Duck Duck Book

The Mummy Congress : science, obsession, and the everlasting dead / Heather Pringle.
New York : Hyperion, c2001.
[MCL call number: 393.3 P957m 2001; one copy, no holds]

The human body, once dead, usually begins to degrade immediately.  Within a few days or weeks, under most natural conditions, the dead person is nearly unrecognizable.  Within a few months or years, no more than bones will remain, and in some environments they don’t last long either.  But under the right conditions, bodies are preserved.  Think about the ways we preserve food, and you’ll have a good start on how to keep a body stable — dry it, freeze it, or pickle it.  This can happen by accident, but people are observant and inventive, and many cultures have developed mortuary practices that increase the shelf life, so to speak, of their dead.

And for just about every something that there is, someone wants to study it.  Studying the preserved dead, though, is tricky.  They are people, undeniably.  Should they be unwrapped, thawed out, dissected, or dismembered, for the cause of learning?  Is it more important to respect the intentions of the people who preserved (and often buried) them, or to advance our knowledge of epidemiology, human migration, or the history of technology?

Heather Pringle explores some of these questions by traveling to meet and interview dozens of mummy experts, and by delving into the fascinating and occasionally quite horrific history of how mummies have been regarded, exploited, and revered.  Among the most repugnant stories she recounts is this:

Medieval Arab physicians, who were wonderful at writing things down for future generations, were very fond of using a specific variety of bitumen (a naturally occurring hydrocarbon, sort of like a petroleum pitch) found in Persia and known there as “mumiya” as a salve for cuts, bruises, and bone fractures.  They also gave it internally for a wide variety of ills, including ulcers.  Since the word mumiya was a strictly local word, when European scholars got to translating these medical texts, they were not sure what to do with this unfathomable word.  They guessed, wrongly, that it must refer to a pitchy kind of substance found in Egyptian mummies.  So European doctors began prescribing ground up Egyptian mummies as a new wonder drug.  Horrors.

The Mummy Congress is engagingly written, a little more journalistic than scientific, with a good solid narrative, a handy (though sadly not annotated) bibliography, and a decent index.

Sex collectors / Geoff Nicholson.
New York : Simon & Schuster, 2006.
[MCL call number: 306.77 N625s 2006; one copy, one hold]

I have long been curious about collectors.  What drives them?  Is their interest in collecting a compulsion, a passion, an emotional or intellectual outlet?  How does one collector’s interest in the pursuit of collecting differ from another’s?  Are there psychological dangers or benefits to collecting?  Is it a byproduct of consumerism?  Can careful amassing of objects or ideas bring collectors to a deeper philosophical or spiritual understanding, or do they just know more about their particular interest than people who are less obsessed? What actually makes someone a collector — does it require a particular degree of passion, a certain number of objects, or a specific approach to the work of gathering things together?  Are people who collect experiences, ideas, or other intangible things truly collectors?

I expected Geoff Nicholson’s Sex Collectors to be essentially a journalistic account of his encounters with individual collectors, descriptions of their collections, and maybe a little discussion of what motivates people to develop sex-related collections.  Nicholson does deliver this — in fact he provides a very rich account of his experiences meeting noted or interesting collectors and visiting museums and archives.  This journey forms the framework for the narrative, and it’s pretty fascinating, but it’s not the book’s only contribution.  Along the way, Nicholson troubles to examine the underlying motivations collectors seem to feel.  He considers possible hallmarks of “true” collectors.  He describes how serious collections change collectors’ houses, affect their personal relationships, and influence the patterns of their lives.  He wonders what defines a sex collection, as opposed to another kind of collection.  And he considers how his interest in sex collecting and sex collections might qualify him as a collector as well.

Sex Collectors is intelligent, clear, and interesting, and it provides a calm but engaged examination of two subjects — sex collections, and the universe of collectors more generally — that, in his narrative at least, are by turns bizarre, wholesome, and titillating.

A history of the world in 6 glasses / Tom Standage.
New York : Walker & Co. : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, c2005.
[MCL call number: 394.12 S785h 2005; six copies, three holds]

Being animals, humans need to drink to survive. Being social animals, we have gone to some trouble to craft rituals, traditions, and practices that rest on drinking, preparing drink, offering drink to others, and accepting drinks offered to us. Certain drinks mean certain things. In my own culture, for example: A strong cup of coffee helps us shake off sleep but also marks the beginning of the work day. Cocktails go before a meal, and milk is the appropriate companion for an afternoon cookie. Champagne, espresso, or sparkling water in an elegant glass mark special occasions. And sharing is important as well — we drink a toast at a wedding, we offer a cup of tea to a guest, we share a drink with coworkers at the end of a trying week.

