Germaine Greer visited New Zealand nearly two months ago, and her copiously illustrated new book The Boy is out. It’s a study of young male masculinity, and gets an uncritical thumbs up from Herald reviewer Alison Jones. For Jones, a lecturer on gender at the University of Auckland, Greer can do no wrong: “It is a serious consideration not only of the representation of male beauty in Western art, but of the joys of male youth, and a lament for the fleetingness of the soft, vulnerable child that is the boy.”

(Peter Conrad, writing in the Observer, summed up the book a little more objectively: “This is a book about the prurient business of looking, and Greer expects us as we read it to be looking at her and marvelling at her larky elderly lubricity. Cranky and exasperating as she is, the world would be a poorer, more piously timid place without her.”)

Greg Critser’s Fat Land deals with an altogether less attractive subject. The subtitle is “How Americans Became The Fattest People In The World”. According to the review Critser, “a health writer and reformed fattie”, knows his stuff.

Cannabis: a history is written by Martin Booth, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted Opium: A History. Says Matt Martel: “Booth takes little more than an academic interest in the subject. But in the end, he concludes that the benefits to be derived from it far outweigh its perceived risks.” Hmm.

Shonagh Koea’s latest novel is Yet Another Ghastly Christmas. It’s the story of a “a bleak but realistic yuletide” and Siobhan Harvey likes it. “If, like a professionally wrapped gift, the ends are tied up a tad too cleverly, it remains well worth finding out what's inside the cover.”