Bookmarks

World Music is Where We Found It (Victoria University Press) is a fine collection of 28 essays by Allan Thomas, his students and colleagues.

Thomas (1942-2010) was a lecturer in musicology at Victoria University in Wellington for three decades.

His world music courses included tuition in Indonesian gamelan instruments, and he focused on Asian and Pacific as well as New Zealand vernacular music.

Interesting and surprising explorations are to be found among the scholarly studies. They include careful research into Maori guitar strumming styles, the musical modes and melodic cadences of auctioneers' patter and chants as they call the bids, and the history of "Kiwi" songs such as Now Is The Hour, Blue Smoke and others.

Edited by Wendy Pott and Paul Wolfram, the book is well referenced with sources and chapter notes, yet sadly devoid of a searchable index. However, music is the winner and there are plenty of chords struck as you dip into this volume.

- Geoff Adams

• Creatures great and small

Keep a copy of the new edition Collins Field Guide to New Zealand Wildlife by Rod Morris and Terence Lindsey, first published in 2000, in the glove box of your car. It's a guide to most of the creatures - birds, animals, insects, reptiles and some fish, that you may see if you look carefully when out and about. There's lots of useful information about the animals, both indigenous and introduced, but no guide to help identify what you may be looking at - you just have to flip through the book looking at the photographs until you find it.

- Charmian Smith

• Heroic true story

There have been many books about officers who were captured, held as prisoners of war, and tried to escape.

Unbroken by W. R. Beecroft (Brolga Publishing) is about a sergeant. NCOs and other ranks generally had a tougher time than officers.

Beecroft was an Australian soldier captured during the German siege of Tobruk. He spent four years in Italian and German POW camps, with a mixed population of Anzacs, and many New Zealanders are recorded sharing his experiences.

Life tended to be tougher under the Italians than under the Germans; the Germans were more rigorous about feeding their prisoners. The best part of this memoir is the escape from the Germans when the Reich was collapsing. It is rare to get such an accurate and persuasive account of the late-1944 and early-1945 debacle.

- Oliver Riddell