October 2006 Bibliographies

Field Notes

Welcome to Cairo! Where is your Wife?
by R.M. Vaughan
(pp. 18-22)

The Human Rights Watch report, In a Time of Torture: The Assault on Justice in Egypt’s Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct (2004), documents the repression of homosexuals in Egypt, most sensationally exemplified by the May 2001 violent arrest of dozens of men aboard the “Queen Boat,” a floating disco. Accused of participating in a blasphemous conspiracy, the media labeled the group Satan-worshippers. Twenty-three of the men were sentenced to up to five years imprisonment, followed by an equal period of police supervision. “In November they sentenced me to a living death,” one of the convicted reported, “but I had already been dead for months.”

Bruce L. Gerig presents evidence of gay love in pharaonic times in his article Homosexuality in Ancient Egypt (2005), posted in the Epistle, a web magazine for Christian gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

“Ming, eh?”
by Eric Powell
(pp. 22-25)

The Island of Seven Cities: Where the Chinese Settled When They Discovered North America by Paul Chiasson (Toronto: Random House, 2006) tells the story of Chiasson’s discovery of a possible ancient Chinese settlement on Cape Breton Island in his own words.

One of the first visitors to the alleged archeological site was Gavin Menzies, the author of the controversial book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (Toronto: Bantam, 2004). Menzies argues that the Chinese circumnavigated the world in the fifteenth century, reaching America seventy years before Columbus, Australia 350 years before Captain Cook, and the Magellan Straits sixty years before Magellan was born. The book supports Chiasson’s theory about a Chinese settlement in Nova Scotia, but has been attacked by academics for being highly speculative.

For a more traditional examination of fifteenth-century Chinese naval history, try When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

“Guerilla Frogger”
by Moira Farr
(pp. 25-27)

To learn more about Brian Kubicki’s work with frogs in Costa Rica, visit his website, where you can also buy his reference books, Leaf-frogs of Costa Rica, and Glass Frogs of Costa Rica.

Like Kubicki, Marty Crump is passionate about amphibians, and for thirty-one years the American biology professor trekked through the rainforests of Central and South America in search of exotic species. Crump’s memoir, In Search of the Golden Frog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) tells of her adventures in the tropical wild – from dining on guinea pig, to drinking banana wine, to stumbling on “over one hundred Day-Glo golden orange toads poised like statues, dazzling jewels against the dark brown mud.”

For those amateur herpetoculturists eager to reproduce Kubicki’s research in their own home, Care and Breeding of Popular Tree Frogs: A Practical Manual for the Serious Hobbyist, by Philippe De Vosjoli, Robert Mailloux, and Drew Ready (Mission Viejo, CA.: Advanced Vivarium Systems, Inc., 1996) will help you set up your vivarium, choose the right food, and encourage your tree frogs to breed.


“The Human Library”
by Chris Koentges
(pp. 27-28)

The Council of Europe sponsors Living Libraries throughout Europe as part of its human- rights education program for youth. They’ve produced Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover! The Living Library Organizer’s Guide (Ronni Abergel, Antje Rothemund, Gavan Titley, and Péter Wootsch; 2005), which can be accessed through the Council’s publishing arm .

This clip from Theo van Gogh and Somali-born former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s short film Submission depicts a Muslim woman speaking to Allah after being forced into an arranged marriage and abused by her husband. Shots of women’s bodies inscribed with verses from the Quran punctuate her narrative. After the release of the film, twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri shot Van Gogh, slit the filmmaker’s throat, and pinned a letter condemning Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an “infidel fundamentalist” to Van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Hirsi Ali went into hiding, and has recently immigrated to the United States to take up a position at the American Enterprise Institute. She has said that she will produce a sequel to the film.

There are the kind of human books you check out of the Bibliotheek Almelo, then there are the kind created when words are written on the body (see also Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book, in which the protagonist asks her calligrapher-lover to treat her “like the pages of a book”), and there are the kind with words written in the body—that is, books bound in human flesh. Texts with “anthropodermic binding” can be found at many libraries, including Harvard’s Langdell Law Library, where the final page of a seventeenth-century treatise on Spanish law bears the faint inscription: “The bynding of this book is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”


Detail

“African Queen”
by Finbarr O’Reilly
(pp. 31)

See fifty years of World Press Photo winners at the WPP online gallery, and the finalists in various categories in the WPP 2006 Winners gallery.

