1971. Dolly Parton sings into microphone. Sevierville. Photo / Les Leverett
Coffee table books to add to your collection this Christmas
Wes Anderson: The Iconic Filmmaker and his Work
by Ian Nathan
(Quarto, $55)
This deep dive into writer/director Wes Anderson's filmography is as meticulous and well presented as one of its subject's films. Ian Nathan, former editor of movie mag Empire and writer
of books on other modern auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, brings vast insight and heavy research to Anderson's work.
Starting with his 1996 debut Bottle Rocket and going right through to the upcoming The French Dispatch, Nathan details the genesis, inspiration and production of each of Anderson's 10 films and its relation to his life at the time and, as is often the case, his past.
The book is beautifully illustrated with an abundance of on-set photos, movie stills and poster art and full of detail, meaningful trivia and thoughtful analysis, all backed up by an extensive bibliography.
Naturally, a delight for fans of Anderson, it's also a pleasure to read with Nathan feeding you sentences like, "It was full of outrageous, teeth-itchingly embarrassing behaviour."
Karl Puschmann
Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics
by Dolly Parton with Robert K. Oermann
(Hodder and Stoughton, $70)
You don't need to be a Dolly fan to appreciate this big-hearted book of songs and memorabilia - but I challenge anyone to resist her charms once they have flicked through its pages.
A songwriter first and foremost, Parton has penned more than 3000 in her nearly 70 years of writing - starting with an ode to her corncob doll, composed when she was 6. In this richly illustrated tribute, she shares photos of her Tennessee childhood home, outrageous stage costumes, publicity-shy husband Carl Dean and guitar collection. But more significantly, given her status as a hit-making genius, she explains her inspiration for 175 songs including the iconic Jolene (partly inspired by Dean flirting with "a girl down at the bank") , 9 to 5 (written on the set of the movie while tapping her fingernails to keep time) and I Will Always Love You (about long-time collaborator Porter Wagoner). She also writes of being underestimated for decades because she was a poor "Backwoods Barbie". She says: "I might look artificial and corny to you. You might think I have no taste. But underneath the look is a person. There's a brain and a heart underneath the hair and the boobs." Eleanor Black
Drawn to the Wild: Paintings of New Zealand Birds
by Nicolas Dillon
(Potton & Burton, $60)
"Are you still painting birds?" people ask wildlife painter Nicolas Dillon, as if he should have moved on by now. Thank goodness he hasn't. This exquisite collection captures the fragility, the eccentricity and the majesty of the creatures that inhabit our skies, coastline, sandspits and waterways.
Dillon has been drawing birds since he was 6 – two early works are reproduced here. In the short commentaries that accompany each painting, it's the subtleties of colour he is often drawn to most vividly: the burnt-sienna of the male dotterel's breast feathers; the whio's golden eyes echoing the yellowing beech leaves caught among the moss.
After formative years in England and Europe, his home territory today is the Wairau Plain – coming full circle back to Marlborough, where he grew up on a farm in the Waihopai Valley. For a birder, it's rich pickings. And Dillon has never lost his sense of awe. "Through birds," he writes, "I come closest to the soul of the environment." Joanna Wane
Landmarks
by Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner & Owen Marshall
(Penguin Random House, $75)
New Zealand has 15,000km of coastline, but this is another love letter to the raw, landlocked beauty of Central Otago, with its "clear, hard, sharp light in the grandest blue skies of all". Featuring some previously unpublished work, Landmarks celebrates not only a love of the landscape but four decades of friendship between three of our most singular literary and artistic treasures.
The trio first's collaboration, Timeless Land, published in 1995, was – somewhat unexpectedly – a raging success. A painter (Sydney), a poet (Turner) and a writer of prose (Marshall) – but really, all are philosophers at heart. Now in their 70s, their work is imbued with the melancholy that comes in life when more time is spent reflecting on the past than looking to the future.
There's some anger in that – the damage to the environment, the "greening" of the land through intensive dairy farming – but humour, too. Turner again, in Autumn Nor'wester: "She's a good one," my mate says, "hang on to your undies." Joanna Wane
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright! Animal Poems
Selected by Fiona Waters, illustrated by Britta Teckentrup
(Nosy Crow, $55)
This book doesn't talk down to kids. I like that about it. It tells them it's okay to not know what a poem is "about". Poems are things you can get lost in. I don't know; I'm no educationalist or talkback caller, but maybe we spend too much time teaching kids how not to get lost.
Two or three poems - sometimes one, sometimes four - appear on each page. They typically congeal around a single animal or collection of related animals. Britta Teckentrup's quiet, wistful illustrations, with their muted palette, are as open and generous as the poems around which they appear. Poets include Blake, Byron, Margaret Mahy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes, Paula Green and a couple of hundred others.
Some of the poems are silly and light, some of them are deep and full of provocative, metaphysical space. Mostly, they're short and affecting. A good poem immediately puts you somewhere new emotionally and this book is packed with good poems. For adults, they will evoke the past. For children, they will help create it. Greg Bruce
Railways Studios: How a Government Design Studio Helped Build New Zealand
by Peter Alsop, Neill Atkinson, Katherine Milburn and Richard Wolfe
(Te Papa Press, $70)
From 1920 to 1987, the Government's railways department owned and operated its own design agency. Rarely in the history of business have two less synergistic operations co-existed but it obviously made enough sense to last 67 years and to produce enough intriguing material to lead to the creation of a book of richly evocative images advertising and promoting New Zealand, New Zealanders and New Zealand's products and services. Some of the ads are beautiful, some preposterous, some both.
One poster shows a beautifully hand-painted river vista, over which is written: "The Wanganui River New Zealand's 'Grand Canyon'" and "NEW ZEALAND'S PARAMOUNT TOURIST ATTRACTION". The images, providing a pictorial history of the country as it saw itself through the 20th century, are the stars, but the first half of the book also contains plenty of text, embedding the project in a wider social history of the country. Come for the pictures, stay for the prominent historians' words, come back for the pictures. Greg Bruce
Wonderland: The New Zealand Photographs of Whites Aviation
by Peter Alsop
(Potton & Burton, $50)
A mix of art, craft, nostalgia and curiosity piece, hand-coloured photographs brought a splash of post-World War II modernism into many New Zealand homes.
The process involved a delicate, intricate touch and exacting replication of colour, which was applied using a thin stick wrapped with cotton wool rather than a paintbrush. As with much women's work, it's a skill that has been largely under-rated. In 1963, one large photograph of Lake Taupō worked on by four "colouring girls" took nine days to complete.
Whites Aviation, founded in downtown Auckland in 1945, specialised in aerial photography and their hand-coloured images have become collectibles. Wonderland, a condensed selection of landscapes from Alsop's popular 2016 book Hand-Coloured New Zealand, is geographically arranged from Northland to Rakiura/Stewart Island, and includes some colourful profiles of the era's key figures. Joanna Wane
NY Times: Heatwaves impair cognition, increase aggression, and disrupt self-control.