Kind Of Life Research Articles

“It's a forced separation […] and we've got used to this kind of life”: changing dynamics of HIV risk in the context of immigration

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the impacts of immigration processes on the HIV risk faced by mainland Chinese immigrants in Canada.Design/methodology/approachDrawn from a larger qualitative study on the vulnerability to HIV of recent immigrants to Canada, the data presented were collected through individual, face‐to‐face, semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews with 34 mainland‐Chinese immigrant adults who perceived themselves as facing sexual health risks (including HIV infection) through engaging in unsafe sex.FindingsImmigration processes have not only exposed these immigrants to a HIV risk that they did not face in China; they have also compromised their capacity to effectively respond to it. In light of various settlement difficulties, HIV risk is neither the only nor the most urgent challenge that they have faced in their post‐immigration lives.Research limitations/implicationsThe HIV risk under discussion must be understood by situating it in the processes of immigration, settlement, and transnational connections, all of which have shaped not only the dynamics of HIV risk but, also, these individuals' capacities to respond to that risk. Owing to its small‐size purposive sample, the results of this study may not be generalizable for Chinese immigrants in Canada as a whole.Practical implicationsGreater attention should be given to the intersections between immigrants' vulnerability to HIV and settlement processes and to holistic approaches that take into account the changing contexts and dynamics of HIV risk.Originality/valueThis exploratory study will contribute to knowledge of the HIV risk Chinese immigrants in Canada face – a little‐known topic.

Pop Life and Living Death

What would Socrates and Britney Spears have in common? Surprisingly, they both offer lessons about how to live and die on stage, how to evaluate the virtue of a life, and to make life a virtue. Both their careers pose a famous question - What kind of life is worth living? - to which both answer the same celebrated reprimand: an unexamined life is not worth living. Of course, there are some subtle differences in the way they would put this. For Socrates, a virtuous and vital life is earned by suffering a continual, relentless testing of oneself. Vitality is the imperative to vigorously interrogate what one thinks to be the limits of oneself: what you are capable of knowing is what you know yourself to be, up to the moment of death. Accordingly, all of life - as long as it is impelled by a crucial assessment of one's finitude (of an epistemological limitation that is essential to the self) - would be such a trial. Yet, for all its compromised immodesty, such obligatory self-inspection is not exactly narcissistic. Socrates's legal trial is testimony to the artful dodge of ego; he confesses that, rather than being an egoistic ambition, it was the voice of his inner daimon (a genial ghosting of the ego) that inspired him to pursue philosophical life, rather than a more respectable career in public affairs. The Socratic daimon - whose only audience is the ego it privately accompanies, and whose only influence is preventative (not merely cautionary, certainly not hectoring) - does not get the publicity or the gratification due to egotism. Less like a conscience and more like the esoteric Latin genius (an impersonal but faithful intimate of ego), the daimon only gets acknowledged when the philosophical life it successfully inspired is tried and sentenced to death.

Uniquely Human: The Ethics of the <i>Imago Dei</i> in Genesis 1–11

Wentzel van Huyssteen proposes an intriguing reinterpretation of the biblical symbol of the imago Dei, according to which the purpose of humankind as created in the image of God is ''to set forth the presence of God in this world.'' It is not one particular aspect of human life that is associated with the imago Dei, such as rationality and reason; rather, van Huyssteen invites us to consider the complexity of human life in its evolu- tionary, biological, social, and ethical dimensions as an expression of the imago Dei. This article explores how his ideas resonate with a historical-critical reading of the pertinent passages in Genesis 1-11. It has often been overlooked that the imago Dei in primeval history is deeply embedded in the priestly account of how life—human and other—is created and how it unfolds. As such, the imago Dei appears in contexts that describe the relationships between humans and animals, men and women, parents and children, and, in a general ethical sense, between neighbours. Humans are called images of God because they are capable of creating, shaping, and changing the networks of relation that connect them with each other and with the rest of creation. It is in these networks that humans fill the world with the kind of life that sets forth divine presence in the world.

