IT WAS a good thing sports psychologist Gary Hermansson was in the Black Caps' dugout as New Zealand continued their losing run against South Africa but restored at least a semblance of pride. Perhaps he could say why it takes coloured clothing...

He was born in the USA, as Bruce Springsteen would say, a 32-year- old Honda-driving software engineer who lives in a rented apartment in one of those cookie-cutter highway-side developments called Shrewsbury Commons. He's a fully inducted, taxpaying member of this wonderfully inclusive...

["The Face of Another"] is an intricately contrived fantasy, somewhat wanting in dramatic confrontation of characters, but replete with symbolic devices having to do with the fate of modern man. The story, told in a series of letters and journal entries, is of a man who, as a result of a laboratory accident, has lost his face behind keloid scars, and who sets about making himself a new one. The process of imagining and producing the new face is an ordeal, the process of trying to put it to use...