Search results for ""author tom scott""

Drawn Out is a hilarious, heartbreaking, heart-warming account of Tom Scott's tragicomic childhood, his manic student-newspaper days, his turbulent years stumbling through the corridors of power, his fallings out with prime ministers, his collaborations with comic legends John Clarke, A.K. Grant and Murray Ball, his travels to the ends of the earth with his close friend Ed Hillary, and more...'A first-class memoir of a highly memorable life. Here is an important (often hilarious) writer and immensely gifted cartoonist, insightfully chronicling quite momentous changes in our political and social landscape.'Jim Mora, New Zealand Books

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Tom Scott wrote and illustrated a weekly column on politics for the Listener for over a decade in the 1970s and early 1980s. Since 1988 he has been the editorial cartoonist for Wellington's Evening Post and its successor, the Dominion Post. A life member of the Press Gallery, he has observed at point-blank range prime ministers from Norman Kirk to John Key. He was famously banned from China by Rob Muldoon. He has been 'a boy on the bus' with David Lange, Mike Moore, Jim Bolger and Helen Clark. His television drama series and documentary on Ed Hillary have sold to a number of countries. Footrot Flats, which he co-wrote with Murray Ball, and his stage play The Daylight Atheist were hits on both sides of the Tasman.

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Charles Upham was the most highly decorated soldier in the Commonwealth forces of WWII, and could arguably be called the bravest soldier of the war. An unassuming stock worker/ valuer at the beginning of the war, he stormed through Crete and the Western Desert amazing and confounding his comrades with his exploits. He won two Victoria Crosses (the only combat soldier ever to do so) and in the opinion of his superiors deserved many more. Captured, he became an escape artist and ended his war in the famous Colditz POW camp. Shy and reluctant to take credit for his actions, he deflected all praise onto his soldiers and was described as “distraught” that he had been honoured. He then farmed in North Canterbury until his death in 1994, avoiding the limelight wherever possible. There has been one previous biography, “Mark of the Lion” published in 1962, which was a major bestseller and sells to this day.

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On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. Txhese influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance. As Scott-Smith shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. On an Empty Stomach focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. Scott-Smith concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.

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Abandoned airports. Shipping containers. Squatted hotels. These are just three of the many unusual places that have housed refugees in the past decade. The story of international migration is often told through personal odysseys and dangerous journeys, but when people arrive at their destinations a more mundane task begins: refugees need a place to stay. Governments and charities have adopted a range of strategies in response to this need. Some have sequestered refugees in massive camps of glinting metal. Others have hosted them in renovated office blocks and disused warehouses. They often end up in prefabricated shelters flown in from abroad.This book focuses on seven examples of emergency shelter, from Germany to Jordan, which emerged after the great summer of migration in 2015. Drawing on detailed ethnographic research into these shelters, the book reflects on their political implications and opens up much bigger questions about humanitarian action. By exploring how aid ag

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