Political control & freedoms Books

At 300 pages and 105,000 words, it blows open the Waitangi debate by investigating the events leading up to the Treaty, and what Maori really believed they were signing. The Great Divide, working from the original documents from 200 years ago, directly challenges the findings of books like Michae...

Parihaka has become a byword for Maori refusal to yield land, culture and dignity to New Zealand's colonial government. Well after the end of the New Zealand Wars, the people of this small settlement at the foot of Mt Taranaki held out against the encroachments of Pakeha settlers in a struggle that ...

Daniel Domscheit-Berg An explosive and deeply revealing exposé of the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Website,’ by former WikiLeaks insider and spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Since its launch in 2006, WikiLeaks has rapidly grown into the most powerful a...

Why is Australia's current attitude towards freedom of speech harmful to democracy? Australia is the land of the 'fair go'. But does this attitude extend to freedom of speech? Unlike the US, Australia has no Bill of Rights to protect our right to free speech, yet most Australians take this right for...

This account begins before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and tells the story to the present day. This edition covers the challenges and settlements of the last decade of the 20th century, and includes photographs, paintings and drawings. Copies of the Treaty are included.

Bible & Treaty: Missionaries among the Maori is a complex and colourful adventure of faith, bravery, perseverance and betrayal that seeks to recover lost connections in the story of modern New Zealand. It brings a fresh perspective to the missionary story, from the lead-up to Samuel Marsden's fi...

This book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. Gulag is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the S...

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a qu...

The State of Maori Rights brings together a set of articles written between 1994 and 2009. It places on record the Maori view of events and issues that took place over these years, issues that have been more typically reported to the general public from a 'mainstream' media perspective. It is an im...

This is a collection of papers that examine the current place of the Treaty of Watangi in core public policy areas. The authors analyse the tensions and dynamics in the relationship between Maori and the Crown in their areas of expertise, detail the key challenges being faced, and provide insights o...

 Does free information mean free people? At the start of the twenty-first century we were promised that the internet would liberate the world. We could come together as never before, and from Iran's 'twitter revolution' to Facebook 'activism', technological innovation would spread democracy...

Since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by Maori chiefs and Governor Hobson in 1840 it has become the defining document in New Zealand history. From the New Zealand Wars to the 1975 Land March, from the Kingitanga to the Waitangi Tribunal, from Captain Cook to Hone Harawira, The Treaty of Waitang...

Today the Treaty has come to signify what both joins and divides the people of this country. It had different meanings also to those present at the 1840 signing -the new arrivals and the tangata whenua then occupying the land. To the British, it was the means by which they gained sovereignty over th...

Ingrid Betancourt's story - her exemplary courage, spirit and resilience - has captured the world's imagination. A politician and presidential candidate celebrated for her determination to combat the corruption and climate of fear endemic in Colombia, in 2002 she was taken hostage by FARC, a terrori...

New Zealand is at a watershed in its constitutional and political arrangements. There are three events looming in the short term which suggest that the status of Maori in Parliament is in for significant challenge. The first is the impending review of constitutional issues and the Maori seats as par...

"Death or Liberty" reveals how the British Government of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries banished to the end of the earth - Australia - political enemies viewed by authorities with the same alarm as today's 'terrorists': Jacobins, democrats and republicans, machine breakers, food r...

Weeping Waters is a must read for anyone who wants to be informed about the current debate regarding the Treaty of Waitangi and a constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand. The book features essays from eighteen well-known and respected Maori figures including Professor Margaret Mutu, Bishop Muru Walter...

A comprehensive history of the struggle for women's suffrage in New Zealand, including short biographies of the main people involved. New Zealand was the first country in the world to give women the vote, in 1893, an achievement of which we are justly proud. Respected historian Megan Hutching record...

This ground-breaking collection of essays by leading scholars - Bryan Gilling, James Belich, John C. Weaver, Alan Ward, Michael Allen, Mark Hickford, Vincent O'Malley, Judith Binney, Dion Tuuta, Alex Frame and Richard S. Boast - examines the confiscation of Maori land in nineteenth-century New Zeala...

In the former East there was one agent of the Stasi, the secret police, for every six citizens. What did it do to people to be so watched? And what sort of people were they, all those watchers? In her internationally acclaimed debut, Anna Funder presents with startling humour and sympathy the human ...

