Spend the weekend reading with these new titles. Photo / Getty Images
Spend the weekend reading with these new titles. Photo / Getty Images
Sam Whitelock’s View from the second Row (HarperCollins) begins with 14 full lines of the injuries he’s suffered playing rugby, the outcome of which was five surgeries under general anaesthetic. He played in the 2023 Super Rugby Pacific final with an Achilles tendon injury. The most capped All Black inhistory speaks – with the help of sports journo Dylan Cleaver – about his career, which covers four World Cups and 153 appearances in the black jersey, his life and his family. In the foreword, All Blacks coach Scott Robertson says Whitelock as captain knew when to toggle between rooster and sheepdog – leading from the front or guiding his flock. Whitelock has serious rugby lineage on both sides. He claims not to be a complicated guy: “family, footy and farming” are at the centre of his life.
The Social Space of the Essay: 2003-2023 (THWUP), Ian Wedde’s third collection of essays, discusses artists such as Bill Culbert, Elizabeth Thomson, Ralph Hotere, Tony Fomison, Gordon Walters and Judy Millar, and muses on libraries, museums, poetry, NZ gothic and other matters. Some early essays might be familiar to Listener readers of the early 2000s. Wedde usually offers a writer-present, meta style – “The interview … is one of the more casual I’ve done …” – the writing mostly at an approachable art-magazine level, a ticklish humour lurking.
Even after 23,000 hours in a cockpit – that’s more than two and a half years – Jeremy Burfoot is still as fascinated with the technology, systems and people involved in flying as when he started. In The Secret Life of Flying (Macmillan), the Auckland-based Burfoot, whose 37-year career was cut short by Covid lockdowns, explains, in jokey but authoritative fashion, everything that happens before and after, and on and off, a flight.
