Canvas books wrap: Grand: Becoming My Mother's Daughter by Noelle McCarthy, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by Emma Marris, and more

Kick back and relax with one of our top book suggestions this week. Photo / Getty Images

Do we feed starving polar bears? Or cage the last of the world's condors? These are some of the quandaries raised in one of this week's recommended titles. Emma Marris' Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World will get you thinking about the ethical relationship of human beings to the non-human world. For those hoping to increase their financial literacy, we've got two new books to add to your list. And just in case you're in the mood for something else, we also have a highly anticipated new memoir. Happy reading.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World, by Emma Marris (Bloomsbury, $43). Reviewed by David Herkt.

Whatever you do, if you are of a sensitive disposition, don't look at the photographic insert in Emma Marris' Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. The grainy black-and-white photograph shows Mary, an elephant, being hanged by the neck from the gantry of a crane in Tennessee in 1916 as capital punishment for trampling a new keeper who had goaded her.

Perhaps the image should not upset us any more than driving past a New Zealand paddock in the middle of blazing summer where animals are confined without shade or shelter or news items about the "farrowing crates" in piggeries, but somehow it does. This is possibly because it starkly reveals humanity's selective morality when applied to other species.

The ethical relationship of human beings to the creatures of the non-human world has always been complex, especially now that untouched environments are bordered and shrinking every day. In Wild Souls, Marris does not deal with domesticated animals so much as the decisions that human beings make with regard to wild animals.

Marris is the American author of Rambunctious Garden which argued for new philosophies of conservation. Mixing concrete examples with focused philosophical and ethical inquiry, she explores the environmental issues of the contemporary world, frequently through well-researched travel and direct experience.

In one chapter of Wild Souls, she really brings things home. Her account of a visit to Zealandia, offshore islands in the charge of the Department of Conservation, the policy with regard to 1080, as well as predator-trapping and Predator Free 2050, are familiar and can be read with a New Zealander's "inside knowledge". Her inquiries are not abstract but particular.

Do New Zealanders simply have an obsession with killing all introduced species? Have we actually considered that 1080 results in a particularly painful death for animals that ingest it? Are our lofty goals of a predator-free country even possible? Why is the not-native kiore rat given heritage status while all other species of rat need to be exterminated? Why does arriving with the Māori trump arriving with the European? Where and when do New Zealanders blur ecological lines and what have been our successes and failures?

It is a book filled with facts. Rats will stop to aid a companion in distress. The pacing of a caged animal like a tiger is predicated on how much they would have ranged in the wild. However, it is the questions of the book that are the important thing. Do we save the last condors, the world's high-fliers, by caging them for captive breeding? Do we feed polar bears who are starving in a reduced habitat as a result of human-made climate change?

It is to Marris' credit that she does not dumb down her conclusions. These are the quandaries that all of us in the contemporary world must face. Our wilderness is dwindling. Wild animals face unprecedented threat. Our choices have consequences. It is not easy.

Too Much Money, by Max Rashbrooke (Bridget Williams Books, $40) and Your Money, Your Future, by Frances Cook (Penguin Random House, $35). Reviewed by Eleanor Black.

For such an essential topic, it is surprising how dreadfully dull most books about money are. Notably, not these two, which take very different approaches to the problem of wealth accumulation.

Max Rashbrooke has been writing about the yawning gap between the haves and have-nots for years. Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand is a sophisticated synthesis of that work, which shows the reader what it means when an individual in the top 1 per cent of New Zealand adults has a net worth more than 68 times that of the average Kiwi. Spoiler: It's devastating.

In a nutshell, rich people are privileged in almost any way you can imagine, and privilege begets privilege. Meanwhile the poor tend to live smaller lives, both physically (not moving far beyond their neighbourhoods) and metaphorically, unable to access or imagine different pathways. Rashbrooke talks about the links between wealth and wellbeing, the history of the wealth divide in Aotearoa New Zealand and what he calls the "conveyor belt of advantage" that acts to push some people "in a positive direction even if they exert little effort".

It's a dense and important book, rich in statistics, fresh research and interviews with people on both sides of the divide.

Personal finance journalist Frances Cook is concerned with helping readers invest their money so they can live more carefree lives – she is not advocating wealth accumulation for the sake of it. In Your Money, Your Future she talks about how to extract more money for the work you do and how to grow it through investment. She does a good job of addressing the bigger picture – that for most people money is a means to an end, whether that be early retirement, a shorter working week, more time for family, mini-sabbaticals or something else entirely.

In chatty style, Cook attempts to demystify the buttoned-up world of finance, including newer concepts like the Instagram-friendly movement FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early. She takes a refreshing whole-person approach to money management, offering nuggets of wisdom on the meaning of life itself. A useful primer for young earners and a good check-in for everyone else.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

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JUST OUT

Noelle McCarthy's memoir Grand.

Broadcaster Noelle McCarthy's memoir Grand: Becoming my mother's daughter (Penguin, $35) is barely out and the reviews are rapturous. What began as an entry in the Fish Short Memoir Prize (which McCarthy won in 2020) is a sensitive reflection on her complicated relationship with her mother and alcohol.

When Wellingtonian Chanelle Moriah was diagnosed with autism at 21, she was dismayed to find few resources produced from the point of view of an autistic person. So she wrote and illustrated one, out now: I Am Autistic: An interactive and informative guide to autism (Allen & Unwin, $30). Moriah explains what autism is, for the autistic and their families, and what impact it can have.

Tāngata Ngāi Tahu Volume Two (Bridget Williams Books, $50), edited by Helen Brown and Michael J. Stevens with a foreword by Tā Tipene O'Regan, is the follow-up to the much-loved Tāngata Ngāi Tahu Volume One, which came out in 2016. Described as a "tribal family album", Volume Two contains 50 biographies and hundreds of archival photographs. The reprint of Volume One is also available now.

WHAT I'M READING: JAN KEMP

Jane Kemp. Photo / Lisa Gardiner.

At present I'm reading A History of the Jewish People – to try to understand the culture and why antisemitism has existed through the ages, a question to which there are many and varied answers. Perhaps next year I shall visit the "Holy Land" on a guided tour, to observe present-day Israel - a nation just a year older than I am - and knowing, as Allen Curnow wrote so brilliantly, "reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces".

I love literary and historical pilgrimage – especially to ancient and sometimes dry and stony sites, which are in such high contrast to our own Aotearoan lush greenness of bush and the richly wooded Taunus hills surrounding where I now live. A huge surprise to me in my reading was to find that Israel is just smaller than the Waikato region where I grew up, although its history is large – going back to over a millennium before Kupe. The numbers of peoples who have lived there is mind-boggling, ruler after ruler fighting to take power, the Jews being pushed out often in the cruellest ways possible, and yet returning.

As well, I'm reading a guidebook, Jerusalem, Israel & the Palestinian Territories, as I think it's important to be able to orient yourself on such a visit. It contains small maps, a fold-out one of the old and new cities of Jerusalem. It has descriptions of the main centres, the many religious and historic sites including places like the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea where I'd love to swim – float, rather! The book takes a contemporary look at this land of diverse peoples showing life as it is now lived and present-day problems, especially with so many diverse ethnic groups living side by side – a huge experiment for the great idea of peace on Earth. I wish Vladimir Putin would espouse this idea too.

Waikato-born poet Jan Kemp lives in Germany. Her memoir, Raiment (Massey University Press, $35), is out on April 14.