This is an auction for SUCH ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS: A MEMOIR, by Ian Cross.

"Journalist, author, and broadcaster Ian Cross has made many splashes in New Zealand's small pond and in this rich and rewarding memoir he reveals much of his life that would easily elude any would-be biographer:

• The bizarre troubles he and another young journalist fell into in Panama under the direction of an older New Zealander who turned out to have been a British intelligence agent and his implication in gun-running.
• How a journalistic fellowship at Harvard University could turn his life upside down and have him write The God Boy, a novel that has been in print for fifty years and was recently published again by Penguin, this time in its Classics series as 'a masterpiece'.
• His innovation as editor of the Listener.
• His dogged pursuit of funding to recompense authors for the library use of their work; over twenty-four years the returns have amounted to twenty-two million dollars.
• His years with the country's single television channel.
• His misadventures as Chairman of Broadcasting, trying to save television from becoming hopelessly dysfunctional.
• And, in 1981, facing demands to ban television coverage of rugby during the Springbok tour."

Large format (trade) paperback 2007.

151 pages + eight pages of photographs.

Very good condition.

The cost of shipping is $4.95 (ordinary post) or $6.95 (tracked mail). If you are on rural delivery and want tracked mail, the shipping cost will be $9.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.