Tom Standage set out to examine the history of significant drinks in different periods of Western history. In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, beer. In Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors about 3,000 years ago, wine. In Europe and its colonies beginning about the 15th century, spirits. In the European Age of Reason, coffee. Shortly after that, tea. And finally, in late 19th century America, Coca-Cola. Standage explains how each beverage developed, considers why it became popular, and how it affected cultural trends. How were these drinks made? How did they come to be popular? Were they stored, shipped, or traded? In what circumstances were they drunk, and by whom? Did people choose these drinks because they held particular cultural meanings, because they were identified with strength or fertility or civilization or graciousness? It is a very compelling narrative, full of fascinating detail, and Standage displays a rare gift for explaining the development of technology and its role in commerce and culture without being at all boring.

I am frustrated, however, that he has given in to the widespread tendency to cast important developments in the history of Western civilization as universal. The book is called A History of the World in 6 Glasses. A history of the world. But it is really a history of the West. When Standage discusses the importance of tea in the history of China and the development of the tea ceremony in medieval Japan, he is providing background, not telling his central story. When he mentions that the Inca and Aztecs used quite beer-like beverages in religious ritual, it is almost off-hand, a nod to the fact that far-flung cultures shared similar elements. This doesn’t make it a bad book — on the contrary it is an excellent book. But it would have been an even better one if Standage had plainly acknowledged the true scope and focus of his story.

At the close of the book, there are two particularly nice bits of end matter. One is the notes to the main text, which are themselves written in a narrative style that acts more as an annotated bibliography for readers who have an interest in exploring the source material more fully. The end notes are helpful and readable, rare and welcome qualities for notes and bibliographies both.

The second piece of end matter is an appendix, “In Search of Ancient Drinks,” which directs readers to beverages that are as close to the ancient variety as possible. Here we learn, for example, that traditional folk beers found in sub-Saharan Africa are probably the closest modern equivalent to Neolithic beer; while King Cnut Ale from the British brewer St. Peters and Sahti, a Finnish folk beer, are quite similar to Egyptian or Mesopotamian unhopped beers. Fascinating!

The works : anatomy of a city / Kate Ascher ; researched by Wendy Marech ; designed by Alexander Isley, Inc.
New York : Penguin Press, 2005.
[307.1216 A813w 2005; six copies, one hold]

One of the magic things about cities is that they are incredibly, incredibly complex.  Even a pre-industrial era city was supported by dozens of important infrastructural systems: sewers, canals, marketplaces, streets, civic fortifications, communications networks.  Modern cities require even more layers of infrastructure, and it all has to be more or less reliably available in thousands (if not millions) of locations over a large geographical area.

The Works breaks down the different layers of modern U.S. city infrastructure into sections (moving people, moving freight, power, communications, keeping the city clean, and the future of civic infrastructure) and provides detailed explanations of how they work, using New York City as an example.  This use of New York City’s infrastructure to illustrate city infrastructure in general works well to provides a concrete basis for each chapter, but it also pulls readers into the story of one fairly enigmatic city.  For example, Ascher begins her explanation of how city postal delivery service works with a two page spread describing Manhattan’s pneumatic tube mail network (in operation from 1897 to 1953).  I found this fascinating, but I would guess it’s not a very good example of how metropolitan mail systems typically work.

In fact, while reading the book’s most New York-specific bits, I often wished that Ascher had made more of an effort to discuss them in the context of other cities.  There is a section on New York’s steam network, which heats buildings and provides steam for industrial use throughout midtown and lower Manhattan.  Ascher’s account of the history of the steam system, her description of its technical specifications, and her discussion of steam’s practical uses is both compelling and educational.  But although she begins the chapter with a note that New York’s is the biggest district steam system in the world, and mentions that there are steam systems in Paris and in at least four other U.S. cities, she does not disclose how common municipal steam systems are, nor does she discuss the circumstances under which they are practical, or explain their history in general.  Are they rare, or common?  When were they first installed?  What political and practical factors keep them operating, or not?  Outside of the specific example of New York City’s steam system, readers are none the wiser.

The strategy of using a specific city to illustrate how city systems operate is a good one, but I think it might have been more successful if the example city was more, well, typical of cities in general.  Of course every city is unique and has its foibles, but comparing Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Buffalo, Nashville, Iowa City, Austin, Bakersfield, or Spokane to the rest of the cities in the U.S. might be a little bit less of a stretch.

