THE GROOVE BOOK REPORT

Photo: Rebecca McMillan Jon Toogood’s Home Again session at Verb Wellington last night wasn’t just a headline event — it was the emotional centrepiece of a full day of literary energy across the city. At a packed Hannah Playhouse, Toogood sat down with writer‑broadcaster Nick Bollinger for an hour that moved easily between humour, history, grief, music, politics, and love — the kind of conversation Verb does best. Verb Wellington’s Saturday programme unfolded as a full‑day tapestry of literature, conversation. Earlier in the day, audiences moved between The Long Game of Reclamation with Witi Ihimaera Smiler and Puawai Cairns, the hands‑on craft session A Riot of Words led by Sasha Francis, the powerful whakapapa‑centred discussion Carrying the Past Forward featuring Hana Buchanan, Lauren Keenan and Terri Te Tau with Matariki Williams, Dame Silvia Cartwright: That Woman with Anna Fifield, the memoir‑focused panel Seasoned Self, Disclosing Self with Tusiata Avia, Joseph ...

There are broadly two kinds of smart people. The first kind desperately wants you to know how smart they are. The second kind is clever enough to make you feel smart. Fortunately, Christoph Schumacher belongs firmly in the second camp. His wonderfully entertaining Sitting on the Shoulders of Giants is a book built around an apparently simple premise: why are some of the most interesting questions the ones we rarely think to ask? Why is the night sky dark? Why are we terrified of shark attacks but barely concerned about heart disease? Why does losing twenty dollars feel worse than finding twenty dollars feels good? And did Albert Einstein really invent E = mc²? The answers, as Schumacher repeatedly demonstrates, are rarely as straightforward as we imagine.

Imagine being the person whose job it is to walk into a room full of politicians during a pandemic and say: "Well, the science suggests..." before watching every pair of eyes search for a loophole. That, in essence, is the world of Dame Juliet Gerrard's engaging, revealing and often surprisingly funny memoir, F ront Row Seat: How Science Can (and Can't) Shape Public Decision-Making . For six years, Gerrard occupied one of the most unusual jobs in New Zealand. As Chief Science Advisor to three prime ministers, Jacinda Ardern, Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon, she stood at the uncomfortable intersection of evidence, politics, media, public panic and, occasionally, reality itself. This isn't a political memoir in the traditional sense. Nobody is settling scores. There are no dramatic Cabinet betrayals, no anonymous briefings, no revelations involving coded text messages and late-night karaoke. Instead, Gerrard offers something rarer: a backstage pass to the machin...

Ok, so not a short title: All the Wrong Moves - How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Shitshow Politics Led to Trump - and how Find a Way Out. Or  The Mooch Explains America's Midlife Crisis . There are few political résumés more gloriously absurd than that of Anthony Scaramucci. Wall Street titan. Hedge fund manager. Television personality. Podcast host. Best-selling author. White House Communications Director . Well, technically. The last of those jobs lasted 11 days. Depending on who is counting and how charitable they're feeling, it was somewhere between a brief career and a long weekend. Scaramucci himself insists it was 11 days. The BBC famously says ten. Somewhere a constitutional lawyer is probably preparing a thesis. Yet what makes All the Wrong Moves such an entertaining read isn't that Scaramucci once worked for Donald Trump. It's that he's become one of Trump's most articulate and persistent critics while retaining some of the same qualities...

New Zealand enjoys telling a flattering story about itself: a young, open-minded country built by migrants, geographically remote but culturally connected, increasingly diverse and generally less troubled by immigration than comparable nations. Edges of Empire: The Politics of Immigration in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1980–2020 takes a pin to that comfortable national balloon. The result is not an attack on immigration or an uncritical celebration of it, but a tough, detailed account of the machinery that decides who may enter, who may remain, what economic value they must demonstrate and how closely they are expected to resemble the nation’s preferred image of itself. Written by Francis L. Collins, Alan Gamlen and Neil Vallelly, the book concentrates on four decisive decades, beginning with the market reforms of the 1980s and ending with the border closures of 2020. Its most valuable source material comes from interviews with fifteen former immigration ministers. These reveal policy not a...

