she forges a promising career in sequential art and finds herself along the way.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

Andre the Giant : closer to heaven / Easton, Brandon M.
“He was called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” and became an inspiration for millions of wrestling fans all over the globe. While his in-ring exploits were full of flash and spectacle, the personal life of Andre “The Giant” Roussimoff was complicated by an excess of partying and the devastating physical toll of his deteriorating health. This graphic novel biography explores the bookmarks of Andre’s story.” (Catalogue)

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Keeping up with the Jones: new mysteries in our collection

Tesla Teslasdeathray GIF by Discovery Europe

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Welcome to this month’s selection of newly acquired detective and thriller titles. There is a host of goodies on offer this month but the title that caught our eye was The Wharton Plot by Mariah Fredericks, in which the acclaimed author and socialite Edith Wharton solves a tricky mystery.

Author Edith Wharton is perhaps better known as the chronicler of America’s gilded age, approximately the mid-1870s to the late 1890s, through which Edith Wharton lived.  This time in America’s history is known for its rapid economic expansion, materialistic excess and associated political corruption – in short, a perfect period and location in which to set a detective story.

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 into New York aristocracy. Her family name was Jones and their  wealth was such that it led to the phrase, still in use today, “keeping up with the Jones” being coined about them. She became a hugely gifted writer, realistically portraying the morals and lives of her time. Her novel The Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and she was the first ever female recipient of the prize. She went on to write numerous other well-known novels such as The House of Mirth and her ghost stories are highly recommended. She passed in 1937 and was posthumously inducted  into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.

Our other top tips in this month’s selection can be viewed below.

The Wharton plot : a novel / Fredericks, Mariah
“New York City, 1911. Edith Wharton, almost equally famed for her novels and her sharp tongue, is bone-tired of Manhattan. Finding herself at a crossroads with both her marriage and her writing, she makes the decision to leave America, her publisher, and her loveless marriage. And then, dashing novelist David Graham Phillips–a writer with often notorious ideas about society and women’s place in it–is shot to death outside the Princeton Club. Edith herself met the man only once, when the two formed a mutual distaste over tea in the Palm Court of the Belmont hotel. When Phillips is killed, Edith’s life takes another turn, as she becomes obsessed with solving a crime.” (Adapted from Catalogue)

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Poems about the landscape: Books from Te Pataka

The tingling sand in your toes, the smell of pinewood in the forest and the howling wind everywhere… the earth’s beautiful landscape is poetic. From Whanganui River to Banks Peninsula, from famous poets to eminent photographers, this blog features landscape, river, lighthouse and animal poems from across New Zealand.

Land very fertile : Banks Peninsula in poetry and prose
“Engaging a mix of style and content that embraces the peninsula’s unique heritage and charm, this collection of poetry and prose about a special region in New Zealand draws from a wide variety of sources–including such New Zealand greats as Ursula Bethell, James K. Baxter, Denis Glover, Ngaio Marsh, Allen Curnow, and Maurice Shadbolt, along with many newer voices. The contributions are thematically arranged to capture the ambience of Banks Peninsula on the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

Flow : Whanganui River poems / Beautrais, Airini
“Where there is water, people settle and stories collect. Six generations of poet Airini Beautrais’ family have lived near the Whanganui River, all-encompassing figure at the heart of Flow. Flow is a brilliant polyphony of stories – large, small, geological, ecological, and human. In March 2017, in a world first, the Whanganui River was granted the status of legal personhood. ‘This remarkable sequence winds and eddies like the Whanganui River, filtering the region’s many histories into something rich and swimmable.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

The nature of things : poems from the New Zealand landscape
“The Nature of Things is a celebration of the relationship between poetry and the New Zealand landscape. It matches a wide range of poems, that in some way evoke or describe our landscape, with images from the pre-eminent New Zealand photographer Craig Potton. The poems have been selected and the introduction written by James Brown, one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary poets The Nature of Things includes work from many of the central figures.” (Adapted from the Catalogue)

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The Lost Sunflower: our latest fiction titles

Van Gogh Animation GIF

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Welcome to another selection of new fiction titles. As is now customary, we like to pick one aspect of one of the books on offer and explore it a bit further. The title that caught our eye this month was The Lost Van Gogh by Jonathan Santlofer – a novel which revolves around the discovery of a long-lost Vincent Van Gogh self portrait and the mysteries surrounding it.

The premise to this book is entirely fictional but in reality, there is a lost Van Gogh masterpiece. As well as his self-portraits Van  Gogh was, of course, famous for his luminous paintings of sunflowers . He painted eight in total; six are in major public collections, one in private hands and one is lost.

In 1920 a Japanese collector bought a Vincent Van Gogh painting called Six Sunflowers, painted in 1888, and they took it to Japan shortly after its purchase. It was quite unlike any of the other sunflower paintings – being influenced by Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese woodblock art, and it was framed in a bright orange frame, revolutionary for the time, that complimented the colours used in the work.  Tragically, this masterwork was destroyed in the Osaka fire bombings at the end of World War II in 1945. We are, however, fortunate that some photographs of the painting were taken before it was lost and you can see one of those photographs here.

Van Gogh loved the perceived coarse and unrefined nature of sunflowers’ structure. As well as their colours and relationship with the sun, he also intended them to symbolise gratitude. Indeed, he decorated Paul Gauguin’s room with sunflower paintings when he stayed with him at the yellow house in Place Lamartine in Arles southern France.

We also have copies of  the already heavily  acclaimed Lioness by Emily Perkins just in and a host of other goodies.

The lost Van Gogh : a novel / Santlofer, Jonathan
“For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist’s many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever. But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into a most epic art puzzles. When only days later the painting disappears again…” (Adapted from Catalogue)

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