The cold fronts are coming so it’s a great chance to get intimate with a good biography or history book in front of the fire. We continue our coverage of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2008 this week by delving into these two categories.

Let’s take a look at this year’s finalists. And remember to enter the giveaway on NZLive.com.

Biography

The Best Man Who Ever Served the Crown? A Life of Donald McLean
by Ray Fargher (Victoria University Press)

After war service with the 3rd NZ Division in the Pacific and a period of secondary teaching, much of Ray Fargher’s working life was spent as General Secretary of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes until retiring in 1986. He then spent the next four years chairing ministerial working parties advising on the reform of post-school vocational education and training, including the Probine-Fargher Report on The Organisation, Management and Funding of Continuing Education.

The Best Man Who Ever Served the Crown? A Life of Donald McLean is the first full biography of one of the key actors in the drama of 19th-century New Zealand land dealing and fills a gaping hole in New Zealand historiography. McLean was highly respected by Māori for his knowledge of Te Reo and respect for rank and protocol, and was closely involved in land dealings in the Taranaki and elsewhere that still have repercussions today.

Read a review or ‘Best Man’ at The NZ Listener
Buy ‘Best Man’ at Fishpond

The Life and Times of James Walter Chapman-Taylor
by Judy Siers (Millwood Heritage Productions Ltd)

Judy Siers has followed leads about the life and career of James Walter Chapman-Taylor since 1967. Her love of heritage, history and a passion for domestic architecture has been the driving force behind this biography. This has led her to travel all over the North Island discovering his buildings.

A New Zealander, educated at Solway College, Masterton, she worked in advertising and marketing through the 1950s and 1960s. She married James Siers in 1961 and has four children and four grand-children. Judy and James established Millwood Press publishing, Millwood Gallery and Sierpinski Films documentary film company. In the 1990s Judy was elected a councillor to the Wellington City Council where heritage issues were her priority. She is now retired and lives in Napier, Hawke’s Bay.

This book is the story of James Walter Chapman-Taylor, architect, craftsman, furniture designer, builder, photographer, astrologer and family man. This book is the result of research over 30 years. It captures an era in New Zealand’s architectural history that must be treasured, and tells us a great deal about how attitudes and styles have evolved from colonial times to New Zealand’s contemporary identity.

Read Siers’ ‘Rewards of Romance’ about Chapman-Taylor

Waimarino County & Other Excursions
by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press)

New Zealander Martin Edmond lives in Sydney where he is dividing his time between writing and taxi driving. (One writing project is his sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant take on life in his taxi, now transferred to ‘dérives’ at http://fluvial.blogspot.com/).

Martin was born in Ohakune, New Zealand, in 1952, son of poet Lauris Edmond and teacher Trevor Edmond, and grew up in small North Island towns. He studied Anthropology and English at The University of Auckland before graduating MA (1st Class Hons) in English from Victoria University of Wellington. After spending a year as a junior lecturer at Victoria University he joined the avant garde theatre group Red Mole and spent the next five years touring internationally as a writer, actor, stage manager and lighting designer. He moved to Australia in 1981 via London, New York and Los Angeles to work in the film industry there.

Martin has also worked as a proof reader, ESOL teacher and a lighting designer for rock bands until 1984, when he began to earn his living mostly as a script writer. He has written several screenplays which have been produced as award winning feature films: Illustrious Energy (1987), The Footstep Man (1991), and Terra Nova (1996). He also wrote the screenplays for the critically well-received short films Philosophy (1997) and Earth Angel (2002).

Martin’s books include The Autobiography of My Father (AUP, 1992; placed in the 1993 Wattie’s Book Awards), The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (AUP, 1999; shortlisted, Montana New Zealand Book Awards) and the memoir/travelogue of the mind Chronicle of the Unsung (AUP, 2004), which won the 2005 Montana NZ Book Award for Biography. He published in late 2006 Luca Antara, described by J M Coetzee as ‘a booklover’s book, a graceful and mesmerizing blend of history, autobiography, travel and romance.’ Martin also writes reviews and essays, and has several widely read blogs.

