2015 Catalogue 2015 Catalogue

AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY PRESS P[+64]-9-373-7528 AUCKLAND F[+64]-9-373-7465 UNIVERSITY — PRESS PRIVATE BAG 92019 — AUCKLAND 1142 NEW ZEALAND 2015 CATALOGUE WWW.PRESS.AUCKLAND.AC.NZ 2015 CATALOGUE Words that make worlds. Arguments that change minds. Ideas that illuminate. Publishing books that make a difference – 2015 edition. Summer 2015 THE NEW ZEALAND WARS AND THE VICTORIAN INTERPRETATION OF RACIAL CONFLICT James Belich First published in 1986, James Belich’s groundbreaking book reshaped our understanding of the ‘bitter and bloody struggles’ between Māori and Pākehā in the New Zealand Wars. Revealing the enormous tactical and military skill of Māori, and the inability of the ‘Victorian interpretation’ to acknowledge those qualities, Belich’s account of the wars offered a very different picture from the one previously given in historical works. According to the author, ‘The degree of Maori success in all four major wars is still underestimated – even to the point where, in the case of one war, the wrong side is said to have won.’ James Belich is the author of numerous books, including Making Peoples (1996), Paradise Reforged (2001) and Replenishing the Earth (2009), and is currently Beit Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History at Oxford University and director of the Oxford Centre for Global History. February 2015, 216 x 138 mm, 400 pages, maps Paperback, 978 1 86940 827 5, $39.99 2/3 Summer 2015 OTHERWISE John Dennison John Dennison’s first collection,Otherwise , is a finely crafted marvel. The poems here are concerned, above all, with love, and with the strange, unlooked-for manner of its appearances among us. A trio of elegies for poet Seamus Heaney is moving; a heart-shaking sequence recounts an encounter in Calcutta. Ranging globally from Scotland to Dunedin, Otherwise also sits firmly in the New Zealand literary tradition, with poems which take in Baxter’s bees, Bethell’s gardening, Duggan’s amends and Curnow’s ‘surge-black fissure’. This is a moving, meditative and vulnerable manifesto from an assured new voice. John Dennison was born in Sydney in 1978, and grew up in Tawa. His poems have appeared in magazines in the UK, New Zealand and Australia, and were anthologised in Carcanet’s New Poetries V (2011). John Dennison is also the author of Seamus Heaney and the Adequacy of Poetry (Oxford, forthcoming 2015). February 2015, 216 x 135 mm, 64 pages, NZ & Australian rights only Paperback, 978 1 86940 828 2, $24.99 4/5 Summer 2015 AT THE MARGIN OF EMPIRE: JOHN WEBSTER AND HOKIANGA, 1841–1900 Jennifer Ashton In this remarkable biography, Jennifer Ashton uses the life of one man as a unique lens through which to view the early history of New Zealand. Born in Scotland in 1818, John Webster came to New Zealand via Australia in 1841 and spent most of the rest of his life in Hokianga. At the Margin of Empire charts his colourful experiences carving out a fortune as the region’s leading timber trader and cultivating connections with the leading Māori and Pākehā figures of the day. In telling the story of John Webster’s life, this biography also explores the wider transformation of relationships between Māori and Pākehā during the nineteenth century. After a career as a technical writer and editor, Jennifer Ashton graduated from the University of Auckland history department with a PhD in 2012. She lives in Auckland. February 2015, 228 x 148 mm, 276 pages, colour illustrations Paperback, 978 1 86940 825 1, $49.99 6/7 Summer 2015 8/9 Autumn 2015 ENTANGLEMENTS OF EMPIRE: MISSIONARIES, M¯AORI, AND THE QUESTION OF THE BODY Tony Ballantyne The first Protestant mission to New Zealand, established in 1814, saw the beginning of complex political, cultural and economic entanglements with Māori. Entanglements of Empire is a deft reconstruction of the cross-cultural translations of this early period. Misunderstanding was rife and the physical body itself became the most contentious site of cultural engagement, with Māori and missionaries struggling over issues of hygiene, tattooing, clothing and sexual morality. Concluding in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the new age it ushered in, Entanglements of Empire offers important insights into this crucial period of New Zealand history. Tony Ballantyne is an historian whose works examine the development of imperial intellectual and cultural life in Ireland, India, New Zealand and Britain. He is currently chair of the history department and director of the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture at the University of Otago. March 2015, 228 x 152 mm, 376 pages, illustrations, NZ rights only Paperback, 978 1 86940 826 8, $39.99 10/11 Autumn 2015 WHALE