Men's Mental Health Week Book Reviews by Chloe Blades

Our Beautiful Darkness by Ondjaki, translated from Portuguese by Lyn Miller-Lachmann

(Enchanted Lion Books, $30)

Angola’s engulfed in a civil war and two teenagers are sat outdoors, unfamiliar with each other, when the lights suddenly go out leaving them in total darkness.

What ensues is a literary cinematic experience where car headlights, as they pass slowly by, are the only things briefly illuminating their faces. The beauty is in the darkness, “after all, a person can also say things without using their voice.

This was the first curious discovery I made on that night of the beautiful absence of light”. It’s artfully illustrated by Antonio Jorge Goncalves, and you see how their realities melt into the shadows and a new reality’s built based on their insecurities, dreams and family stories.

There’s something about reading a short, poetic novel written for teenagers that brings back the naivety that’s lost with the pressures of adulthood.

Freewheeling: Essays on Cycling from Daunt Books (Daunt Books, $38)

12 writers, including Wellington’s Ashleigh Young, author of Can You Tolerate This?, write about their cycling escapades.

It turns out cycling is more than just cycling. 

There’s a world of cycling to be analysed and I’m surprisingly grateful for it.

Young has a slow side-swipe with a car and the driver says, “sorry, I didn’t see you”. As she’s retrieving her sock and shoe from the floor she realises “I must look crazy.

It was me who was in the different world…out here with my sweat-kicking layer…my racing heart”.

Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada, writes about the memories of her first ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan and how “riding a bike got me into my body”.

Xani Byrne cycles the coast of Great Britain with families bereaved by suicide. Dervla Murphy, a female Irish cycling legend, documents her ride from Dunkirk to Teheran in the 60s in the coldest winter in 80 years.

This collection of essays traverses the many meanings and motivations for cycling, and all are uplifting examples of perseverance, beauty and adventure.

Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman (Auckland University Press, $60) 

Thank the art lords that Mark Forman was able to access the work of Tony Fomison by “bowing before the high priests,” who’s initial advice was that unlike Fomison’s art his life was of little interest.

As Forman proves, however, the two are inseparable, with insights such as: “Fomison brushed off artspeak in interviews as pretentious, and claimed ‘the only reason he’d painted ‘ugly’ faces was because his art training had been in sculpture and form, and malformed people had more form in their faces than ‘blankly young and handsome people’”.

Fomison lived a life of debauchery - a vagrant in Paris, twice imprisoned, and battling addictions -which was paralleled with his thoughtfulness, genius and deep fascination with Pacific and Māori history and art. 

Through research at an admirably granular level, Forman assembles a lifetime of anecdotes, photographs, interviews and reviews, to create a portrait of an artist unlike any other in Aotearoa.

The iconic Jacqueline Fahey muses that she was unsure Mark Forman, a man who didn’t personally know Fomison, was up to the task. Instead, she says, “I was wrong… his research is remarkable, as he recovers the memories of the survivors of the art scenes that Tony was part of with intelligence and sensitivity”. 

Any artist would be lucky to have their life immortalised in this way.

Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick (Penguin Random House, $40)

If there’s one way to alleviate the anxiety and despair of an uncertain future as AI infiltrates our day-to-day, uninvited, it’s to educate oneself. Because unfortunately, or not, AI has well and truly arrived. 

Ethan Mollick, a professor and academic studying innovation at Wharton, offers a matter-of-fact argument for co-existing with AI, because it’s safer to be on the side of knowledge and development than not. 

Here you’ll gain insight into what technology means for the future of work, education, entertainment, interaction, and our sense of self. As well as more scientific deep-dives into how AI interacts with humans and how General Purpose Technology and large language models works. 

About 30% of it will keep you up at night, like the implications for intimacy and human relations as more lonely people seek companionship from chatbots that regurgitate and reinforce the users preferences. 

But on the whole it’s better to have read this book than not. I’ll be chairing a panel of AI experts, centring on this book, at Unity Books on June 28th at 5:45. You can buy tickets here.