Sunday 14 August 2016

Dad Goes to the Movies featured on Radio NZ

 Our latest book Dad Goes to the Movies (1941) featured on Jesse Mulligan's 1-4pm show on Tues 9 August.

"On 6 December 1941 a NZ serviceman named Les Tweedie, stationed in Alexandria, went to see James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner.

How do we know this? Because Les was an avid film fan and wrote a diary and recorded, among many other things, every film he saw. Thanks to his daughter, writer Jaq Tweedie, this diary has just been published as Dad Goes to the Movies (1941), a lovingly transcribed version of his closely written pocket diary from that year. Dan Slevin from RNZ Widescreen takes a look at the new book."

Dan describes the book as ".. Quite delightful, it's modest, much like it's author, and a fascinating window onto a period... he does list every movie he goes to but there's a lot more going on in this book. He's essentially enlisted, and then is shipped overseas, and in a typically laconic or prosaic Kiwi way he describes what he sees and what he's experiencing. And I found it really quite moving in a modest sort of way .. for anyone interested in the period, I think it's a really interesting window on all that..."