YEARS Gregory O’Brien Between 2011 and 2014, poet and artist Gregory O’Brien found himself following the migratory routes of whales and seabirds across vast tracts of the South Pacific Ocean, resulting in work that O’Brien describes as ‘acts of devotion – a homage to a series of remarkable locations and to the natural histories of those places’. These poems are an exploration of outlying islands, the ocean that lies between them, and the whale species and sea birds found there. From Waihi looking east and Valparaiso looking west, O’Brien surveys the cultural heart and health of an ocean in memorable, musical, moving lines. Gregory O’Brien is an independent writer, painter, literary critic and art curator. His most recent book of poetry with Auckland University Press was Beauties of the Octagonal Pool, published in 2012. He is also publishing this year a follow-up volume to his multi-award-winning introductions to art for children – for more on which see pages 40-41. March 2015, 230 x 165 mm, 100 pages, illustrations Paperback, 978 1 86940 832 9, $27.99 12/13 Autumn 2015 THE WRITER’S DIET Helen Sword Is your writing flabby or fit? If your sentences are weighed down with passives and prepositions, be-verbs and waste words, The Writer’s Diet is for you. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds – students to teachers, lawyers to librarians – how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose. First published in 2007, The Writer’s Diet became a bestselling handbook and now returns refreshed alongside a new version of Sword’s website to highlight your bad habits and sharpen your style – for clearer, crisper sentences filled with words that count. Professor Helen Sword is a literary scholar and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland. She is the author most recently of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012). April 2015, 190 x 140 mm, 88 pages, NZ rights only Paperback, 978 1 86940 831 2, $24.99 14/15 Autumn 2015 DEMOCRACY IN NEW ZEALAND Raymond Miller New Zealand is one of the world’s oldest democracies for men and women, Māori and Pākehā, with one of the highest political participation rates. But – from MMP to leadership primaries, spin doctors to ‘dirty politics’ – the country’s political system is undergoing rapid change. An ideal university text, Democracy in New Zealand provides an up-to-date and concise introduction to New Zealand politics and how it works. Examining the constitution and the political system, cabinet and parliament, political parties, leadership and elections, Raymond Miller draws on data and analysis to tackle critical questions. Raymond Miller is Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland and the author of, among other books, Party Politics in New Zealand (Oxford University Press, 2005) and, with Ian Marsh, Democratic Decline and Democratic Renewal: Political Change in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge, 2012). May 2015, 214 x 140 mm, 288 pages Paperback, 978 1 86940 835 0, $45 16/17 Autumn 2015 THE GLASS ROOSTER Janis Freegard The poems in The Glass Rooster explore the spaces inhabited by humans and other creatures – not just natural ecosystems like deserts or the alpine zone, but cities and outer space. Our guide on this journey is a glass rooster – observer of stars and lover of hens – who first popped up in Janis Freegard’s poetry years ago and wanders unchecked through the book’s eight sections (or ‘echo-systems’) – The Damp Places, Forest, Cityscape, The Alpine Zone, Space, Home & Garden, Underground and In the Desert. These are searching, remarkable poems – about art, about places, about unusual expeditions, and about love. Janis Freegard lives in Wellington, with an historian and a cat. Her first full-length poetry collection,Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in 2011 and her first novel,The Year of Falling, was published in May this year by Mākaro Press. May 2015, 210 x 148 mm, 96 pages Paperback, 978 1 86940 833 6, $24.99 18/19 Flotsam The Tide Rises at the Gallery By the end of the second week we stood too long in the washing waves we’d finished the duty free and fashioned a make-shift shelter (the high-heeled shoes from the in-flight magazines. the kettle We dreamed of shops, the internet, the giant apple trim flat whites. the bottle the hat) When, at the fourth week, help had not materialised, & were covered in silvery scales we formed into groups. The lingerie models built a table; afterwards we sat on the table the driving instructors set about listening to gulls collecting fruit. while the wind toyed with the cloth Those who failed to believe in a happy outcome (the television moved to the south face.

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