However, despite my frustration that The Works contributes to a worldwide conspiracy to make New York seem more important and fascinating than it has any right to be, I can highly recommend the book.  Each piece of the story of how city systems work is clearly explained with an intelligent narrative and beautiful, information-rich illustrations.  Many chapters shed a great deal of light on how cities operate — the discussions of rail freight, garbage collection and disposal, road maintenance and traffic management, radio and telecommunications, and electricity are especially illuminating.  The book’s organization is logical and easy to navigate, and the index is competent.  If you are curious to see how mail is moved, how sewers work, what causes potholes and how they are fixed, or how rolling stock is managed, The Works is an excellent place to begin your education.

At day’s close : night in times past / A. Roger Ekirch. 
New York : W.W. Norton, c2005.
[MCL call number: 306.4 E36a 2005; five copies, no holds]

Being a city dweller my whole life, I have only rarely experienced the almost complete darkness of stormy or moonless nights, seen the true glory of the Milky Way, or walked in the bright light of the full moon.  The modern world I live in places a high value on lighted streets, 24-hour grocery stores, and late night public transportation.  Night is nothing particularly awesome, it is just the dark period between the days.

In modern times people, especially city dwellers, have conquered the regular advance of nighttime with shift work, central heating, scientific notions to chase away fears of ghosts and goblins, and of course, artificial lighting.  Before these innovations, night fell and we could do nothing about it.  Darkness stopped work and play, changed the familiar landscape into something frightening and strange, and put people to bed early.  All we could do was wait for morning.

A. Roger Ekirch’s history of night in pre-industrial Western Europe (with occasional mention of North America) opens a space for modern readers to begin to understand how very different the world was before technology gave us ways to believe night wasn’t so powerful after all.  In a beautifully written and careful narrative, he discusses how night influenced or manipulated morality, work, leisure activities, the details of family and household life, sex, sleep, dreaming, and many other aspects of early modern existence.  And the differences between night then and now are greater than one might think. 

For example, Ekirch explains that there is good evidence to show that before widespread industrialization, most Western Europeans experienced two periods of sleep each night.  They slept soundly for a few hours, then lay in peaceful wakefulness for an hour or more, then returned to sleep until morning.  This pattern is widely reported in diaries and other anecdotal evidence of normal life; and it is the same sleep pattern experienced by people who live under conditions that have some similarities with early modern Europe — chiefly the absence of sophisticated and widespread methods for providing artificial light.   The interval between periods of sleep seems to have been a truly restful one for many people, a time in which people contemplated dreams or pondered philosophical or political questions, lovers had sex, babies nursed, and bedfellows conversed.  Then, as now, many people had very little time just for themselves, due to long working hours and crowded households, so this time awake in the middle of the night was valuable for its inherent privacy as well.
 
The window Ekirch provides into nighttime before the Industrial Revolution is fascinating both for its familiarity and for its strangeness.  Most everyone has been afraid of the dark — we fear unknown creatures in the shadows under the trees, the creaks and bumps that houses make after everyone is in bed, and the anxious waiting for morning that comes with insomnia.  But it is very hard to imagine living in a community where everyone believed wholly in ghosts, where darkness changed the world outside into a foreign, dangerous  landscape, and where people went to bed because it was just too dark to do anything else.

The military draft handbook : a brief history and practical advice for the curious and concerned / James Tracy, editor. 
San Francisco, CA : Manic D Press, c2006.
[MCL call number: 355.2236 M644 2006; six copies, no holds]

Anyone who is paying attention knows that U.S. military recruitment efforts are up.  The wars in Afganistan and Iraq have seriously overtaxed the military’s personnel resources, and new recruits are needed to meet current and future obligations. 

It’s hard to imagine the government instituting a new draft, but then, they have gone to a lot of effort over the last fifty years or so to make sure that young men between the ages of 18 and 25 are registered with the Selective Service System.  And even if there isn’t a formal draft, it’s clear that the military is willing to go to lengths to convince young people to join.  (See, for example, the article “Sister, Uncle Sam Wants You Too,” by Vanessa Huang, reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 18.)

So, if you want to be ready to deal with military recruiters, or be more prepared for the possible advent of a formal draft, or even if you just feel like you should know more about the issues surrounding military recruitment, take a look at The Military Draft Handbook.  You’ll find a brief historical overview of the draft in the United States, peppered with helpful statistics and personal stories of draftees; information about the mechanics of a possible draft in today’s United States; methods for draft evasion that work and don’t work, and why; and a bit of information about dissent against military recruitment.  The main text is followed with some helpful appendixes and a short bibliography. 

