May 2007 Bibliographies

Run of the Isle
John DeMont
pp.16-18

Looking to build a cottage of your own on pei’s red soil? Before investing your family jewels, read up on the Island’s Land Protections Act, which is a tad less boring than it sounds.

If Islanders are passionate about their past, it’s because they’ve fought hard to control their own destiny. To read up on the Island’s dramatic history, check out resident University of Prince Edward Island historian Edward MacDonald’s If You’re Stronghearted: Prince Edward Island in the Twentieth Century (Charlottetown: Peibooks, 2000) and John DeMont’s Citizens Irving: K.C. Irving and his Legacy (Toronto: Doubleday, 1992). More recent happenings are reported in the Island’s biggest newspaper, which claims, on its website, to “cover PEI like the dew.”

Dalvay by the Sea is the historic hotel featured in the story where you can get a little R n’ R after reenacting the Athenian glories at Marathon. Don’t try to cover more than 10 km, though, without boning up on some training basics.

Animated Discussion
Christopher Michael
pp.8-22

Although Japanese animation depicting sex between youths is legal in Japan, Shotacon such as Boku no Pico will likely never cross the Pacific and see distribution in Canada. R. v. Sharpe was a landmark 2001 case in which the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the provisions in the Criminal Code that outlaw the possession of child pornography, ruling that child pornography law represented a demonstrably justifiable limitation of section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For his part, the accused mounted a defence arguing that: child porn and child sex abuse are separate sociological entities; child porn can inhibit sexual abuse by providing potential abusers with a form of catharsis; and written child porn (in this case, Sharpe’s own) contains artistic merit along the same lines as the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Only on the last count did the scc allow Sharpe an exception, permitting him to retain victimless (or fictional) written and visual materials of his own creation for his own personal use.

Much of the Japanese anime canon—a vast body of work that encompasses video games, television series, and film—is legal for import. Short for animeshone, a transliteration of the Japanese loanword for the English “animation,” anime first made it big in the West with Astro Boy, syndicated in 1963 by nbc studios. Since then, mech-oriented Robotech (Harmony Gold, 1985) and Voltron (World Events Productions, 1984), Sailor Moon (Cloverway International, 1995), Dragon Ball Z (FUNimation Entertainment, 1989), Pokémon (OM-Animation Studio, 1997), Mobile Suit Gundam Wing (Sunrise, 2000), and others have attracted dedicated viewers in North America. On celluloid, Akira (Telecom, 1988), Ghost in the Shell (Bandai, 1995), Princess Mononoke (Studio Ghibli, 1997), and Spirited Away (Studio Ghibli, 2003) have won the most accolades outside of Japan, with Spirited Away garnering a total of 35 film awards including the 2003 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Readers interested a detailed history of anime and its various subgenres should leaf through Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy’s The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation since 1917 (Stone Bridge Press, Revised Edition, 2006), investigate Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on anime, or (at least) browse the “about” page of the Harvard Anime Society’s website. For the latest in anime news, the Anime News Network—self-described as the Internet’s “most trusted” source of anime news—should do the trick. Finally, the sexually audacious may be interested in a quick look at Wikipedia’s entry on Hentai, which provides an overview of anime’s more erotic subgenres, Shotacon included.

Suburban Renewal
Michel Arseneault
pp.22-24

For more on Roland Castro’s vision, visit the home page of his candidacy, where he lays out his concrete utopias (among his 89 proposals is a foreign policy based on Gandhi’s teachings) or the website for his latest project, the
Caravelle.

It can sometimes seem as if the English-speaking world is determined to distort what’s actually happening in France. Nevertheless, the Guardian maintains an excellent page on France, featuring blogs and all their latest articles. Of course, there’s always France’s newspaper of record, the elegant Le Monde, which has a glut of online features. If you miss that cozy Canadian feel, cbc’s David Common answers your most frequently asked questions about the French presidential elections and more on his Analysis and Viewpoint page.

The Idea of France (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001) is a brilliant analysis of modern French history by iconoclastic French historian Pierre Birnbaum. For quicker consumption (warning: you’ll be hungry again in an hour), you can read up on the latest riots online at Wikipedia. The country’s best-selling novelist is Michel Houellebecq, a writer who dares to say things about France that no one else will (often because they’re complete fabrications). Randy Boyagoda reviewed three of Houellebecq’s novels in the June 2006 issue of The Walrus.

An Upstream Battle
Barbara K. Adamski
pp.30-32

Preeminent lacrosse scholar Tom Vennum wrote the book on the history of lacrosse in North American native culture. American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1994) offers some interesting facts on the social functions of the game—warfare between tribes and a curative for sickness—and details the mechanics of the game with illustrations and appendices.

