Saturday Morning for Saturday 4 February 2017

 

 

8.12 Dr Lester Levy: health's most powerful appointee

One of the busiest men in the health sector, Dr Lester Levy's job has recently expanded to see him lead all three Auckland DHBs: Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau, covering around a third of the country's population.  He talks to Kim about why so much power has been vested in him - and what he intends to do with it.  Dr Levy also chairs Auckland Transport and engineering consultancy Tonkin & Taylor.  He also heads the New Zealand Leadership Institute at Auckland University and teaches in the university's business school.

 

 

 

 

9.05 Dr Andrew Ensor: Leading NZ's key role with SKA

Dr Andrew Ensor is Director of the NZ SKA Alliance, a large group of New Zealand academic and industry experts who are working on the IT requirements of the world's largest science project - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope.  SKA comprises thousands of dishes with a collective area of one square kilometre, up to 2,000 kilometres apart, in Australia and South Africa, allowing humankind to hear back to the beginning of the universe.  Dr Ensor and his team are designing how computers will capture and process the information from these thousands of dishes - some 160 thousand gigabytes of information each second.   Dr Ensor is also director of the high performance computing lab at Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

 

9.35 Don Henley: Statesman of Rock

Don Henley is a founding member, vocalist and songwriter of the Eagles, one of the most influential bands in America. Henley's solo career is acclaimed, with hits such as 'Dirty Laundry', 'Heart Of The Matter', 'The Boys Of Summer', 'The End Of The Innocence', and 'All She Wants To Do Is Dance'. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.  Henley talks to Kim ahead of a tour of Australia and New Zealand in March 2017, where he will perform songs spanning his entire career from the Eagles and his vast solo catalogue, including songs from his latest album Cass County.

 

10.05 Kerensa Johnston: Running the Wakatū empire

Kerensa Johnston (Ngāti Tama, Ngāruahine and Ngāti Whāwhakia), was appointed CEO of Wakatū Incorporation in December 2016.  It's a family-owned business with approximately 4,000 shareholders, descending from Te Tau Ihu, the original customary Māori landowners of the Nelson, Tasman and Golden Bay Regions. Kerensa is one of those descendants.  The business owns commercial and residential property, marine farms, orchards and the multi-million dollar exporting business Kono.

 

10.35 Rhona Fraser and Howard Moody: Opera in Days Bay Garden 

Director Rhona Fraser is staging two major works for this summer's Opera in a Days Bay Garden event: Handel's Theodora - featuring Lexus Song Quest 2016 finalists Madison Nonoa and Filipe Manu, and Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin.  Rhona is joined in her conversation with Kim by British composer, conductor and keyboard player Howard Moody, with whom she will stage the event.

 

11.05 A. Scott Berg: The story of Max Perkins 

After graduating from Princeton University in 1971, American author A. Scott Berg expanded his senior thesis on famed editor Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978), which won a National Book Award.  The book has recently been made into a movie, Genius starring Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. Berg has also written books on Charles Lindbergh, a biography-cum-memoir about his friendship with actress Katharine Hepburn, and Woodrow Wilson, and contributed articles to many high profile publications.

 

11.35 Joanne Roughton-Arnold: Iris Dreaming

New Zealand soprano Joanne Roughton-Arnold is performing a one woman opera at the ADAM Chamber Concert Festival. Iris Dreaming, written by Gillian Whitehead and Fleur Adcock, is based on the life of New Zealand writer and pioneering feminist, Iris Wilkinson, who wrote under the pseudonym Robin Hyde. Her most famous novel The Godwits Fly was published shortly before she took her own life in 1938.

 

 

 

 

 

Books mentioned in this episode:

Max Perkins: Editor of Genius

By A. Scott Berg

New American Library (first published 1978)

ISBN  0399584838