How do photojournalists capture that winning image? Inspiration or perspiration? You will find answers and possibly more questions in titles such as Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism by John G. Morris (New York: Random House, 1998), and Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History by Russell Miller (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997), the latter of which chronicles the stories behind the images of some of the world’s best-known photographers, including two-time World Press Photo of the Year winner James Nachtwey (1992 and 1994).

The ten essays in Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photojournalism, edited by Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) examine the relationship between photojournalism and history, exploring how photographs shape our collective memory.

Finally, in Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe, and War (New York: New York University Press, 1998) John Taylor argues that we minimize the atrocities of war and disaster by only publishing sanitized photographs.


Columns

“Serve-and-volley, anyone?”
by Andrew Clark
(pp. 36-38)

If your hidden wild man (or woman) needs an outlet, Jimmy Connors Presents Tennis Fundamentals: Serve & Volley (Foundation Sports, 2006), directed by Trent Kamerman, will teach you how to rush the net and stomp pastel landscapes like Sampras.

For those who prefer to experience tennis vicariously, Bill Scanlon’s Bad News for McEnroe: Blood, Sweat, and Backhands with John, Jimmy, Ilie, Ivan, Bjorn, and Vitas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004) gives an insider’s account of the golden age of tennis. It’s sour grapes regarding Johnny Mac, but the book is about more than that: namely, how technological changes, including the oversized racquet, along with increased recognition and prize money, affected the game and its players.

If “grapes” and “tennis” make you think “champagne” and not “sour,” then Heiner Gillmeister’s Tennis: A Cultural History (Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997) is for you. Gillmeister, a professor of English at the University of Bonn, adopts a tone more suited to a reception at a scholarly conference than a party with McEnroe or Nastase. Comes complete with Medieval illustrations and extensive footnotes.



“Dictation-bound”
By Greg Gransden
(pp. 40-43)

Bernard Pivot has compiled the texts of all his dictées from Les Dicos d’Or in Les Dictées de Bernard Pivot: l’intégrale. When you read them, imagine them in Pivot’s flawless French.

How did the French language spread from Amiens to Addis Ababa? The French Overseas Empire (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2000) by Frederick Quinn gives some indication. A former American diplomat, Quinn provides a comprehensive history of France’s efforts to extend its sphere of influence across the globe.

For an incredibly accurate account of how an Anglophone learns French, listen to David Sedaris on NPR . Sedaris describes the greatest stumbling block of the French language: gendered nouns. As he points out, the assignment of a masculine or feminine gender to an object often follows no clear logic: “vagina” is masculine, while “masculinity” is female. “Forced to take a stand one way or another” he notes “‘hermaphrodite’ is male, and ‘indecisiveness’ female.” Interested readers might like to know that the word “walrus” is masculine (le morse) – though we fervently deny any gender bias as a result.


Features

“Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons”
by Marci McDonald
(pp. 44-61)

For a more detailed examination on Stephen Harper’s personal relationship to religion read The Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper by Lloyd Mackey (Toronto: ECW Press, 2005).

McDonald read a trio of books for an overview of Christianity in the US: Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2006), American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips (New York: Viking, 2006), and The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (New York: Penguin, 2004.)

If the coming apocalypse looms darkly on your mental horizon pick up these supplies, along with your case of bottled water and canned goods: Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World by John Hagee, (Lake Mary, Florida.: FrontLine, 2006), and The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers Inc., 2006).


“Bombs Over Cambodia”
by Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen
(pp. 62-69)

The trail of historical record on the Cambodia theatre of the Vietnam War is long and winding. The devil is certainly in the details – such as the new facts and figures produced by Kiernan and Owen. While a comprehensive report on the new bombing evidence has yet to be published, there are numerous contextual references to consult.

One of the most complete (and, at the time, controversial) studies of the United States’ secret war in Cambodia is William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Though dated, it is a thorough narrative compendium of reports, interviews, and government documents gathered over many years of research. The revised edition (2002) includes information about the political fallout from the book’s publication.

