I Heart NZ

Three senior writers from The New Yorker have been posting rave reviews about New Zealand in blogs on the  magazine’s website. Chief political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg, along with colleagues Judith Thurman, Rhonda Sherman, and James Surowiecki, were in the country for the recent Auckland Writers and Readers Festival and found themselves “in a Hobbity paradise”. “I did see the first of the three Peter Jackson movies and although my attention wandered during the interminable battle scenes, I was transfixed by the landscape,” wrote Hertzberg. He goes on to say that our snow-covered Southern peaks “look as if Zeus, or more likely some Celtic god, would be tempted to reach down with a giant spoon and have a taste”. The New Yorker business writer James Surowiecki blogged about the comparative health of our banking system compared with the United States, “it feels like what New Zealand is going through is something closer to a  traditional recession … one that doesn’t have the added dimension of a banking system in crisis”. Hertzberg concludes his blog from Queenstown with, “In short, [Middle-earth is] the sort of place, tame, but with a touch of unthreatening  wildness, that any Baggins would be reluctant to leave. “I certainly will be.”