Overall, The Military Draft Handbook is instructive and clearly written, and at a mere 128 pages it shouldn’t take you too long to read.

Labyrinths & mazes : a complete guide to magical paths of the world / Jeff Saward. 
New York : Lark Books, 2003.
[MCL call number: 302.222 S271L 2003; eight copies, no holds]

People have been making mazes and labyrinths in all kinds of media in most parts of the world for thousands of years.  Saward’s book provides an introduction to these complex works of art and science — from small-scale decorative motifs to enormous walkable creations of turf, hedge, stone, and tile.  He gives particular attention to the history of labyrinths in Europe and the ancient Mediterranean, turf labyrinths, garden mazes, labyrinths in medieval European Christian art, and modern mazes.

Labyrinths & Mazes has a nice bibliography arranged in the same way as the chapters of the main text, with a few extras at the end under the heading “Select Further Reading;” as well as a solid subject index.  It is well-illustrated with black and white diagrams, maps, and color photographs on nearly every page.

My one hesitation in recommending Labyrinths & Mazes is that I think the subtitle overstates the book’s scope a bit — labyrinths and mazes from many parts of the world are indeed described, but I have some doubt as to whether the book is truly a complete guide all regions.  Africa, India, and the Americas are only briefly discussed, and the focus is very much on Europe.

DIY : the rise of lo-fi culture / by Amy Spencer. 
London ; New York : Marion Boyars, 2005.
[MCL call number: 306.4 S745d 2005; three copies, no holds]

Despite the somewhat general title, DIY : The Rise of Lo-fi Culture discusses only two cultural media: independently produced and distributed, noncommercialized music and literature.  Zines (which can loosely be defined as independently produced periodicals) are the focus of the literature discussion.  Spencer attempts to answer questions about the history of and antecedents to these cultural movements, the objects they have produced, and what these things mean in a larger context. 

To help my review make sense, I’ll tell you a bit about myself. 

I was raised in something of a counterculture environment.  My parents were artists and I went to an alternative school where the improvisational drama class counted toward the state requirement that high school students should have four years of English (“communication,” in the language of the state standards).  People all around me were involved in producing culture.  My classmates were filmmakers and played in rock bands, my mother hosted a weekly life drawing group at our house, family friends were poets and essayists and potters and glass workers.  But still I was inculcated with the notion that if someone wrote a book and published it themselves, it was only because it wasn’t good enough to be put out by a “real” publishing house.  I was an adult before I had shaken this misguided idea out of my head.

When I picked up DIY, I was very excited because I thought someone who poured an enormous amount of energy into writing 200 pages on independent publishing will surely have something really new to tell me about the history of zines.  I can think of some places to look for zine history — the samizdat of Russia and the eastern bloc, publications of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s, popular broadsides sold for pennies in the 1700s, pamphlets of the Spanish Civil War, magazines run by artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, writing of the African independence movements of the mid-20th century — but I’m not educated enough about these possibilities to know if they relate to contemporary zine publishing in the least. 

I wanted Spencer to know.  I wanted her look at the history of zines to shine a light on other under-appreciated pieces of the world’s cultural history.  Instead, the best she can do is provide a competent but mostly unoriginal account showing that contemporary zines look back to Dada, to the Beats, to the sci-fi fanzines of the 30s and the punk zines of the 70s, and to the underground newspaper movement of the 1960s.

Spencer’s survey of the history of independent music is also competent, but not spectacular.  I am less qualified to critique this section than her study of independent publishing — my knowledge of music is simply that of a listener — I am not passionate about the medium, and I am not intimate with any of the trends, movements, or “scenes” described in Spencer’s history.  Perhaps this is why I enjoyed the section on music more than the sections on zines and publishing — even though many of Spencer’s stories about the history of independent music were familiar to me, I had never troubled to consider how these stories fit together, how they help form a fabric that can be used to understand a wider swathe of culture than any one piece could hope to influence.

Nonetheless, I have a lot of quarrels with this book. 

Overall, DIY was hard for me to read, partly because Spencer’s prose is often confusing (e.g.: “So began the tradition of lo-fi music, the concept of not trying to seek out new technology to produce your music,” in reference to British skiffle music of the 1950s, page 219), but also because I couldn’t ignore her unacknowledged tight focus on the United States and Britain, and because I found her analysis lacking. 

