Non fiction and memoirs to check out this weekend. Photos / supplied
Non fiction and memoirs to check out this weekend. Photos / supplied
Foraging New Zealand by Peter Langlands (Penguin, $50)
Peter Langlands, interviewed here by the listener.co.nz, is a rare local specimen: a licensed professional forager. This means he sources wild food for chefs and runs workshops on how to forage. Out of about 7500 edible species, he’s chosen 250plants and fungi for the 500-page Foraging New Zealand (Penguin), picked on the basis of tastiness, safety and availability. Accurate identification is vital, given the need to avoid toxins and contaminants and to prepare some foraged foods correctly. As he says, “There is not much room for error.” The clear descriptions and photos are helpful, though it may be best to join a foraging group if one is near. The book warns of stuff not to touch, and plants that look like others but are verboten. The range is impressive. You may know you can eat samphire and wild chervil, but be surprised that you can scarf parts of rengarenga, pōhutukawa stamens and wandering willie.
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Heart Stood Still by Miriam Sharland (Otago University Press, $35)
More writerly memoirs are hitting the shelves. Miriam Sharland found herself wanting to return to England after 17 years here, but Covid grounded her in Manawatū. In Heart Stood Still (Otago University Press), guided by the seasons, she writes essays about ideas of belonging and the “consoling power of nature”.
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I Only Know Happy People: A Psychologist’s Memoir by Sarah Beck (CP Books, $33)
In I Only Know Happy People, psychologist Sarah Beck writes about her mother, the author and publisher Christine Cole Catley, the literary and political milieu of the time, the father she never knew, and about returning to New Zealand after 40 years in Australia, after “abandoning a country I loved”.
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Humpback Highway by Vanessa Pirotta (NewSouth, $37.99)
Size-wise, a humpback whale calving is like a bus giving birth to a bicycle. All whales give birth tails first, so the calf can immediately swim to the surface to breathe. Humpback Highway (NewSouth) by Australian scientist Vanessa Pirotta is full of such fascinating cetacean facts and insights.