The War of Wells’s Lives

H.G. Wells has often been unlucky in his biographers. He told the story of his own life in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), a two-volume work filled with vivid recollections and fascinating detail but weighed down at last by its author’s dedication to “The Idea of a Planned World,” which leads him to assert that his progression “from a backyard to Cosmopolis” has made him “the conscious Common Man of his time and culture” (417-18, 643). Here was a bubble waiting to be pricked, especially as the autobiography was supplemented by an episodic, unpublished “Postscript” containing suppressed details of his tangled love-life. The “Postscript” would make its first appearance fifty years later under the title (chosen by his son, G.P. Wells) H.G. Wells in Love, but by that time its contents had been heavily trailed in biographies stepping delicately around the British libel laws. (Though Wells was dead, most of his lovers were still alive and some, notably Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, were highly litigious.) From Vincent Brome’s H.G. Wells (1951) to Gordon N. Ray’s H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), an air of scandal-mongering surrounded Wellsian biography, and to some extent this still remains. Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers (2001) contained new revelations, particularly about Martha Gellhorn, and David Lodge's biographical novel A Man of Parts (2011) revisits Wells's earlier love affairs at great length. Lodge, however, seems to have been unaware of Wells’s unpublished correspondence with Amber Reeves (the mother of his daughter Anna-Jane), which is drawn on in Michael Sherborne’s biography. In his foreword to Another Kind of Life, sf novelist Christopher Priest calls Wells “a great writer” who “left us dozens of great works.” Moreover, he was “an interesting man, a decent man, and an honest one” (11). This verdict is strikingly different from that given by several of Wells’s earlier biographers, even though they were prepared to admit somewhat grudgingly that he was a great writer, at least of science fiction. Lovat Dickson in H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) found him both indecent and personally dishonest. The Mackenzies in a 1987 epilogue to The Time Traveller wrote of “the personal irresponsibility which so vitiated every aspect of H.G.’s life” (458), while Dickson found in that life “the almost complete absence of any moral values” (315). Still more outspoken was Michael Coren, whose The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells (1993) added political debunking to slanderous personal assessment. Coren’s declared aim was to demonstrate that “Wells’s influence on his own age, and his influence on [the] ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive” (11). At least

Health Care Technology, Health Care Rationing, and Older Americans: Enough Already!

As part of the health reform debate that is raging in Congress and the nation at the time this article is being written this time, frenzied claims regarding the advent of health care rationing continue to be exchanged by the more extreme wings of both major political parties. Politicians and commentators on the conservative end of the spectrum worriedly lament that passage of ObamaCare will usher in a new era of rationing that denies potentially beneficial treatments to vulnerable patients and their physicians, while liberal congressional and administration spokespersons vigorously deny those accusations. Attention has been explicitly paid to the subject of health care rationing in the United States-including the idea of using patients' chronological age as a criterion for rationing-in the ethical and public policy literature for several decades (Menzel, 1990; Smeeding, 1987; Symposium, 1992). Responsible commentators have recognized the inevitability of rationing health care in a real world of finite resources and infinite demands (both legitimate and unreasonable) but also have acknowledged the seemingly unmanageable methodological, political, and cultural can of worms that the challenge of rationing opens up (Aaron, 2008; Aaron & Schwartz, 2005). A major problem with the present (often uncivil) political discussion is that both ends of the spectrum make the same categorical mistake. Conservatives and liberals alike act as though (a) health care rationing would be a new, previously nonexistent phenomenon; (b) this new phenomenon, if it developed, would be evil; and (c) that rationing can be avoided by either maintaining the health system status quo or changing the system radically enough to wring out enormous undiscovered amounts of fraud, waste, and inefficiency. A more honest discussion, by contrast, would acknowledge that health care rationing in the United States is already a practical reality and can only intensify in the future regardless of the disposition of the current health reform debate (Kapp, 1998, 2002). Thus, a more fruitful allocation of intellectual and political effort should focus not on whether there will be health care rationing in this country's future but rather how it ought to be carried out in the most ethically palatable manner possible. A primary responder, for almost a quarter of a century, to the question of how health care rationing should be done in the United States has been philosopher Daniel Callahan. CALLAHAN'S PROPOSALS, THEN AND NOW Early Arguments Philosopher Callahan, a cofounder of the pioneering bioethics think tank The Hastings Center (http://www.thehastingscenter. org), broke new ground in 1987 with the publication of Setting Limits (Callahan, 1987). There, he set forth a fairly comprehensive proposal for radically altering the American health care delivery and financing system. The key component of his plan to enhance equal access to affordable care within a universe unfortunately but unavoidably characterized by limited financial, physical, and human resources was the utilization of patients' (or potential patients') chronological age as a categorical eligibility criterion for the receipt of particular forms of diagnostic or therapeutic interventions. Specifically, he proposed the creation and implementation of explicit, official rules disqualifying individuals who had exceeded a designated age threshold (roughly identified as 70-ish) from receiving (ideally at all but at least at public expense) certain aggressive forms of medical tests and treatments solely because they were deemed too old. Callahan expanded on this thesis a few years later in What Kind of Life? (Callahan, 1990), in which he derided the popular clamor for medical progress by arguing that, although many individual lives might be lengthened and improved by continuing to support medical innovation, the American population considered as a whole was quite healthy enough. …