A new work from a master prose stylist, Waimarino County is a book of essays described as ‘elegant discussions on themes of memory, words and travel’. Edmond has an idiosyncratic and utterly engaging way of writing that always draws on himself and his own often quite intimate experience, yet his work is never self-absorbed but turns outwards: to the past, to the landscape and the natural world, to other writers and artists, to journeys and distant places.

Read a review of ‘Waimarino’
Read an extract of ‘Waimarino’

History

Age Of Enterprise: Rediscovering the New Zealand Entrepreneur 1881–1910
by Ian Hunter (Auckland University Press)

Dr Ian Hunter, MCom (Hons) (UoA), PhD (Massey), teaches in the School of Management and Employment Relations at The University of Auckland Business School. He has previously lectured at Massey University and was the visiting lecturer at the Centre for International Business History, University of Reading (UK), from September 2005 to February 2006, where he also undertook joint research projects with Professors Mark Casson and Andrew Godley.

Ian Hunter is a business historian specialising in entrepreneurship and economic development. His research has been published in leading scholarly and management journals including the Business History Review, the Australian Economic History Review and the University of Auckland Business Review. His article, ‘Tapping Our Entrepreneurial Heritage’, won the Prize for the Best New Zealand Business Research Article in 2003.

His previous books include the biographies ‘David Levene: A Man and His Business’ and ‘Robert Laidlaw: Man for Our Time’ (9000 copies sold). He received a NZ History Research Fund Award. He was until 2006 a director of the Auckland Business History Project (www.businesshistory.auckland.ac.nz/) and was joint editor of the Project’s first publication, City of Enterprise: Perspectives on Auckland Business History (AUP, 2006).

This important book, which covers an area little touched by traditional historians, shows how entrepreneurship and innovation transformed New Zealand in the late 19th-century. By focusing on the shape of our economic history and its entrepreneurial players Ian Hunter fills a major gap in our knowledge of the colonial period.

Read a review of ‘Age of Enterprise’

Devils on Horses
by Terry Kinloch (Exisle Publishing)

Lieutenant-Colonel Terry Kinloch has held a commission in the New Zealand Army since 1983. He has completed operational tours in Bougainville, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Egypt, and training courses in the United Kingdom and Australia. He spent much of his regimental career in Queen Alexandra’s Mounted Rifles, an armoured unit that is the last Regular Force link to New Zealand’s horse-mounted units. This is his second book about the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade in the First World War, completing the story begun in his highly praised Echoes of Gallipoli (Exisle 2005).

Lieutenant-Colonel Kinloch was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2006. He has recently returned from a posting in Washington D.C., as New Zealand’s staff officer in the American, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Armies Program. He lives in Wellington with his wife Carol.

Few New Zealanders know the gripping story of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade (‘perhaps the finest body of New Zealanders ever to serve overseas’) in Sinai and Palestine during World War One. Now, using the soldiers’ original letters and diaries wherever possible, and with 150 superb photographs, Terry Kinloch vividly describes every battle and skirmish in their long campaign against the Turks.

Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka Volume II: Te Ara Hou – The New Society
by Hilary and John Mitchell (Huia Publishers)

John Mitchell of Ngati Tama, Te Atiawa, Taranaki Tuturu, Ngāti Toarangatira and Ngāti Kinohaku descent is tangata whenua of Mohua (Golden Bay). He has been involved with iwi affairs in Te Tau Ihu (north of the South Island) in many different capacities over nearly thirty years. He has lectured at the University of Canterury and was School Director of the Outward Bound School in Queen Charlotte Sound.

Hilary Mitchell, of West Coast Irish stock, has been a secondary school teacher and a Nelson City Councillor. She was involved in establishing the Nelson Provincial Museum, and is currently a councillor of the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

Hilary and John wrote the first volume in the Te Tau Ihu series in 2004.

The most comprehensive account of the impact of colonisation up to the start of the twentieth century throughout Nelson and Marlborough. This second volume in the series details Māori participation in the European settlement society and shows how Māori culture and language were swamped by assimilation.

Buy ‘Te Tau Ihu - Vol II

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