The Women's War Book

Belich is clearly both an excellent writer and a good historian. This is probably, hmmm. A tertiary text? Like, it's not for lay reading really, it's for historians, but it's still not focused and specific enough to be a secondary text. College students doing introductory New Zealand history might have it as a course text. What I'm saying, basically, is that if you don't already have a significant amount of interest in the subject, this is not the book to interest you. That said, Belich seemed quite balanced and clear in his presentation of events (I haven't read a great deal of other NZ history, but I was impressed by his consideration of multiple interpretations on many counts) and he has a sly sense of humor that had me occasionally backtracking to snort at some outrageous phrase or other that he had sneakily stuck in among drier fare. The book was divided into two parts, "Making Maori" and "Making Pakeha." This, in the end, was not a choice that worked well for me, though I perhaps understand why it was done. I ended up devouring the first half and slogging through the second - I used it mainly as a cure for insomnia, I'm afraid. Whether this is just my own bullshit - am I fascinated with the exotic "otherness" of the Maori? Do I have an "authenticity" thing about non-European cultures? Please God let me not be That Sort Of Person - or whether I've just read far more about European colonization and frontier cultures in my life and am thus less interested in them as a whole, it made the book only half of what I'd wanted to read. And there was so much information I had trouble absorbing it in any way that would allow me to recall it organically; I will have to use the book itself for reference if I want to access any of the facts, even after reading it cover to cover. That last, however, I suspect is a function of my reading speed and absorption habits rather than anything else.