NEW BOOK SESSION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 634, 24 August 1951, Page 9

NEW BOOK SESSION

OOK SHOP, a fortnightly session for those who like to hear important new books reviewed at some length, will go on the air from seven National stations during the fortnight beginning September 3. Each session will include one 10-minute review of a recent book likely to interest the general reader and one or two short talks on topics related to books. Books reviewed will be both fiction and non-fiction — biography, travel, history, technical and scientific works, poetry, memoirs. Brave Company, by Guthrie Wilson, will be reviewed by Jim Henderson (author of Gunner Inglorious, and now with the War History branch of the Internal Affairs Department) in the first session. Brave Company, a story about New Zealand infantrymen in the Italian campaign, is the first novel of a Palmerston North school teacher. It has been very highly praised overseas. Guthrie Wilson himself will also be heard. He will talk about the way in which he wrote the book and drop a hint about his next novel. In the second short talk listeners will hear Melville Palmer, buyer for a large Wellington bookshop, discussing New Zealand Tastes in Fiction. Mr. Palmer takes the view that what the ordinary reader says to his friends matters more than what the reviewer says. (He mentions the success of The Snow Geaose, which he says was hardly mentioned by reviewers.) He will also comment on the current taste for books with a religious theme or background. In the second session W. S. Wauchop, . Chief Librarian of the General Assembly Library, will review The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and Takrouna, a recent official War History publication, will be reviewed by Lieutenant-Colonel C. M. Bennett in the third session. Colonel Bennett commanded the Maori Battalion during the action at Takrouna, A number of short talks for future sessions have already béen arranged. Some of these (with speakers) are: Children’s Classics (Dorothy Neal

White), Looking After Books (A. R. D. Fairburn), Reading in Bed (W. H. Graham), The Public Library (A. G. W. Dunningham), The Bible as Literature (Professor G. A. F. Knight), Stalwart Victorians (A, E. Caddick), Books About the Country (L. J. Wild), Books About Gardens (Millicent Jennings), Bronte Books (Joan Stevens), and Pains and Rewards of Amateur Bookbinding (Eleanor Joachim). Two aspects of Dumas will be discussed in the talks by the New Zealand authority F. W. Reed. Authors, poets, journalists, printers, publishers and booksellers, librarians and collectors, professors, lecturers and students, and readers of all kinds "are among those expected to contribute to the session. Book Shop will be heard from 2YA, 3YA, 2YZ and 3YZ in the first week of each fortnight, and from 1YA, 4YC and 1YZ in the second week. Stations which already have a book session will continue to broadcast this as well as the new session. The first Book Shop will be heard from 3YZ on Monday, September 3; 3YA on Wednesday, September 5; 2YA on Friday, September 7; 2YZ on Sunday, September 9; 1YA on Wednesday, September 12; 4YC on Thursday, September 13; and 1LYZ on Sunday, September 16. Subsequent broadcasts will’ be on the same days each fortnight. Broadcasting times will appear in the programme pages of the next two issues of The Listener.