Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Ea..., Christina Thompson
Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Ea..., Christina Thompson
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
A New Zealand Story

Author: Christina Thompson

Narrator: Sarah Mollo-Christensen

Unabridged: 8 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/08/2020


Synopsis

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.

As an American graduate student studying history in Australia, Thompson traveled to New Zealand and met a Maori known as "Seven." Their relationship is one of opposites: he is a tradesman, she is an intellectual; he comes from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middleclass privilege; he is a "native," she descends directly from "colonizers." Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own.

In this book, which grows out of decades of reading and research, Thompson explores cultural displacement through the ages and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and Cook's circumnavigation of 1770.

About Christina Thompson

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, which was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue, the American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, and three editions of Best Australian Essays. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Writer's Grant from the Australia Council, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, she lives outside of Boston with her family.


Reviews

Neo-colonial hogwash. I'm planning a trip to New Zealand and from the title and description thought "Come on Shore....." would be a colorful account of a woman's adventures in New Zealand. Instead the author chose to write a narcissistic memoir of her own privileged WASP upbringing in New England re......more

The fact that it took me forever to read this book should in no way be regarded as criticism of it. Life got away from me for a while. It's an excellent book. The blurb explaining how it's a memoir of a cross cultural marriage can not even begin to contain all that's in this book. The author is an A......more

Goodreads review by Mindy

I feel two ways about this book. On the one side, it offers up a very satisfying history of the Maori people in New Zealand for a layman to read — episodic rather than chronological, emphasizing key events but not pedantically enumerating them, almost conversational in style. On the other, it's got......more