Two other books that must be consulted in any further reading on this topic are Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983) and Henry Kissinger’s Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003). Hersh’s book offers in-depth analysis of several areas of the Nixon administration’s foreign policy, including the decision to bomb Cambodia in early 1969. The former National Security Advisor’s book, adapted from his earlier memoirs, chronicles the very same events, offering analysis and opinions of Nixon’s foreign policy decisions. It is worth noting that appended to Kissinger’s book are copies of memoranda and correspondence by key players in the Cambodia bombing that refute some of the evidence in Mr. Shawcross’s book.

Finally, for further historical perspective, have a look at Ben Kiernan’s How Pol Pot Came To Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea 1930-1975 (London, UK: Verso, 1985) and Call Sign Rustic: The Secret Air War over Cambodia 1970-1973 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002) by Richard Wood.


“The Animals We Love, The Animals We Eat”
by Debbie Tacium Ladry.
(pp. 70-74)

How did dogs and cats become family, while cows and chickens remain food? For half the answer, see Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) by Katherine Grier. Grier explores the evolving relationship humans have to their pets, providing an account of the cultural significance and representation of domestic animals in the United States from colonial past to present-day.

Animal to Edible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) by Noélie Vialles tackles the second half of the question, examining the processes by which the poultry industry in Southwestern France turns live chickens into meat. Vialles argues that keeping abattoirs at a distance shields the public from a practice that would otherwise be intolerable to French sensibilities.

If these books make you eager to eschew industrial farms without becoming a herbivore, Gail Damerow’s Barnyard in Your Backyard: A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens, Ducks, Geese, Rabbits, Goats, Sheep and Cows (North Adams, Mass.: Storey Books, 2002) will get you started. Damerow covers all the basics: feed, housing, dealing with the racket, the right time to shear a sheep, and the market for manure. However, if you still have the heart to eat your animals after you’ve raised them, you’ll need another reference: the BBC’s h2g2 guide to catching, killing, and preparing a chicken. Recipe for poule bouillie not included.


Fiction

“The Smell of Smoke”
by Peter Behrens
(pp. 76-80)

For more fiction by Peter Behrens, read his short story collection, Night Driving (Toronto: Macmillan, 1987). Behrens’s debut novel, The Law of Dreams (Toronto: Anansi, 2006), was greeted with rave reviews in Newsday, the L.A. Times and the Washington Post. The Law of Dreams chronicles protagonist Fergus O’Brien’s exodus from Ireland during the Great Potato Famine of 1847 to a new life in North America.


Arts and Culture

Books
“The Paradox of Paradise”
by Charles Foran
(pp. 83-86)

For more by Wayne Johnston, readers can try his first novel, The Story of Bobby O’Malley (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1985), or The Divine Ryans (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), a comic novel about a young man coming to terms with the mysterious death of his father.

Kevin Major’s As Near to Heaven by Sea (Toronto: Penguin, 2002) provides a lively history of Newfoundland, from the first aboriginal peoples to the Vikings to Joey Smallwood and beyond. For a more in-depth look at Newfoundland’s first premier and one of Johnston’s favourite subjects, read Richard Gwyn’s recently reissued Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999).

Finally, committed Wayne Johnston fans need to find D.W. Prowse’s A History of Newfoundland (Westminister, MD: Heritage Books, 2003), the sprawling, Victorian-era history book that figures so prominently in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise.


Music

“Melody Man”
by Dylan Young
(pp. 88-91)

For more on the ageless Irving Fields, check out the Reboot Stereophonic website for Bagels and Bongos, which contains video clips, downloadable interviews with Fields, and even a remix of one of the album’s signature tracks, “Cha Cha No. 29.”

Avant-garde pianist Anthony Coleman discusses the impact that Bagels and Bongos had on his career in “Anthony Coleman’s Bottom Shelf” (July 2003), published in the music journal, The Squid’s Ear.

Cited in Mr. Young’s article, Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) situates America’s great musical traditions and innovations within the inescapable context of the continual struggle for an American identity. Also referenced is Columbia University professor Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s book on the fusion of Cuban and American cultures among immigrant communities entitled Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).