"Insightful, involving, and inspired" --dannyreviews.com

"Bulky, witty, spiky and full of embelichments" --The Evening Post, 16 November 2001

"This work is in scope, shape and accomplishment so far in advance of previous histories of New Zealand that comparisons with predecessors ... are largely beside the point.... Paradise Reforged is a considerable literary as well as historiographical achievement, a work of creative imagination that provides an epic narrative. It is a pleasure to read Belich's vigorous and colloquial but carefully wrought prose." --New Zealand Journal of History 36 (2002)

Paradise Reforged picks up where Making Peoples left off, taking the story of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the end of the twentieth century. It begins with the search for "Better Britain" and ends by analyzing the modern Maori resurgence, the new Pakeha consciousness, and the implications of a reinterpreted past for New Zealand's future. Along the way the book deals with subjects ranging from sport and sex to childhood and popular culture.

Critics hailed Making Peoples as "brilliant" and "the most ambitious book yet written on [New Zealand's] past." Paradise Reforged, its successor, adopts a similarly incisive, original sweep across the New Zealand historical landscape in confronting the myths of the past. That some of its themes are uncomfortably close to the present makes the result all the more fascinating.

For sale only in the U.S. and Canada.

James Belich is professor of history at the University of Auckland and the author of Making Peoples (UH Press, 1997).