September 2006 Bibliographies

Field Notes

“Touchez-pas That Dial”
by Martin Patriquin
(pp. 16-18)

To hear Tim Morgan on air, tune into his radio station weekdays between 3 and 7 p.m. ET (choose the “Listen Now” link), or check out CHOM’s competition on the Montreal airwaves, CKOI .

Morgan isn’t the first Vancouverite with a flair for rock and talk. Maclean’s interviewed one of Canada’s original radio DJ celebrities in ““They Liked the Energy’: Red Robinson: A Pioneering Rock ‘n’ Roll DJ Remembers Elvis, the Beatles”“and Some Hot Lyrics ” (March 3, 2003, p. 28).

For more information on the anglophone experience in Montreal, read Martha Radice’s Feeling Comfortable The Urban Experience of Anglo-Montrealers (Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000).


“Straight and Narrow”
by Wendy Glauser
(pp. 18”“20)

Behind the Mask is an online newsmagazine devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex issues in Africa. It features international profiles, human rights updates, arts coverage, opinion pieces, health education, and discussion forums.

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (New York: Palgrave, 1998) gathers together scholars from a variety of disciplines who examine same-sex patterns across the continent. Read about institutionalized marriages between women, same-sex relations between men and boys in colonial work settings, and the success of lesbian and gay activism in South Africa, which in 1996 became the first nation on earth to constitutionally ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Two films from the late 1990s address homosexuality in Africa. Dakan, directed by Mohamed Camara, (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1997), is a dramatic story that examines the conflicts between love and social conventions. Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut’s Woubi Chéri (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1998) documents Africa’s gender pioneers. Unfortunately, both films are available in VHS format only.


“Greening Giant”
by Chris Turner
(pp. 20”“24)

For more on the CII-Godrej GBC building, read “LEEDing Green in India ” in Architecture Week magazine (September 22, 2004).

Two recent books investigating the theory and practice of sustainable development and eco-construction are Evaluating Sustainable Development in the Built Environment by Peter S. Brandon and Patrizia Lombardi (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science, 2005) and Cities, People, Planet: Liveable Cities for a Sustainable World by Herbert Girardet (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Academy, 2004).

Looking to go green yourself Think LED lights, dual-flush toilets, and insulated hot-water heaters. You might be surprised to find out that as much as 35 percent of your home’s heat is lost through the basement (so much for the notion that hot air always rises). And your dryer uses more energy per year than any other appliance. For home improvement advice, try the Ecology Action Centre’s tips for energy efficiency or the government of Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency . For more green-it-yourself inspiration, read the Christian Science Monitor article “In Portland, living the green American dream ” (April 26, 2005).


“Little Boy’s Family Reunion”
by Marcello di Cintio
(pp. 24”“26)

For a wider contextual study of Oak Ridge and the legacy of America’s nuclear project, read Russell Olwell’s At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). You might like to complement this quick read with an edited collection of scientists’ memoirs, Remembering the Manhattan Project: Perspectives on the Making of the Atomic Bomb and its Legacy (ed. Cynthia Kelly; Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2004).

Nobel Prize”“winning Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe’s Hiroshima Notes (trans. Toshi Yonezawa and David L. Swain; New York: Marion Boyars, 1995) is a collection of essays that he wrote in the 1960s after amassing volumes of oral testimony from survivors of the bomb.

Adventurous readers should look for Toronto writer and visual artist Kyo Maclear’s exploration of the frontiers of collective memory in the beautifully written Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).

Michael Frayn dramatizes an epic moment in nuclear history in Copenhagen (London: Methuen Drama, 1998). With just three characters, Frayn constructs a play around the 1941 clandestine encounter between leading German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. The exact details of their dialogue have long been shrouded in mystery and conjecture, but Heisenberg was working at the time on the Nazi nuclear mission, while Bohr would later join the Manhattan project in its final stages.



Columns

Language: “Tongues of the World, Unite!”
by Alison Gillmor
(pp. 30”“33)

The Kanada Esperanto-Asocio offers correspondence courses as well as links to local Canadian Esperanto clubs, in case if you’re pining for an internationalist potluck.

For the hot-blooded, there’s How to Talk Dirty in Esperanto , a website that includes a primer on Esperanto pronunciation and grammar and lists the most useful affixes for dirty purposes. Do not go to this site if you are shocked by prurient language!

Esperantist Donald J. Harlow traces the evolution of the language in The Esperanto Book . And for a more comprehensive examination of the political aspects of Esperanto, pick up The Esperanto Movement (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1982) by Peter G. Forster.


Energy: “Will CANDU Do”
by Paul Webster
(pp. 34”“37)

To learn more about the evolution of Canada’s nuclear industry, read Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) by Robert Bothwell, and Deep Waters: The Ottawa River and Canada’s Nuclear Adventure (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004) by Kim Krenz.

In The Politics of CANDU Exports (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) Duane Bratt chronicles the often controversial history of Canadian reactor sales (and attempted sales) abroad. The website of the Sierra Club of Canada contains detailed information on the group’s court case against the government of Canada regarding the sale of CANDUs to China. For information on the Canadian antinuclear campaign and the environmental impact of nuclear reactors, visit the websites of Energy Probe and Greenpeace .


Features

“The True West, Strong and Free”
by Allan Gregg
(pp. 38”“45)

For more on what the Canada West Foundation thinks Alberta should do with its wads of oil cash, see Seizing Today and Tomorrow: An Investment Strategy for Alberta’s Future (Calgary: CWF, 2006) edited by Roger Gibbins and Robert Roach.

