THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Four of the recent Auckland University Press books ( Strangers Arrive by Leonard Bell, Selected Poems by Ian Wedde, Allen Curnow's biography and poems by Terry Sturm, Elizabeth Caffin & Linda Cassells, and Tears of Rangi by Anne Salmond) have been shortlisted in the PANZ Book Design Awards .  The other nominees include  Aberhart Starts Here  (Peter Bray), The Domain (Designed - Philip Kelly); the merrier (Daniel Blackball Alexander);  New China Eyewitness: Roger Duff, Rewi Alley and the art of museum diplomacy  (designer  -Aaron Beehre); Big Words (designer - Rachael Clark); Blood Ties: New and selected poems 1963-2016 (Aaron Beehre (cover), Aaron Beehre & Gemma Banks); Edmund Hillary: A Biography (Paperminx – Lisa Noble and Annabelle Archibald); A Moral Truth (Ed. James Hollings - Gideon Keith, Strategy Creative, Gideon Keith & Carla Sy). Also nominated, in the children's section, amongst others, is Scholastic's wonderful...

When actor Garrard Conley was 19, he was forced by his parent to take part in a Christian fundamentalist program called Love in Action.  The aim was to " cleanse him" of the 'scourge of homosexuality'. “I was here by my own choice,” he wrote in his new book Boy Erased , “despite my secret wish to run away from the shame I’d felt since my parents found out I was gay. I had too much invested in my current life to leave it behind: in my family and in the increasingly blurry God I’d known since I was a toddler.” This wasn't a tale of 1920's, 30's,40 or even 1950's religious zealots.  This happened in 2004! Conley was the only child devoutly Baptist parents.  He grew up in small-town Arkansas.  He was dramatically outed by a fellow student, who actually raped him and then told his parents, during his first semester at a small liberal arts college. The timing was terrible because he was, at the time considering joining the fundamentalist group known a...

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2017 The most comprehensive and definitive biography of Muhammad Ali that has ever been published, based on more than 500 interviews with those who knew him best, with many dramatic new discoveries about his life and career. When the frail, trembling figure of Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996, a TV audience of up to 3 billion people was once again gripped by the story of the world's most famous sporting icon. The man who had once been reviled for his refusal to fight for his country and for his fast-talking denunciation of his opponents was now almost universally adored, the true cost of his astonishing boxing career clear to see. In Jonathan Eig's ground-breaking biography, backed up with much detailed new research specially commissioned for this book, we get a stunning portrait of one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the twentieth century. We are not only taken ...