'A book to be treasured for the access it gives us to a little-known corner of the New Zealand experience.' Tipene O'Regan, Evening Post This award-winning, trail-blazing book by Michael King restored the Moriori of the Chatham Islands to their rightful place in New Zealand, Pacific and world history. This revised edition contains material that has come to light since first publication. 'King has set the record straight in a richly readable and often moving account of a long ignored sideshow to the history of our country.' Gordon McLauchlan, National Business Review 'It is authoritative but it is also popular history in the best sense, and that is precisely what is needed to clear away the brambles of racial prejudice and historical error which have all but overwhelmed the subject in the past.' Atholl Anderson, Otago Daily Times 'This book decisively strips away all the muddle . . . a clear, thoroughly readable and honest history of the Moriori.' Judith Binney, Sunday Star 'A timely book which must be read so that we will all know more about ourselves and about us as a nation.' Hirini Moko Mead, Dominion

From the Chatham Islands/ Rekohu to London, from 1835 to the 21st century, this quietly powerful and compelling novel confronts the complexity of being Moriori, Maori and Pakeha. In the 1880s, Mere yearns for independence. Iraia wants the same but, as the descendant of a slave, such things are hardly conceivable. One summer, they notice their friendship has changed, but if they are ever to experience freedom they will need to leave their home in the Queen Charlotte Sounds. A hundred years later, Lula and Bigs are born. The birth is literally one in a million, as their mother, Tui, likes to say. When Tui dies, they learn there is much she kept secret and they, too, will need to travel beyond their world, to an island they barely knew existed. Neither Mere and Iraia nor Lula and Bigs are aware that someone else is part of their journeys. He does not watch over them so much as through them, feeling their loss and confusion as if it were his own.

‘Us Maoris used to practice slavery just like them poor Negroes had to endure in America . . .' says Beth Heke in Once Were Warriors. ‘Oh those evil colonials who destroyed Maori culture by ending slavery and cannibalism while increasing the life expectancy,' wrote one sarcastic blogger. So was Maori slavery ‘just like' the experience of Africans in the Americas and were British missionaries or colonial administrators responsible for ending the practice? What was the nature of freedom and unfreedom in Maori society and how did that intersect with the perceptions of British colonists and the anti-slavery movement? A meticulously researched book, Outcasts of the Gods? looks closely at a huge variety of evidence to answer these questions, analyzing bondage and freedom in traditional Maori society; the role of economics and mana in shaping captivity; and how the arrival of colonists and new trade opportunities transformed Maori society and the place of captives within it.

Mary Jane has travelled to all corners of the globe, to large cities to the outskirts and tiny islands off the coast of continents. This book is testament to her travels, discoveries and adventures. A mixture of laughter and sadness it is a reflection of her time spent abroad to date. Her love of travel takes her to Ben Nevis in Scotland, Mont Blanc in France, naked on a Chinese Junk, kicking a nuclear submarine and even visiting a secretive US military base. She has seen iconic buildings like Antonio Gaudi's buildings in Spain, the Taj Mahal, St Basil's Cathedral and even climbed the foothills of Mount Everest to basecamp! This is an intriguing book filled with amazing travel stories, the story of Mary Jane Walker.

Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.