Category: NZ Biography
Karin Horen tells the remarkable story of her continuing battle with breast cancer. At just 26 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and immediately underwent two surgeries, resulting in a partial mastectomy, a twelve-month course of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiotherapy. Unphased by her health sca ...Show more
Category: Adventure | Reading Level: near fine
In August 2015, Dunc Wilson became the first person to circumnavigate New Zealand on a bike. This 10,940 km journey followed one rule: cycle the closest available route to the coastline. The Big Loop candidly details Wilson's 240-day cycling adventure, through native bush, ragged coastlines, farm statio ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography
Spontaneous combustion and exhumation, drug mules and devil worshippers, a gruesome killing beneath the Palmerston North Airport control tower, a mysterious death in a historic homestead, a first-hand dissection of the infamous Mark Lundy case ... In The Cause of Death, provincial pathologist Dr Cynric ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography | Reading Level: very good
When writer and historian Peter Wells found a cache of family letters amongst his elderly mother's effects, he realised that he had the means of retracing the history of a not-untypical family swept out to New Zealand during the great nineteenth-century human diaspora from Britain. His family experience ...Show more
Category: Adventure
'Disaster man' Lloyd Homer photographed events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides arounf New Zealand for over 35 years. This book features a selection of spectacular colour aerial photohraphs, including high-altitude panoramas, from the GNS Science image library as well as many uniqu ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography
Four years, two wars and one most unlikely social enterprise. Marilyn Garson was an experienced aid professional who created jobs at the edge of war. In 2011, she was invited to move to the Gaza Strip. Friends warned her that nothing worked behind the Gaza blockade. Unable to resist that challenge, Mari ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography
A book on how to break free from prison A powerful lesson in personal change As an 18-year-old, Dr Paul Wood was completely off the rails. He wasn't coping with the impending death of his mother, he was dependent on drugs, and was an unemployed high-school dropout committing crimes to feed his habit. Tw ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography | Reading Level: Very Good
At my worst moments, I lost all sense of hope for the future. As I began to slowly get better, I began to be able to say to myself, 'This will pass, you'll get through this. Hang on to hope.' John Kirwan was one of the most devastating wingers New Zealand, and world, rugby had ever seen. A prominent and ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography | Reading Level: Near Fine
One man's memoir of World War II which took him from the Blitz to the jungles of Burma, to the devastation of Hiroshima.'I consider myself lucky to have survived the global carnage still myself - a reluctant soldier who had to go to war, who only ever wanted peace for everyone.' Brian HennessyBrian immi ...Show more
Category: Adventure
Passages is an intimate account of a young family’s sailing venture. When Linda and David sold the house they had built to last a lifetime and abandoned a thriving career for a nomadic life, they discovered more about the world and themselves than they ever imagined. The story’s strength li ...Show more
Category: NZ Biography | Reading Level: very good
A fascinating insight into Helen Clark's career, throughout which she has consistently worked for equality and parity, most particularly for women.
Category: NZ Biography | Reading Level: very good
Every morning, so far, I’m alive is about what it’s like to live in a world where shaking a stranger’s hand, catching a taxi or touching a door handle are fraught with fear and dread. This memoir charts the author’s breakdown after migrating from New Zealand to England: what begi ...Show more