Marine catalogue of concern

Summary A 10-year study of marine organisms has provided an unprecedented list of species but highlights the worries about many of them. Nigel Williams reports.

Membrane Thickness Cue for Cold Sensing in a Bacterium

Thermosensors are ubiquitous integral membrane proteins found in all kinds of life. They are involved in many physiological roles, including membrane remodeling, chemotaxis, touch, and pain [1-3], but, the mechanism by which their transmembrane (TM) domains transmit temperature signals is largely unknown. The histidine kinase DesK from Bacillus subtilis is the paradigmatic example of a membrane-bound thermosensor suited to remodel membrane fluidity when the temperature drops below approximately 30°C [1, 4] providing, thus, a tractable system for investigating the mechanism of TM-mediated input-output control of thermal adaptation. Here we show that the multimembrane-spanning domain from DesK can be simplified into a chimerical single-membrane-spanning minimal sensor (MS) that fully retains, in vivo and in vitro, the sensing properties of the parental system. The MS N terminus contains three hydrophilic amino acids near the lipid-water interface creating an instability hot spot. Mutational analysis of this boundary-sensitive beacon revealed that membrane thickness controls the signaling state of the sensor by dictating the hydration level of the metastable hydrophilic spot. Guided by these results we biochemically demonstrated that the MS signal transmission activity is sensitive to bilayer thickness. Membrane thickness could be a general cue for sensing temperature in many organisms.

Water Availability and Quality in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries: Implications for Public Health

Environmental problems and their potential impacts on public health vary in scale and time depending on the level and nature of pollutants. Although water is regarded as the source of all kinds of life on earth, it also acts as an efficient carrier of pollutants. Contamination of drinking water, agricultural water, or recreational water by infectious pathogens, chemical pollutants, or others can have significant impacts on public health. During the past few decades, waterborne diseases continued to spread and the health risks continued to increase. The correlation between water resources and public health is more evident in arid regions. This article discusses the availability of water resources in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries and elaborates on the possible impacts of water resources on public health. It emphasizes the importance of preservation of water quality and prevention of waterborne diseases, which could be achieved through a coordinated effort from diverse groups and disciplines.

Crossing Digital Bridges for Global Understanding

Everyone who has ever been to Disney World's Epcot Center and visited the Small World ride leaves with the song It's a Small World (After All) ringing in their ears. Never has the central message of this song been truer than it is today. Was Walt Disney a prophet of global connectivity? The international fantasy world he developed, and others like it, are designed to create a global community experience for amusement park visitors. Disney's portrayal of many nations-their colorful dress, musical traditions, and unique native cuisine-is many students' only foreign travel, and the experience may leave them with lasting stereotypes. So what? Is this bad? Isn't this a good hook to generate interest in other cultures? Indeed, it's a great hook, but fantasy worlds promote an idealized portrait of the world: no real people, no trash, no problems, and no worries. It is our charge to see that students grow beyond the superficial and begin understanding real-world peoples, problems, and issues. How do we help our middle grades students, many of whom will never actually travel the world, achieve a deeper understanding of other cultures? Making virtual cultural connections offers the best alternative to experiencing travel firsthand. In this article, we discuss why young adolescents need to develop a global perspective and how we can help them do that. We examine the difference between surface and internal culture learning and offer digital bridges to one important country, I have taken a dozen Great Adventures to Russia and have worked with thousands of North Carolina students and their teachers, all of whom have traveled with me virtually. With each trip, I have found that teachers have welcomed the opportunity to move out of textbook Russia. A former sixth grade social studies teacher, Natalie Bates (Author 2), joins me to share with you what we have done and learned and to offer suggestions about how to infuse authentic voices-in this case, Russian-into your own curriculum. Two-way stereotypes Teachers know that students learn best if they can relate what they are learning to themselves and their own worlds. From the earliest grades on up, children examine themselves in the context of their families, their schools and communities, cities, countries, and, finally, the world. This article offers your students the chance to cross a digital bridge and hear the voices of children from We are especially mindful of the need to raise the level of learning beyond the stereotypes so that we may know what the Russian people are really like. Stereotypes go both ways. I once walked into a sixth grade classroom in Volgograd, Russia, just as the children were reading in their English textbooks about the Garrett family of Atlanta. I listened as they read about the typical American home and possessions. The Garrett's house had three stories, a long driveway filled with cars, a well-manicured lawn, and a swimming pool and deck in the backyard. For the next 30 minutes I fielded questions about rich Americans. I informed them that neither my school teacher friends nor I lived like the Garretts and that most people I knew were not wealthy enough to have large homes with swimming pools. These Russian school children had bought into the stereotype because it supported TV and videos about American sports and rock stars. Didn't all Americans live that kind of life? Interestingly, the shoe was on the other foot later in my trip when I was asked to speak to parents whose children had just entertained me with their considerable musical talents. Sheepishly, I noted that my evolving cultural understanding had started with a 1950 Russian stereotype built on Cold War misinformation. In my elementary school, bells alerted our second grade class to darken the room and hide under desks in case Soviet planes dropped bombs from the sky. Russian parents in the audience smiled and shared similar stories about the possibility of American air raids. …