Using a vast body of documentary materials, noted scholar and editor Clayborne Carson creates a book that remarkably approximates a self-portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. Delving into all aspects of this man's life, the work covers his boyhood, his education as a minister, and his emergence as a l...

'You are here for the rest of your life. Do you understand? You are not leaving Iran. You are here until you die.' Betty Mahmoody and her husband, Dr Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody ('Moody'), came to Iran from the USA to meet Moody's family. With them was their four-year-old daughter, Mahtob. Appalled by th...

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The ...

Raised a Muslim but increasingly outraged by her religion's hostility towards women, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has now become one of today's most talked-about, admired and controversial political figures because of her desire to free women from an oppressive Muslim culture. Her bestselling collection of essay...

Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes Against Humanity is a superb and highly influential account of the history of the human rights movement up to the present day. From the French Revolution and the Nuremberg trials to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Robertson traces the developing concept of human rights and...

AccoladesShortlisted for New Zealand Book Award Fiction Category 1994.

Waris Dirie, whose name means "desert flower", was born in Somalia of nomadic parents. She underwent extreme female circumcision at the age of five, and when she was 13 her father sold her into marriage with a 60-year-old for five camels, at which time she ran away. She was discovered by a fashion p...

Essential reading for anyone with an interest in New Zealand's early history and implications of the Treaty of Waitangi. This new biography of Captain William Hobson is "immensely readable .. for everyone with an interest in New Zealand's crucial early history". Hobson, within two days ...

In the Robben Island prison register, Nelson Mandela was famously recorded as prisoner number 466/64. Number 468/64 was Ahmed Kathrada. Sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 in the infamous Rivonia Trial, Ahmed Kathrada spent twenty-six continuous years in jail for his political beliefs. During his...

The Treaty of Waitangi is the most important document in New Zealand's history. Current Treaty issues and Maori/Pakeha relationships can only be understood within the wider story of New Zealand. As we understand and honour our history, we can acknowledge the need for restoration, healing and right r...

An astonishing account (and the only one we have) of a woman’s experience of labour camps under Stalin and Hitler. Margarete Buber-Neumann was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935, she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937...

The slave ship was the instrument of history's greatest forced migration and a key to the origins and growth of global capitalism, yet much of its history remains unknown. Marcus Rediker uncovers the extraordinary human drama that played out on this world-changing vessel. Drawing on thirty years of ...

 It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet me...

'Harrowing, spellbinding . . . nothing less than an indictment of the entire Bush era' Observer, 'Shocking' The Times In August, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina blew in, the city of New Orleans had been abandoned by most citizens. But resident Abdulrahman Zeitoun, though his wife and family had...

Meet Denver, raised under plantation-style slavery in Louisiana until he escaped "da Man" - in the 1960s - by hopping a train. Then, after another 18 homeless years on the streets of Dallas, God moved...and a godly woman prayed, and listened, and obeyed. And mountains began to move, beginning with h...

The author was the first to forecast (in 1997) the events that ruptured the global economy in 2008 by applying an analysis that exposes the fault lines in the structure of the market economy. Now, he extends his analysis to the future of the West, to evaluate fears from distinguished commentators wh...

Extremists are people whose ideas or tactics are viewed as outside the mainstream. Looked at this way, extremists are not necessarily twisted or evil. But they can be, especially when they are intolerant and violent. What makes extremists turn violent? This 2006 book assumes that extremists are rati...

Should contemporary citizens provide material redress to right past wrongs? There is a widespread belief that contemporary citizens should take responsibility for rectifying past wrongs. Nahshon Perez challenges this view, questioning attempts to aggregate dead wrongdoers with living people, and exa...

An unprecedented and timely collection that captures the global vision of Dr. King--in his own words Too many people continue to think of Dr. King only as "a southern civil rights leader" or "an American Gandhi," thus ignoring his impact on poor and oppressed people around the world. ""In a Single ...

"Ladies and Gentlemen" studies the history of the terms that once elevated the ideal woman and man and illuminates how the structure of Western society established and maintained the virtues. In contrast, the book demonstrates how three movements--atheism, liberalism, and radical feminism--undercut ...