Many times in the book, Spencer comes back to a central theme: lo-fi culture is what people create just because they want to create and they want to share.  Anyone can do this, anyone who wants to should, and it’s worth supporting.  Spencer quotes zinesters, musicians and others explaining how actively participating in culture affects them as individuals, but she provides only scant reflection on what this means for individuals or for culture at large.  She never gives attention to how this independent cultural empowerment affects the rest of society, or about its possibility to create cultural change outside of the “scene” or the “underground.”

So, my recommendation is, give this book to people who are just beginning to consider the idea that anyone can be a creator and an active participant in culture.  Read it yourself, if you would like a beginner’s background on a few of the different influences that have led people in the United States and the UK to commit themselves seriously to the project of creating and honoring this kind of cultural product.  But do not expect DIY to provide a comprehensive analysis of the history of homemade music and literature, remember that the book focuses almost entirely on only two countries, and prepare yourself for some less-than-elegant prose.

If you are interested in reading more about sci-fi fanzines of the 1930s and later, you are in luck.  Their history is covered at length by a book by Frederic Wertham, a man more famous for inspiring the censorious Comics Code than for his interest in independently produced periodicals.  You Portlanders are really lucky, because this out-of-print gem can be found at your library:

The world of fanzines; a special form of communication. / [Frederic Wertham].
Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press [1973].
[MCL call number: 808.3 W488w; one copy, no holds]

Black on white : Black writers on what it means to be white / edited and with
an introduction by David R. Roediger.
New York : Schocken Books, c1998.
[MCL call number: 305.8 B6276 1998; two copies, no holds]

A collection of short classics on the narrow but interesting topic of just what is it with these white people anyway. The book provides a nice introduction to the work of a great number of excellent African American writers, so it is a good starting place for anyone interested in beginning a journey into African American thought and literature.

Read this book, and if you find, for example, that you like Derrick Bell’s essay on whiteness as property, well, then you can look a bit further and read his books on the history of the civil rights movements, gospel choirs, or Brown v. Board of Education. Or, if you’ve only read Toni Morrison’s fiction, you may enjoy beginning to explore her other work with the excerpt from her book Playing in the Dark.

But even if Black on White weren’t a good place to begin exploring literature, it would be worth your time, and here’s why: the idea of race has largely been defined and explicated by the people who have the most opportunity for expression: white people. An analysis of what whiteness is, what it means, how it works, and what it’s for — but one conceived and written by Black people — is bound to be fresh and interesting.

So, if you think racism and the idea of race definitions are wrong, or even if you aren’t angry about it, but you do think it’s a bit silly, then take a few hours to consider what Black people have to say about whiteness.

(Unfortunately, Black on White has no index or other supplemental endmatter.)

White like me / Tim Wise.
Brooklyn, NY : [Berkeley, Calif.] : Soft Skull Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2005.
[MCL call number: 305.8 W813w 2005, two copies, seven holds]

Wise examines his whole life (all 36 years) through the lens of race and with an eye on the problems of white skin privilege. This is not a book of history, it is the story of one man’s experience and what he has chosen to do with it. Wise will not tell you where racism and white privilege come from, exactly, but he will tell you where he has found them, his observations about what they give and take away from white people’s lives, and what a compassionate white person ought to do about it all. He does this, I think, with an honest and a serious attempt at understanding his life context and how race has impacted it with compassion and intelligent, rational analysis.

Wise makes his points with stories. If you have seen him speak (which he does regularly, all over the country), his method and tone will be familiar to you. He talks about his youth and his travels, tells his family’s legends, and tells his own versions of their stories. All of this is done to show how whiteness and racism have affected Wise’s own life, and his particular family. What have they gained, what have they lost, how did they get to where they are, and what does it mean? This matters to Wise’s readers not because they are so infatuated with him or his family, but because the story he is telling is not an enigmatic story, it is just a regular story of an average white person in a normal white family in the United States. Even though White Like Me is not about you and your family, if you are white, it will be familiar.

For me, listening to Wise speak and reading the book produced much the same feeling — he impressed me as a very regular person with a very exceptional ability to see clearly through a set of subjects that our society works hard to obscure. He is plain-speaking, calm, and consistent. Your mother, your boss, your next-door neighbor, and the person in line in front of you in the grocery store would probably like him, and so would you. What Wise has to say is very hard for most white people to hear, but we need to hear it, and he is the right person to get his say said and listened to.