Franciscan monk François Rabelais was one of the first to name the outdoor ball-and-stick game lacrosse, or “la crosse” as it appears in his sixteenth century comedy, Gargantua, reprinted in Gargantua and Pantagruel (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990). But Rabelais’s wordsmithery extended beyond sports; Gargantua, which contains several masterfully wrought variations on the word “bunghole,” was banned by the Catholic church for its bawdy word play and general grotesquerie.

In an effort to establish lacrosse as Canada’s national sport, William George Beers published the first Canadian book on the sport and titled it Lacrosse: the National Game of Canada (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1869). The original edition is held in the National Library’s Rare Book Collection, and their website offers a brief history of the book and its dentist-cum-lacrosse-advocate author.

If reading Barbara Adamski’s article has turned you into a diehard Salmonbellies fan, your timing couldn’t be better. The 2007 Western Lacrosse Association season is just getting going, and you can track the Bellies progress online as they vie for their 25th Mann Cup win.


The Last Laugh
Rebecca Addelman
pp.34-36

Rebecca Addelman doesn’t have the kindest of words for cbc comedy mainstays like This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Air Farce, and the Rick Mercer Report. Compared to the sharp satire of American shows like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Canadian television comedy is still in the bush league.

As Addelman explains, Canadian broadcasters cut a deal with the federal parties almost twenty years ago to restrict the use of debate footage to news and current affairs programming. After the 2006 debates, Air Farce’s Alan Park impersonated Gilles Duceppe in a mock debate—to see a clip, clink on the link entitled “What Did They Just Say?” Rick Mercer didn’t use the footage, either, and told the New York Times, “The whole idea of calling it a debate is contemptible. They may as well have just run the parties’ infomercials.” If you really must have a sample of the wall-to-wall hilarity that was last year’s French-language election debate, there’s a transcript available on the CTV website.

Websites like YouTube, and less well-regulated sites like Daily Motion and Metacafe, are a haven for comedy fans. There are dozens of clips online featuring classic comics like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and the SCTV gang. (Carlin and Bruce, of course, had notable censorship problems of their own, outside of Canada.)


Life on Nut Island
Stephen Williams
pp.38-47

Primed for 60,000 pages of Ipperwash Inquiry documents? The official website is home to a wealth of information, including research papers, exhibits, transcripts, and links to webcasts of the hearings. Impressive in its expanse, the site is also markedly accessible and has an educational resources section designed for use in high school and university classes.

The Harvard Business Review on Culture and Change (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), which was used by the Ontario Provincial Police to train its top Tactical Rescue Unit (tru) officers, includes chapters on “The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong” (as outlined in Williams’s article) as well as “The Real Reason People Won’t Change” and “Transforming A Conservative Company—One Laugh at a Time.”

A seemingly ordinary flag and photo are at the centre of the Barrie tru’s dissolution. However, the story behind these objects is far from simple. Start your history lesson by checking out the famous photo of the head-to-head between a Mohawk warrior and a Canadian soldier and then delve deeper into the issues by downloading “Warrior Societies in Contemporary Indigenous Communities,” a scholarly history of native resistance groups across Canada.

Police conspiracy and corruption make for good reading and even better movie going. One of the best films in the genre is the gritty Serpico (Artists Entertainment Complex, 1973), in which Al Pacino plays a New York City cop who blows the whistle on corruption among his fellow officers. The trailer tag says it all: “Many of his fellow officers considered him the most dangerous man alive—an honest cop.”

The Hamas Dilemma
Richard A. Johnson
pp.48-56

Despite its short history, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) has been the subject of many books, journal articles, and reports. Readers unfamiliar with the Middle East’s storied history should start with the second edition of the aptly titled A History of the Middle East (New York: Penguin, 2003) by Peter Mansfield or William L. Cleveland’s A History of the Modern Middle East, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). From there, works by famed rivals Bernard Lewis and Edward W. Said will help fill in the gaps: from the former, The Middle East (New York: Scribner, 1996) and The Arabs in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); from the latter, The Politics of Dispossession (London: Vintage, 2002) and The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992).

Historical accounts more specific to Palestine and Hamas include Ziad Abu-Amr’s Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), Rashid Khalidi’s Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), and F. Robert Hunter’s The Palestinian Uprising: A War By Other Means (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). Several online databases also host updated pages that address the Hamas and Arab-Israeli conflict-specific pages, including the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Crisis Group. The New York Times has compiled all of its articles on Hamas from 1989 to present here.

