Bøger i Massey University Press memoirs serien

Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith were two of New Zealand's most significant twentieth-century figures; Sutch as an economist, influential civil servant, and inspirational proponent of innovation in the fields of social and economic development, and Smith as glass-ceiling breaker in the formerly male-dominated world of the law. Keith Ovenden's wise, urbane memoir begins with the early years of his marriage to Sutch and Smith's only child, Helen Sutch, and carries through Sutch's trial on charges under the Official Secrets Act to Smith's death over 30 years later. It offers unprecedented insights into both the accusations against Sutch and Smith's remarkable legal practice and, behind both, some of the dramas of their domestic life. Deeply intelligent and beautifully crafted, Bill and Shirley: A Memoir is a unique and intimate study of two complex and fascinating New Zealanders.

'"I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road.' I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the mother I'd never met. But how do you convey your life in a few sentences when almost every memory is missing?" Barbara Sumner grew up in a family filled with secrets and lies. At twenty-three she decided she had to find her mother. Remarkable, moving, beautifully written, Tree of Strangers is a ripping account of a search for identity in a country governed by adoption laws that deny the rights of the adopted person.

"In this deft memoir, Richard Shaw unpacks a generations-old family story he was never told: that his ancestors once farmed land in Taranaki which had been confiscated from its owners and sold to his great-grandfather, who had been with the Armed Constabulary when it invaded Parihaka on 5 November 1881. Honest, and intertwined with an examination of Shaw's relationship with his father and of his family's Catholicism, this book's key focus is urgent: how, in a decolonising world, Påakehåa New Zealanders wrestle with, and own, the privilege of their colonial pasts"--Publisher's website.

"Pioneering New Zealand poet Jan Kemp's memoir of her first 25 years is a vivid and frank account of growing up in the 1950s, and of university life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tracks from an innocent Waikato childhoodto the seedy flats of Auckland, where anarchic student life, drugs, sexual experimentation and a failing marriage could not keep her away from poetry. She became one of the few young women poets of her era to be allowed in to the then male poet club.Weaving its own patterns and colours, Raiment shines a clear-eyed light on the heady, hedonistic hothouse of our literary community in the 1970s and reveals what it took, back then, to be an independent woman"--Back cover.