Last year, Alberta celebrated its centennial of joining Confederation, and several publications seized the opportunity to take an in-depth look at the province’s politics, culture, and history. Saturday Night magazine devoted a significant part of its Summer 2005 issue to a feature package titled “Alberta: The New Ontario” (pp. 25”“47), which includes articles written by Todd Hirsch, Chris Koentges, Andrew Coyne, and Janice Paskey (among others) on everything from a right-wing blonde bombshell to expat Torontonians. In the September/October 2005 issue of This magazine, Iain Ilich offers nine reasons to love Alberta in “Alberta the Good ” (pp.16”“19).

Also released last year, Forging Alberta’s Constitutional Framework (ed. Richard Connors and John M. Law; Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005) is a collection of essays examining the development of the province’s constitution, including Preston Manning’s “Federal-Provincial Tensions and the Evolution of a Province” (pp. 315”“344), quoted in Allan Gregg’s piece.


“Far From Home”
by Monte Paulsen
(pp. 46”“53)

For more in-depth coverage of the search for an earth-like planet, read Michel Mayor and Pierre-Yves Frei’s New Worlds in the Cosmos: The Discovery of Exoplanets (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). And Bruce Jakosky makes a scientific case for the possibility of life out there in The Search for Life on Other Planets (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

In case you need some humanities with your science, Dennis Richard Danielson, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, has collected writing from some of the greatest thinkers in history pondering the big questions about our place in the cosmos in The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking, A Helix Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000).


“Iran’s Quiet Revolution”
by Deborah Campbell
(pp. 54”“65)

There is no shortage of books about the history and politics of Iran. Read veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), which chronicles the ill-fated CIA coup to topple Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Or try In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs (London: HarperCollins, 2004) by Economist journalist Christopher de Bellaigue, which examines the complexities of politics and society in the era since the Iranian revolution and comments on how the West came to misunderstand Iran. For the edgier mind, perennial whistle-blower and former arms inspector in Iraq Scott Ritter offers his own intelligence estimate in Target Iran: The Truth about the White House’s Plans for Regime Change, due out in September 2006 from Nation Books.

Feminist historian Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a broader perspective on Iran in her rewrite of the social history of prerevolutionary Iran, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Her book brings to prominence the roles of gender and sexuality in the development of a modern Iranian cultural identity. Another historian, Roy Mottahedeh, blends the vicissitudes of Iranian society during the buildup to the revolution with the life of a fictional cleric in his historical novel The Mantle of the Prophet (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

Finally, one of this month’s Walrus contributors, Marcello di Cintio (see Field Notes, “Little Boy’s Family Reunion,” pp. 24”“26), recently published a book on Iran. Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006) is a rich narrative of the connected histories of two great Persian traditions: poetry and wrestling.


“Domestic Terroir”
by Don Gillmor
(pp. 66”“71)

Feeling overwhelmed by Canada’s bevy of wine labels, grapes, and vintages Can’t tell your nose from your legs with Ontario’s finest Sort it out with Canadian Wine for Dummies, 4^th Edition, by Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), due out in September. Then match that Pinot with the perfect repast by consulting Wine and Food-101: A Comprehensive Guide to Wine and the Art of Matching Wine with Food, by John R. Fischer (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006). After supper, uncork a dessert wine and a copy of Ruth Reichl’s collection History in a Glass: Sixty Years of Wine Writing from Gourmet (New York: Modern Library, 2006).




Arts and Culture

Film: “Snapshots from Cannes”
by Marni Jackson
(pp. 72”“75)

Cannes media maestro and Le Monde reporter Henri Béhar and former National Public Radio correspondent Cari Beauchamp offer an analysis of the political, social, and artistic aspects of the festival, dropping plenty of names along the way, in Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival (New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1992).

In the film All the Love You Cannes!, directed by Lloyd Kaufman, Sean McGrath, and Gabriel Friedman(New York: Troma Team Videos, 2002), the folks from Troma”“producers of cult indie films The Toxic Avenger and Terror Firmer“”examine the commercial side of the festival, describing how they’ve been able to pitch their, um, quirky films to theatre and video markets all over the world and offering advice to novice producers looking to do the same.

Stephen Walker dishes the inside story in his book King of Cannes: A Journey into the Underbelly of the Movies (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publications, 2002). Walker’s interest in the underdogs of the film industry propels him to search the globe for four young, unknown filmmakers and follow them in their quests for fame and glory, culminating with their experience at the most glamorous film festival in the world.


Film: “The Promise of Beauty”
by Pico Iyer
(pp. 76”“79)

Acclaimed but reclusive director Terrence Malick is in good company in the book Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity by Leo Barsani and Ulysse Dutoit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), a study of cinematic works by Malick, Jean-Luc Godard, and Pedro Almodóvar.

Writers James Morrison and Thomas Schur examine Malick’s first three films, shedding light on the director’s magic realism via archival research and cultural analysis, in their book The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). Similarly, author Hannah Patterson, in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower, 2003), paints a portrait of Malick on a canvas of identity politics, Heideggerian philosophy, and representations of the rugged American West.

To truly appreciate Malick’s enchanting and ominous vision, you must watch his films:

Badlands (1973)
Days of Heaven (1978)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
The New World (2005)