W. H. Oliver — Looking for the Phoenix: Looking for the Phoenix: a Memoir

Bridget Williams Books 2002 Paperback, 178pp. W. H. Oliver, a writer, editor, professor, and central figure in New Zealand's intellectual landscape, reflects here on the decades of his own life and the history that has shaped him. A warm portrait is painted of his Cornish parents, whose experiences with immigration, rural work, the depression, and Labour activism are recounted. Oliver shares how he avidly absorbed education and progressed from rural schools to Oxford University. This wide-ranging account tells of ancestry and early childhood, the influences of feminism, friendship, marriage, and family, while acknowledging the broader scope of history and the development of New Zealand. This is a poet writing about history, and an historian writing autobiography-perceptive, wry, and sometimes painfully honest. (ISBN: 9781877242984). Good.