Entre macho e fêmea: santas travestidas na Antigüidade

Resumo: Em vários relatos cristãos sobre mártires e santas na Antigüidade, a figura da mulher é imaginada ou efetivamente travestida com roupas e traços masculinos. Essa passagem do gênero feminino para o gênero masculino é uma estratégia discursiva para permitir o acesso da mulher a funções, atividades e sentimentos antes vedados à condição feminina. Além disso, permite uma reflexão sobre o estatuto do gênero da mártir ou da santa que incursiona nos dois âmbitos, o que tem como resultado um gênero de vida que ultrapassa (ou mesmo transgride) as fronteiras de gênero, em que o páthos erótico não está ausente, chegando mesmo a dinamizar a constituição desse ‘transgênero’.

Donated to Science: Humanity is more than skin deep

Donated to Science: Humanity is more than skin deep

Our Version of Normal

Our Version of Normal

What Lies Beyond Same‐Sex Marriage? Marriage, Reproductive Freedom and Future Persons in Liberal Public Justification

abstractIn this article I consider whether the legalization of sex‐same marriage implies a right to incestuous marriage. I begin by suggesting that the liberal state get out of the ‘marriage’ business by leveling down to a universal civil union status. The question is then whether incestuous unions should be both legal and eligible for this status. I argue that the arguments compatible with public reason for prohibiting them outright, or even for excluding them from the permissible types of legally registered partnerships, are quite weak. The objections to allowing such relations are those from (1) child abuse; (2) unfair burdening of society; and (3) the creation of bad lives. I argue that while rape and other forms of child abuse would be no more legal or tolerated than they are now, the concern about any form of weakening a society's legal and political resources to combat such abuses does indeed register on the justificatory scale, but does not prove that such first‐degree incestuous sexual relations are inherently bad enough to warrant intervention in their own right. I then argue that the concern about unfairly burdening society with unhealthy persons is not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, but nor is it strong enough to justify an outright prohibition. Finally, I argue that a concern to dissuade persons from creating certain kinds of lives (children with extreme birth defects) is also not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, and in fact goes further towards explaining why we might have a legitimate interest in intervening. Nonetheless, I argue that the criminalization of such acts only make sense when they are indicators of other offenses, namely negligence or abuse, and it thus seems that the act of consanguineous reproduction is itself insufficient.

Snow

It's the late 70's in Ireland and it's pretty grim. Michael Logan is walking home from his girlfriend's (Rita) house in Harold's Cross, a working class suburb of Dublin. It's late, Michael has missed the last bus, and it has just begun to snow. Michael is in his forties and works as a Harbour Policeman in Dun Laoghaire, seven miles outside of the city. As he starts the long walk home, Michael's thoughts turn to Rita and how they first met. Rita is 35, and a decent woman. Michael is very fond of her, but he does not love her. As he continues his walk, he delves more and more into the past, and we learn of Susan, a free spirited woman he loved over 20 years previously. We learn of his relationship, and of the kind of life that Michael lived in 1950s Ireland. We see Michael as a bright and energetic young man, trying to forge a new world and break away from the traditional conventions. We also learn of a great personal tragedy that prevented Susan and Michael from being together.