East Side stories : gang life in East L.A. / photographs by Joseph Rodríguez ; essay by Rubén Martínez ; interview with Luis J. Rodríguez.
New York : PowerHouse Books, 1998.
[MCL call number: 364.1066 R696e 1998; two copies, no holds]

Open this book, and before you even get to the title page you’ll see a photograph of a young family, mother, father, and baby daughter. They look happy to be together and fond of one another. The caption is: “The morning after a rival gang tried to shoot Chivo for the fourth time. Chivo teaches his daughter how to hold a .32-caliber pistol. Her mother looks on. Boyle Heights.” I think it’s a beautiful picture, despite how hard it is for me to stomach the juxtaposition of the baby sitting on the floor with a pistol in her hand, three more guns with extra clips scattered across the floor, and bullets strewn here and there.

Keep turning the pages and there is a lot more to East Side Stories. The book begins in earnest with an essay by Rubén Martínez about Rodríguez’s photographs and about life in the part of Los Angeles they describe. Then there are about 100 photographs of kids in gangs, their families, their neighborhoods, and the events of their lives. Most have brief captions, and a few are annotated with mini-essays by Rodríguez’s about what surrounds the pictures. The book is honest and straightforward, and the very lovely photographs show all kinds of moments — proud, scary, sweet, contemplative, generous, and more.

The presence of guns in East LAers lives, their use as tools of persuasion and as weapons, and anything else about guns as objects or as symbols are only a little part of the story that Rodríguez’s photographs tell. But for people who aren’t familiar with the world he’s describing, that first picture of the daddy and the baby with the gun and the mama looking on with a smile maybe provide a bit of a shock, a way to learn how much you just fucking don’t know about other people’s lives, and also a reason to be interested in finding out.

Rodríguez’s photographs were taken between 1992 and 1995. At the end of the book are interviews with Daniel “Chivo” Cortez (the father in the first photograph), and with writer and activist Luis J. Rodríguez. There is no index.

Encyclopedia of the stateless nations : ethnic and national groups around the world / James Minahan.
Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2002.
[MCL call number: R-320.5403 M663e 2002, one copy reference only at Central Library]

I think if you understand what makes reference books fascinating, you will begin to understand what makes many reference librarians tick. An abiding interest in reference materials is part of what drove me to begin this booklist, and the joy that I feel on learning of a new source that provides valuable information in a logical, useful arrangement — well, it is considerable.

When librarians go out to happy hour and make drunken conversation with each other, we often confess and discuss the reference books we have at home (more than one of my librarian friends, for example, has the full set of Library of Congress Subject Headings, four or five enormous red volumes — and I personally own the surprisingly useful Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1998). A good reference work has a perhaps odd combination of facts, figures, and opinions in a useful, accessible arrangement. Great breadth or perhaps great depth can be found there, but the really important part is that you can find what you’re looking for easily — the contents are arranged in a sensible order, the index is good, the appendixes compliment the main text, etc.

Maybe what makes a great reference book is just that when you need it, nothing else will do. In the first number of this booklist, I described a book that was nothing but a compilation of facsimiles of famous people’s death certificates (Celebrity Death Certificates, compiled by M.F. Steen; Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2003). It’s hard to imagine why anyone would need such a book, but my guess is that if you did, there would be no substitute.

Librarians need reference books desperately in our work — where else would we turn to find a list of all the banks headquartered in Oregon or a short analysis of the careers of each of the US presidents or a brief essay on where the wheelchair came from? Reference works are our meat and drink and take them seriously we must.

So when I was looking at the books in the 320 section (political science) of the reference area in the library a few weeks ago, I was pleased to see a reference set that was new to me, on an interesting topic. And when I took it down from the shelf and examined it a little, I was even more pleased. Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations is a well-conceived reference guide to a subject that is often ignored elsewhere: cohesive national and ethnic groups that are without nations or significant self-determination.

Minahan used three criteria to determine whether to include a national group in the book: self-identity as a distinctive group, the display of the outward trappings of national consciousness (the prime example being a national flag), and existence of a specifically nationalist organization or political grouping whose purpose is the furtherance of self-determination.

The book’s four volumes contain entries for stateless nations arranged alphabetically by their names in English. Each nation’s entry discusses its population, homeland, flag, people and culture, language and religion, and national history, and includes a short bibliography. National flags are reproduced, as are maps of homelands. The text is followed by two appendixes; one containing independence declarations, and another detailing the geographic distribution and national organizations of included national groups, arranged by nation. There is also an index.

And this is a book you should be glad to have the library buy for the good of the whole community — the publisher’s list price is $475.00, so it’s not really an affordable addition to the part of your book collection you talk about when you’re at happy hour with a bunch of librarians.

