Web Only: What I'm Reading - August

IQ editor Claire Finlayson reveals another OF THE  bookS  currently restING on her bedside cabinet.

Steve Braunias is surely our gutsiest journalist. Who else would have gumption enough to characterize Prime Minister Helen Clark thus: “When she listens, her top lip rests over her bottom lip, her chin lowers, and she looks as though she has just swallowed a large potato”? John Key, meanwhile, is “an empty vessel”. Clark and Key feature alongside 25 other New Zealand identities in Roosters I Have Known (Awa Press): a collection of pithy profiles written by Braunias for the Sunday Star-Times in 2007.

Many of his interviewees dug their own graves with nervous, galloping tongues: “…I needed them to keep talking, to slip their necks inside the noose of my frayed TDK tape”. Braunias has a novelist’s eye – he reveals much about each subject via oblique details (the mention of the budget toilet paper lying on the floor of Steve Crow’s loo; of Ruth Richardson cheerfully stripping down to her togs for the photographer). He sniffs out social tics, moral bald spots and obfuscatory nonsense. His journalism is very clever prince-of-darkness.