Time for a round up of Kiwi-flavoured books recently reviewed in the Herald. Top of the list has to be a significant retrospective of the photographer Brian Brake (pictured) ... even if the book in question is printed in China.

Brake died in 1988, but his status as one of New Zealand’s greatest photographers remains intact. Maori Art: The Photography of Brian Brake is published by Reed, and made it onto the Listener list of the best new illustrative and photo books in December 2003. Paul Panckhurst now reviews it in the Herald:

The new book is a mining of one seam of the work Brake left behind. The plates include photographs of amulets, canoes, caskets, clubs, doorway figures, feather boxes, fish hooks, flutes, godsticks, pendants, post figures and rock carvings.

For Panckhurst, however, the book could do with more insight:

The only quibble is the sparse text: the objects and artworks are accompanied by label-style details - age, dimension, tribe, location, museum collection - but their stories are untold. Inspired readers will ferret elsewhere.

Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Great Fire has an altogether more tenuous connection to New Zealand. According to Margie Thomson,

this is a story of people putting their lives back together after the conflagrations in Europe and the Pacific. It's essentially a romance: man meets woman, albeit a young one, and love follows a thwarted path in a disoriented world.

Thin-skinned jingoists should give this book a wide berth, though:

(Note to locals: New Zealand, and the Antipodes in general, comes in for a real bollocking here, and those who are insecure or overly sensitive will be indignant. There's hardly a sentence that isn't directed towards a sneer. The people are passionless, attenuated. "Too cautious to detest, Mrs Baillie did, with some regularity, not quite like." The only decent conversation is to be had with fellow exiles.)

Thomson can roll with the punches though, and is not easily put off:

I thought this a marvellously skilled piece of writing. Struck by William Boyd's Any Human Heart, a portrait of a man whose life, like the 20th century itself, was cut in half by the war, it's satisfying so soon to discover another novel unafraid to tackle these same themes, albeit with rather more self-conscious treatment, and a too-simple solution.

Much less confrontational is Margaret Orbell’s Birds of Aotearoa (A Natural and Cultural History). Stan Pinnegar finds it

a fascinating study of New Zealand's birdlife, both past and present, and the special relationship the birds shared with Maori life … Birds of Aotearoa is a thoughtful and comprehensive study, nicely written, and sumptuously illustrated.