James McNeish

"This is the story of three men - a doctor, a soldier and a judge. They are men of rare achievement. The doctor has the gift of saving others but not himself. The soldier disobeys orders and abandons his command post in a bid to die with his men. The judge cares more to uphold a principle than save himself from ruin.All three defy convention in a way that exacts a price.The first two, Dr John Saxby and Brigadier Reginald Miles, destroy themselves. The death of the judge, Peter Mahon, is hastened by his stand for truth and justice on behalf of the victims of New Zealand's worst air disaster"--Publisher information.

This is a story based on letters and diaries and interviews in several countries. It is the story of a group of Rhodes scholars, five young men - James Bertram, Geoffrey Cox, Dan Davin, Ian Milner, John Mulgan - caught up in the turmoil of their times: Spain, Hitler's Germany, Greece and North Africa, Eastern Europe, China. They left New Zealand in the thirties for "the dreaming spires" of Oxford. War intervened. Only one returned.

When James McNeish covered the David Bain trial for a British newspaper in 1995, he had no idea that he was writing the introductory chapter to what would be a cause celebre in the annals of New Zealand crime.

"An Olympic athlete has been enlisted to expose Hitler and his war aims. This is during the 1936 Berlin Games, the notorious summer festival designed to persuade the free world that the leader of Nazi Germany is a man of peace. Werner Seelenbinder's mission is an unknown story; the defiance and courage of the only Olympian in the resistance, subsequently concealed by the Americans in the Cold War and blotted out in modern postwar Germany. All the characters in Seelenbinder are real; all the main events described did happen. But amid the preparations for the coup and its nightmarish end, there unfolds a riddle of fact versus fiction: when you are a novelist telling a story of mythical dimension, where do you draw the line?"--Back cover.

This is a duplicate. Please update your lists. See

One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum and Herzog, and major works by Hemingway, Woolf, Orwell, Camus and Nabokov. There are long studies of George Grosz, vignettes on Botero and Picasso, and an appreciation of Cezanne and Van Gogh, including a visit to Cezanne's homes on the South Seas. Also included are essays on political and social thinkers, from the nineteenth century feminist, Flora Tristan, to Isaiah Berlin, and contemporary pieces on 9/11, the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid.

Writer James McNeish wandered Europe for ten years and then retreated in 1967 to a remote Maori community on a Tasman Sea coast headland.

What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? How do we create community? When can we say that we truly belong? The issues of place and belonging are the subject of this book. Moving from past to present, the author charts a journey in which she moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began in her native place, Kentucky. She explores a geography of the heart, focusing on issues of homeplace, of land, and land stewardship, linking the issues to global environmentalism and sustainability. She writes about family and the ties that bind. And she focuses on the experience of black farmers, past and present who celebrate local organic food production. This work offers a vision of a world where all people, wherever they call home, can live fully and well, and where everyone can belong.