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A sweeping story of action and suspense, Behind the Tattooed Face presents the complex web of Maori belief, tribal rituals and discipline which existed at the time of the voyages of Captain James Cook. The story is set in the late 1700s, about 600 years after the great canoes from the Central Pacific had arrived in New Zealand. Here in the new land off the Canoe Coast, in what is now known as the Bay of Plenty, the people settled and prospered and here Maori society reached the zenith of its power and development. Then, as the people multiplied, the question of survival became inextricably interwoven with the concepts of mana and tribal honour. The delicately poised balance of power was easily upset so that bloody warfare, cannibalism and slavery prevailed. This electrifying novel is now in its fifth printing and is the first NZ historical novel to be written by a Maori . It is also the first serious attempt to show pre-European Maori people as the really were.
"This historical novel ... brings a ... new perspective to events during the New Zealand Wars. Traditional Maori beliefs were challenged by European concepts. Maori and missionary tragically failed to understand each other's gods. Pai Marire, the new religion which the Hauhau brought to Opotiki, was based on the wandering Jews of the Old Testament. The religion of the new settlers often seemed to be based on money, power and land. This book is about the men and women of the 1860s, the Reverend Carl Volkner and his wife Emma, the Whakatohea leaders Nikora and Mihiterina and the chiefs and tribespeople together with visiting traders and the businessmen of Auckland. [It] is a story of conflict between gods aold and new, between the old ways of the tribes and the new ways of the individual, between those who belonged to the land and those who wanted to own it. It is about people who sought peace in too many different ways, and who were locked in an escalating drama of confrontation and misunderstanding. It culminates in acts of violence which have reverberated down through the generations of both Maori and European New Zealanders. ..."--Jacket.
The Amazing Balancing Man By David Linden This is the personal story of one person balancing pursuing his dreams and putting bread on the table. Born during the Great Depression to a barber and a homemaker in Albany, New York, David?s prospects were not very bright. However, his parents, who immigrated from Russia and Austria shortly after World War I, instilled in him the belief that you could do anything you wanted, as long as you did the work needed to prepare for it. He left high school before graduating to work and bring in a little extra income to help out the family. This was his first balancing act: finish high school or help the family. It wasn?t a lot of money, but it helped stretc...
St. Louis has been the heartbeat of American soccer for years, dominating in club, high school, and college soccer. To this day, St. Louis University has the most NCAA Division I men's soccer national championship titles. Yet, in 1996, when Major League Soccer kicked off its inaugural season, there was no team to represent the Gateway to the West. How did this happen? Author Shane Stay guides you through St. Louis soccer's journey, from its past to the present, including the launch of St. Louis CITY SC. The story will start 100 years in the past and follow the major achievements—and setbacks—of St. Louis soccer. Shane recounts not only the history of soccer at the club, high school, college, and professional levels, but he also provides some helpful hints for which are the best local attractions for soccer fans, and he even goes so far as to predict the future successes of St. Louis CITY SC. This is one book soccer fans will want to have on their shelves!
The complte history of The Washington Redskins. All 925 games the team has played from its first game in Washington in 1937 through the last game of the 2001 season are chronicled in rich detail.
In Aboriginal and Māori literature, the circle and the spiral are the symbolic metaphors for a never-ending journey of discovery and rediscovery. The journey itself, with its indigenous perspectives and sense of orientation, is the most significant act of cultural recuperation. The present study outlines the fields of indigenous writing in Australia and New Zealand in the crucial period between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s – particularly eventful years in which postcolonial theory attempted to ‘centre the margins’ and indigenous writers were keen to escape the particular centering offered in search of other positions more in tune with their creative sensibilities. Indigenous writ...
Covering the two decades from 1972, Swiss scholar Otto Heim presents detailed readings of the novels and short fiction by Heretaunga Pat Baker, Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Bruce Stewart, J. C. Sturm, Apirana Taylor, and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. His book places the fiction by Maori writers in the context of a culture of survival and traces its textual engagement with violence between empathy and sacrifice, from the privacy of domestic violence to the public arenas of systemic violence and war. He argues that out of this confrontation with violence emerges a distinctive ethnic world view created by the construction of individual experience, the development of an ideological stance and the expression of a spiritual orientation. Heim's analysis shows works of fiction by contemporary Maori writers as challenging explorations of the constraints placed on the literary imagination by the urgent facts of the human condition and the imperatives of culture.
A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection The modern classic of contemporary war fiction - a Man Booker Prize-nominated examination of World War I and its deep legacy of human traumas. 'A brilliant novel. Intense and subtle' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decis...
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