African voices of the Atlantic slave trade : beyond the silence and the shame / Anne C. Bailey.
Boston : Beacon Press, c2005.
[MCL call number: 306.362 B154a 2005; three copies, no holds]

Bailey examines African memories and experience of the Atlantic slave trade through stories that are a part of the oral literature tradition of Ghana, which she cross-references to written accounts from African, European, and American sources. African Voices begins with an introduction to Bailey’s methodology and academic perspective, and then considers the five main oral history tales that she uses to structure her discussion. Bailey also examines African, European, and American agency in the slave trade, the social, economic, and religious impact of the slave trade on the people of the coast of Ghana (where millions of Africans were loaded onto ships to be taken to the Americas), and the movement for reparations and redress for the harms of the Atlantic slave trade.

Some mainstream reviews of this book have complained at the “unhistorical” qualities of Bailey’s approach, but I find her methods useful. Compared to many other academic works I’ve read, African Voices is fresh and vibrant — because the stories are part of an oral tradition and exist because people tell them, they seem to provide insight into the culture they are a part of in a way that traditional academic evaluation of written history cannot.

Complaints about Bailey’s “unhistorical” approach can be summed up like this — stories passed down through the generations can have no bearing on an academic history of real events, for their oral medium leads them to be unreliable as sources for facts. But my response to Bailey’s methodology is to recall how important my family stories are to my conception of my own and my family’s identity and U.S. culture. My family’s stories are true (perhaps more in theme than detail, but still true enough), and some relate directly to major historical events and trends — the Great Depression, the influenza pandemic of 1918, the early movie industry in Hollywood — who is to say that these stories could not aid a serious study of historical events? And how much more significant would such stories be in a culture that greatly values oral genealogies and family history?

The first orally reported story Bailey uses, The Incident at Atorkor, is a commonly told story among the Anlo Ewes of Ghana. The Incident at Atorkor reports the kidnapping of a group of well-respected community members (drummers and headmen’s relatives among them) in the coastal town of Atorkor who were lured on to a slave ship as it was about to leave the harbor. Generally slaves sold to white traders were from the interior regions, which likely explains why this story has been remembered by so many people and for so long. Bailey reports several different oral versions of the story, as well as a version written by a white traveler who visited the region shortly after. She then develops a set of conclusions about what happened and what it means for the people of the region around Atorkor. Other stories are treated similarly, and Bailey seems careful not to draw unsupported conclusions about historical fact or about the biases or cultural impact of particular incidents or tales.

African Voices is written for an academic audience, but it is very readable, and would provide a useful starting place for anyone interested in African perspectives on the Atlantic slave trade. Bailey draws upon a wide variety of sources, many of which she cites in her text, and the book has an extensive bibliography. The book also has an index.

A home in the world : houses and cultures / Martine and Caroline Laffon ; translated from the French by Lenora Ammon. (English-language edition; original title: Habitat du monde.)
New York : H.N. Abrams, 2004.
[MCL call number: 392.36 L163h 2004; two copies, no holds]

A picture book of houses, focusing on the vernacular house ways and styles of traditional cultures from around the world. The text isn’t worth much; the tone is somewhat patronizing, the explanations of how cultures and houses interact didn’t answer most of my questions, and much of the information that’s provided seems superfluous. The photographs focus on houses that are very different from house forms in the industrialized west, and the representation of people and their dwellings is somewhat exoticized. But, the pictures are lovely and fascinating, there is no doubt. And perhaps the text is only suffering from a poor translation. For a better book on a similar subject, keep reading until you get to Built by Hand.

Our enemies in blue : police and power in America / Kristian Williams.
Brooklyn, NY : Soft Skull Press : Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2004.
[MCL call number: 363.232 W724o 2004; two copies, six holds]

As you may know, this book was written by my partner Kristian and I am not at all an unbiased reviewer. However, I am fairly sure that I am never an unbiased reviewer. So: this book presents a clear, politically savvy account of where police came from, what they’re for, how they work, and why we don’t need them.

Our Enemies in Blue is an intellectually, socially, and politically useful book; Kristian’s writing is tight and a pleasure both for the mind and they eyes, even for an impatient reader such as myself (I’m always skipping to the end of the paragraph, the page, the chapter). The text is followed by an excellent bibliography and index.

