Ghosts of Makara

Book excerpt: Ghosts of Makara: Growing up Down-Under in a lost world of yesteryears, is the moving memoir of a son of an Irish-German immigrant family growing up during the 1920s and the Depression-wracked '30s in a wind-blasted, yet picturesque, Pacific corner of colonial New Zealand. Makara Beach could have been Middle-Earth of the Lord of the Rings, the Academy Award-winning movie which 70 years later used Makara as one of its filming locations. In this sepia-tinted, nostalgic, first-person family album, the author evokes a lost era Down Under, one without television, the Internet, or (early on) even radio, when he and his younger brothers and sisters acted out their own stories and dreamed their own dreams. It was truly a different world, where barefoot Bobbits grew up with a deep love of nature and respect for family--a world we can learn much from today.