The importance of precocity in evolution.

In an Article published in September 1920 I propounded a theory respecting the process of Organic Evolution, which I believe to be both true and important, and to have at least some degree of novelty. Here I propose to restate that theory as shortly as possible, both on account of those who did not read, or have forgotten, that Article, and because I believe its interest and value to warrant a second exposition, especially if made, as I shall as far as possible make it, in different and more familiar language. The theory is a corollary of Darwinism, and is so simple that it may almost be stated in a single word--precocity. It hinges on the assertion that the precocious in all kinds of life, and especially in the highest kinds, have had throughout the ages, and have now more than ever, a great advantage over their brethren less favoured in that respect. Mainly they have been the fit of each generation, and consequently the progenitors of the next, and of all creatures that have inherited and now inhabit the earth. Let us see what can be made of this apparently insufficient material. Everybody knows what precocity is. When a child shows knowledge, intelligence, activity, and self-assertion beyond its years, it is said to be precocious. And though owing to this last quality the word is generally used in an unfavourable sense, it is evident that precocity in itself is so far from being a fault, that the early exhibition of every right activity is a virtue and a great advantage. If efficiency is right and profitable, then the sooner we are efficient the better for ourselves, our parents, and others, or there is no value in time. I therefore use the word in a favourable sense, signifying the arrival by offspring at a certain degree of efficiency in the struggle for life in slightly less time than that in which the same degree was attained by their parents. And it may be well to add at once the obvious fact that this precocious efficiency necessarily involves the equally early attainment of the structures--the character or sum-total of characters--to which it is due, structure and function going as always hand in hand. As to the cause of such earlier attainment there can be no doubt. It must be a slightly greater rapidity of growth in the child than in the parent. It is the gist of the theory that such increased rapidity of growth has been a normal possession of the fit of every generation, at least of the higher animals, for ages past, and that in an increasing degree, corresponding with the height of evolution attained, the resulting precocity has been of importance in the organic world. That this general prevalence of precocity needs proof I admit, but for economy of space I shall here pass it over with the remark that the citable facts, if not exactly plentiful, are quite sufficient, and that, outside the book of nature, they are largely to be found in that great granary of information about the organic world, the works of Darwin, The occasional occurrence of precocity has for many centuries been matter of common knowledge, which has descended to us, with the word, from ancient Rome. But Darwin appears to have been the first to observe and assert its generality, which so much impressed him that in his work on Animals and Plants under Domestication he came near erecting it into a universal law of inheritance. To that work the reader is referred. To return to the theory, if I am asked in what mainly has consisted the fitness of the fit in all times and of all kinds, I reply that the first and almost indispensable condition of their superiority has been rapid growth. The causes of this are easily seen. One main advantage of precocity, perhaps the greatest of all, but one which I can here only mention without elaborating, is the earlier escape so made from the perils of the environment. It is a well-known fact, and was familiar to Shakespeare, that the period of growth is in all creatures, animal and vegetable alike, a period of high, and often even of immense mortality. …