The essential William H. Whyte / edited by Albert LaFarge.
New York : Fordham University Press, 2000.
[MCL call number: 307.76 W6295e 2000; two copies, no holds]

William Whyte wrote the very famous book The Organization Man, about the move of the middle class to the suburbs and the impact of mass organization on our culture; and then much later he wrote City, about how people use public space and what makes a good one. Two very interesting and quite different subjects. Whyte wrote a lot of other stuff too, and the work reproduced in this book will give you a fascinating overview. Some of my favorites are about: why was the college class of 1948 different from that of 1938?; how you can ace a personality test; and why on earth are people always blocking the sidewalk?

The Nazi census : identification and control in the Third Reich / Gotz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth ; translated and with a foreword by Edwin Black, with additional translation by Assenka Oksiloff.
Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2004.
[MCL call number: 314.306 A477n 2004; two copies, no holds]

This book has something of a lurid cover, black with giant orange and white letters spelling out the title, and I picked it up initially because I thought, “Nazi census, huh?” Which I guess is the idea behind the cover design. (Later on I had a hard time not being embarrassed to be seen reading it while on the bus.)

The book was written partly to illuminate a shadowy piece of Germany’s history, and partly as a contemporary political argument against the planned implementation of a census in the early 1980s. It traces the statistics-keeping practices and policies (including censuses, compulsory identity cards, and requirements that institutions such as hospitals and grammar schools snitch, I mean report information on people they served) of the Third Reich, from 1933 through the end of the war in 1945, and the careers of prominent Nazi statisticians after 1945 (many continued to work as statisticians for the German government). The authors argue that the information gathered by the government was used to restrict political opposition and free speech, and to classify the population in preparation for exterminating or terrorizing “antisocials” and the “genetically diseased.”

Part of the reason I read the book is that right about the same time I was enticed by the orange and black cover, I read an article from the New York Times about a scandal involving the United States Census Bureau. In 2002 and 2003, the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security with a list of cities in which more than 1,000 Arab-Americans lived, and also a more detailed zip-code tabulation of the number of Arab-Americans, broken down by country of origin. (N.b.: All this information is available on the Census Bureau’s website, though it’s not pre-compiled; the data is set up to be viewed one geographical region at a time. That is, it’s easy to find out how many people of Pakistani origin were living in zip code 97214 during the 2000 census, but if you want to know for all the zip codes in the US, you’d be at the computer for awhile. Also, as far as I know it is not only legal but compulsory for the Census Bureau to provide this kind of data to other federal agencies.) Arab-American and privacy rights groups got mad. The story was not followed up in the media, as far as I could discover.

And then shortly after that, one of my co-workers received the new American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, which replaces the long form from the 2000 census, and is compulsory. She brought it to work, I looked at it, and dang are they nosy! So, food for thought.

A world history of tax rebellions : an encyclopedia of tax rebels, revolts, and riots from antiquity to the present / David F. Burg.
New York : Routledge, c2004.
[MCL call number: R-336.2 B954w 2004; 1 copy reference only at Central]

A handy little reference book on an odd but useful subject. The book includes a section on taxing terms and strategies, short biographies of notable figures in the history of tax rebellion (all men, as far as I can tell, except for Joan Baez), and a series of entries on various tax rebellions arranged chronologically, from c. 2350 b.c. to 2002 in our own century. Tax rebellions in Europe and North America make up the bulk of the book, but shorter entries are provided on rebellions in in the Caribbean, China, India, North Africa, and the Middle East. The book also has a decent subject index, an index by place name, and a concise bibliography.

A World History of Tax Rebellions is clearly arranged and informative, but it has some problems. One is that it doesn’t seem to mention Oregon at all, despite our complex and fascinating history of tax-related strife. Another is that some entries that should be long (like the one on the British poll tax rebellion of the early 1990s) are actually rather short (like two measley pages). However, it is still a worthy read. Why don’t they put this sort of thing in airport waiting areas, instead of USA Today and Teen People?

A history of prison and confinement in Africa / edited by Florence Bernault ; translated by Janet Roitman.
Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, c2003.
[MCL call number: 365.96 B524h 2003; 1 copy, no holds]

This is a book of academic essays on prisons in Africa, with a focus on the colonial introduction of formalized penal systems, and the various adaptations those systems have taken in post-colonial societies. There is also some discussion of punishment in pre-colonial societies (termed “customary law” by the book’s index). Most of the book discusses punishment and penal systems in sub-Saharan Africa.

I haven’t read the whole book, but the introduction and the bits and pieces that caught my eye were clear and reasonably well-written — many of you are familiar with my impatience with academic writing, but for those of you who are not, you should know this is fairly high praise. Six of the authors are at universities in the United States, three in France, one in Cameroon, one in Britain, and one in Senegal.