By Larry B. Hill

FROM THE JACKET: “One increasingly popular device for achieving a balance between authority and accountability in government is the institution of the ombudsman. The first non-Scandinavian ombudsman appeared in New Zealand in 1962, and since then the office has spread to many countries and been adopted at different levels of government. This book--the first intensive study of New Zealand's "model" ombudsman-seeks to understand the process by which the institution was successfully adapted and made a part of New Zealand's political system. The author's inquiry is based on eighteen months of field experience in New Zealand. His book examines the complaints, the clients, their interaction with the ombudsman, his relations with the bureaucracy, and his effectiveness. His relations with various publics-bureaucrats, Honorable Members, and Queen's Ministers- receive special attention.

"This book will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the ombudsman institution. This book raises the level of scholarship on the ombudsman from mere definitions or classifications to that of tested propositions." -Stanley Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 1976.429p

By Shirley Hazzard

From the introduction: “Nations from time to time assume that it is allowable and inevitable for them to fall upon each other on some pretext or other.“ So the historian Jakob Burckhardt wrote, more than a century ago, at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War—warning that “the most ominous thing is not the pre­sent war, but the era of wars upon which we have entered.” In the same fateful year of 1870, Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand: “Within a century, shall we see millions of men kill each other at one go?* The acceleration and inco­herence of social and economic change, the transformations wrought by scientific discovery, the growth of populations, and of their enfranchised discontent—all these raised, in the minds of reflective men and women, a sense of moving toward some dread culmination, propelled by factors never before present in human etpcrience. Over these apprehen­sions, the discrepancy between the narrow thinking of states­men and the huge scale of the mounting crisis cast—as it does today—the shadow of a prodigious incongruity.”

NY. Viking Penguin. 1990. 196p.