On the silver screen, the Arab-Israeli conflict frames 1987’s Wedding in Galilee, which tells the story of a traditional Palestinian wedding to which the town’s occupying Israeli commander and his staff attend as guests of honour. Stephen Spielberg’s Munich (DreamWorks skg, 2005) offers a more action-packed meander through the thicket of Arab-Israeli relations in the 1970s and 80s. James Longley’s Gaza Strip (Arab Film, 2002) documents life in the occupied territories after the 2001 election of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.

The Sopranos of Gaza City
Mitchell Prothero
pp.54-55

Ahmed Daghmash is one of the Gaza Strip’s most notorious gangsters. As such, he doesn’t keep an especially high Internet profile—or, indeed, any kind of profile at all. (You’re not going to find him on Facebook, for starters.) Nonetheless, occasional reports have surfaced in the international press over the years, most recently in this piece by Kevin Peraino from Newsweek and this Jerusalem Post article, which mentions another, tangential Daghmash family squabble.

One of Ahmed’s relatives, Mumtaz Daghmash, is also an infamous figure in Gaza; he’s reputedly the head of the Jaysh Islam, a religious splinter group of the Popular Resistance Committee, who are said to have connections with al Qaeda. Jaysh Islam also claimed responsibility for last summer’s kidnapping of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, which had such disastrous consequences.

Writer Mitchell Prothero is based in Beirut, Lebanon, where he works as a freelance journalist and photographer for Polaris Images. A collection of his impressive photos for Polaris can be found here, while Salon and Slate carry several of his written dispatches. Prothero has also worked as a field researcher in Iraq for the Committee to Protect Journalists; his reports are available here.

If you’re looking for more English language information about Gaza, there’s plenty out there to digest. Why not start small, with journalist Laila El-Haddad’s excellent blog, Raising Yousuf? The Gaza Strip also features heavily in Joe Sacco’s seminal graphic reportage, Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphic, 2002), which was written around the time of the first Intifada.

A Pianist in Rwanda
Deborah Kirshner
pp.58-68

Rwanda’s history has inspired countless depressing books, including Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), written by Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, who led the peacekeeping efforts there when the genocide erupted. A film adaptation of the book, with Canadian actor Roy Dupuis in the lead role, is coming out in the fall.

Another Canadian who was there at the time, Quebecois reporter Gil Courtemanche, paints a less sympathetic portrait of Dallaire in his best-selling novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (Toronto: Vintage, 2004). One of the most acclaimed books written about the genocide was, however, penned by a journalist—Philip Gourevitch—who was not present when hostilities broke out, but who later travelled the country extensively to research We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1999).

A country where indigenous music played a significant role in massive social change is South Africa; the history of this relationship is documented in Lee Hirsch’s stirring 2002 documentary Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (ato Pictures).

Biographical information on pianist Rena Sharon can be found on her University of British Columbia web page. For more of author Deborah Kirshner’s inimitable writing on music, see her story about the life and work of classical violinists, published in the March 2005 issue of The Walrus.

City Limits
Alex Mazer
pp.70-74

Jane Jacobs wrote two books in addition to those mentioned in Alex Mazer’s piece: The Economy of Cities (New York: Vintage, 1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Vintage, 1985), both of which continue the tradition of communitarian criticism Jacobs began with The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). Details about the Jane Jacobs Prize, awarded annually to “unsung” Torontonians who contribute to the city’s vitality, can be found at the Ideas That Matter website.

Those still interested in Jacobs’s legacy may want to watch her 1969 cbc broadcast, in which she wanders downtown Toronto and Montreal musing about their respective places in the changing Canadian urban landscape. Meanwhile, Robert A. Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975) chronicles the life of New York urban planner Robert Moses, whose vision Jacobs so vehemently opposed.

Alienated Cosmopolitans
Mark A. Cheetham
pp.77-79

In The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, & the Search for Home (New York: Knopf, 2001)—quoted in Mark Cheetham’s article—and Sun after Dark: Flights into the Foreign (New York: Vintage, 2005), Pico Iyer travels the globe, riffing on the cultural ramifications of globalization. French New Wave documentarian Chris Marker paved the way for Iyer with Sans Soleil (Argos Film, 1983), a dream-like, elegiac tour of the world’s far reaches.

A more literal treatment of the subject can be found in Timothy Brennan’s At Home in The World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), which traces cosmopolitanism through its various academic, political, and economic manifestations. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy charts a conceptual history of cosmopolitanism, from the Greek Sophists up to the 20th century (and includes an extensive bibliography). Last but certainly not least, Canadian Oxford professor Jennifer Welsh discusses what it means to be a global citizen in At Home in The World: Canada’s Vision for the 21st Century (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005). Welsh in particular explores various means by which Canadian citizens can affect the country’s relations with the rest of the world.