Defending the Lowly Prokaryotes: New Challenges forBIOGaiaLearning Activity

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Many educators agree that effective teaching helps students to think critically, communicate more clearly, learn self-discipline, develop an understanding of themselves and others, and cultivate the habit of self-education (Cherif, 1994; Joyce & Weil, 1986). Today's global, multi-cultural environment requires people to work in teams, which in turn requires collaboration and practical approaches to conflict resolution. Therefore, teachers must provide their students with structured group learning experiences that promote the development of these skills (Gayford, 1989). In the following learning activity, we accomplish this by having groups of students work together to solve a problem. Students act out conflicts, collect information, learn to take on the roles of others, and improve their social skills and academic performances. Additionally, this activity encourages students to have a desire for the knowledge that will allow them to solve the problem (Cherif & Adams, 1994; Joyce & Weil, 1986). Therefore, they become actively involved in their own learning process. * Scenario You are the founder, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and the Chief Engineering Officer (CEO) of BIOGaia, a consulting firm that specializes in developing and implementing plans to protect various life forms on Earth. Your employees are highly trained to meet the needs and to serve members of all life forms including Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya. BIOGaia has access to the latest technology and equipment to provide protection, safety, and security to various life forms. In short, you are very good at what you do. Indeed, your success rate is over 95%, which has brought you, your company, and your employees a good reputation and an increasing number of clients each year. A New Client A delegation from the domain Bacteria has just approached you seeking BIOGaia's help in protecting them from other life forms. Your new clients are members of a domain that includes the original and the most basic organisms on the planet that have existed on Earth for four billion years (Koneman, 2002). Indeed, for more than three billion of those years, Bacteria and their cousins Archaea were the only kinds of life on planet Earth. Today, borrowing Bill Bryson's (2003) words, bacteria, which are on and around us in numbers we can't even conceive, inhabit our skin, gut, and nasal passages; cling to our hair and eyelashes; swim over the surface of our eyes; and drill through the enamel of our teeth. ... [Our] digestive system alone is host to more than a hundred trillion microbes of at least four hundred types. Some deal with sugars, some with starches, some attack other bacteria. A surprising number, like the ubiquitous intestinal spirochetes, have no detectable function at all. They just seem to like to be with [us]. Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. They are, in short, a big part of us. From the bacteria's point of view, of course, we are a rather small part of them. (Bryson, 2003, p. 302-303) After all, they have not only preceded the more complex eukaryotes by almost two billion years, they have also outnumbered all the other life forms we have known on the planet (Koneman, 2002; Knoll, 2003). * A New Challenge The natural hosts of bacteria, such as humans, domestic animals, and crops, are no longer dependent on their own natural defense mechanisms when they interact with the members of the domain Bacteria. During the 20th century, humans started using outside help, compounds called antibacterial drugs. For example, in the U.S. alone, more than 35 million pounds of antibiotics are produced every year, and about 70% of all these antibiotics are not even used for the treatment of human diseases (Lawson, 2008). Since this time, bacteria have been under constant attack (Koneman, 2002). …

The Long Goodbye

The Long Goodbye

Second Genesis: Introduction

One kind of life is all we know, but that's about to change, right here on Earth, says Bob Holmes

A Weird Death: The Schwarzkommando and the Symbolic Challenge in <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>

Toward the end of Gravity's Rainbow, in a passage closely related to the scattering or transformation of Tyrone Slothrop, we find this strange and rigorous maxim: 'the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you , it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life…. ' (742). Although the maxim is obscure, it clearly conveys an antagonistic stance. Weird death is set against the notion of natural and rationalizable–that is, medically, biologically and conceptually determinable–death. A weird death, like Slothrop's, is indefinable, resisting all attempts to locate it in space (the body) or in time (the moment of death). The elliptical fragment at the end of the passage makes it clear that there is no conception of death without a certain conception of life and the conditions under which it is lived, and thus any attempt to have control over death entails having control over life. So the passage on weird death is political in its absurdity: the escape from rationalization becomes a moment of resistance, resistance not only to any univocal meaning of death but also to control over the transition from life to death.

Roderick Finlayson, 1904–1992

work’, but Finlayson remains the least known of the recognised writers of his generation. He is probably known best through anthologies, and his two most anthologised stories, ‘The Totara Tree’ and ‘Another Kind of Life’, point towards what is generally considered his most significant accomplishment, his portrayal of Māori life in a Pākehā-dominated society. His Māori stories are rightly emphasised, but over a career spanning more than fifty years, including the writing of novels, short novels, and essays as well as short stories, he also explored other themes and areas of life, all contained within a consistent personal vision. Roderick David Finlayson was born on 26 April 1904 in Devonport, near Auckland, of a Scottish father and an Irish mother. When he was two his father left the family to go to America to escape gambling debts, and he was brought up by his mother and her mother, mostly in multi-racial Ponsonby, where he experienced both his mother’s close-knit Northern Irish family and their varied friends and neighbours, including Chinese and Rarotongans. His experience was further broadened through his uncle, Arthur Wilson, who managed farms in the Bay of Plenty, a man who served in Finlayson’s life something of the function of Frank Sargeson’s farmer uncle, Oakley Sargeson, in Sargeson’s life. Finlayson spent his summers on his uncle’s farms and got to know very well several Māori families at Pukehina, eventually being almost adopted by the family of Hone Ngawhika, so that he continued to visit them each summer until 1930 or 1931, even after his uncle had left the district to run his own farm near Glenbrook. In ‘Beginnings’ in 1965 he described how he ‘found it natural … to identify [him]self with the Maori: “I, a Pakeha, can be Maori when I wish – perhaps I am mostly Maori and can play Pakeha only when I try hard.”‘