Some books announce themselves with a bang. Michael Jackson's Outliers: Eight Antipodean Tales arrives more quietly, like a stranger sitting down beside you in a pub and beginning a story that seems simple enough at first, only to leave you pondering it long after you've gone home. Jackson, a New Zealand-born writer, anthropologist and academic with more than three dozen books to his name, has always been fascinated by the relationship between the stories we tell ourselves and the lives we actually end up living. In Outliers, he turns that fascination into eight finely crafted stories about people who exist slightly outside the ordinary flow of society. Not outcasts exactly, but individuals who never quite fit the mould.

  WOMAD Aotearoa has today revealed the first artists set to take the stage at the iconic Bowl of Brooklands, Pukekura Park, Taranaki, from 12–14 March 2027, with award-winning Aotearoa musician Troy Kingi, Grammy Award-winning Tuareg band Tinariwen and pioneering Fijian Flying Circus the first names announced for the three-day celebration of global music, culture and creativity. Troy Kingi - Photo by Tim Gruar (at WOMAD 2020) One of Aotearoa’s most celebrated musical shapeshifters, Troy Kingi will present two unique sets at WOMAD Aotearoa 2027. The first being a celebration of the first nine albums of Kingi’s ambitious 10|10|10 project – 10 albums in 10 genres over 10 years, alongside special guests. For the second performance he’ll be joined by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for a special world-premiere performance marking the culmination of his 10|10|10 project with the unveiling of his tenth and final album: 10|10|10 - THE FINAL CHAPTER WITH THE NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHES...

Kate Atkinson’s Our Noble Selves unfolds as a sly, atmospheric blend of postwar melancholy and comic intrigue, and it thrives most vividly when allowed to breathe in long, textured paragraphs. Set against the hopeful but faintly absurd backdrop of the 1951 Festival of Britain, the novel follows Harry Flynn, a former foreign correspondent and Japanese POW who returns to a country trying to reinvent itself while he himself feels half‑formed. 

Amongst a gathering of keen mountaineers this fabulous new book was officially launched last Wednesday 9 September at the Tararua Tramping Club. Great Hearts by Hazel Phillips (MUP) is a landmark work of recovery, reclamation, and narrative repair — a book that pulls thirty pioneering women climbers out of the footnotes of New Zealand mountaineering history and places them firmly at the centre of the story. It is meticulously researched, emotionally resonant, and formally inventive, blending archival scholarship with critical fabulation — a method that allows Phillips to reconstruct the interior lives of women whose voices were erased from the historical record.

The Wellington Jazz Festival is set to take over Te Whanganui-a-Tara this October for its 30th anniversary, with more than 180 performances filling the capital across five days. From 14-18 October, the city will come alive with an extraordinary mix of jazz, soul, funk, blues, brass and contemporary sounds, with acclaimed Aotearoa artists, emerging talent, album releases, late-night sessions and exclusive performances taking place across Wellington’s venues. From intimate club shows and second-hand bookshops to major international performances, this year’s City Line-up celebrates the depth, diversity and creativity of Wellington’s thriving music scene. Festival Co-Director Dolina Wehipeihana says the City Line-up is a celebration of the community that makes the Festival possible. "The prolific way the local scene powers this festival is the reason it has such an excitement and vibrancy. This year we have almost 70 venues taking part, which is the largest number of venue...

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/24/lifestyle/take-an-online-tour-gloria-steinems-journalism-career-via-new-google-arts-exhibition/ Gloria Marie Steinem, the journalist, feminist organizer, political activist, and co-founder of Ms. magazine who became one of the most influential advocates for women's equality in modern history, died peacefully at her New York City home on September 2, 2026. She was 92 years old. Her death was announced by her foundation and family, who said she was surrounded by loved ones and had continued working for social justice until the very end. [kuow.org] , [msmagazine.com] For more than half a century, Steinem stood at the forefront of struggles for women's rights, reproductive freedom, workplace equality, political representation, and social justice. To many, she was the public face of second-wave feminism. Yet those who worked alongside her often noted that she resisted being viewed as a singular leader, insisting instead that lasting change cam...