Columbia Books

Anyone with a sailboat on Puget Sound, WA and an urge to explore north into B.C. will find this book a treasure trove of information on the Broughton Archepelago area of Johnstone Strait. Well written by a man who was raised up there.

This is an excelent book about the relationships between fungus and insects. It shows how cladistics is the ultimate method to codify biological information into a framework common to all Biology.

A Game To Play On The Tracks by Lorna Jackson begins with Arden, a mother who has some very serious problems with alcohol and self-absorption. Arden's struggle to resume her life of country music at the British Columbia bar scene but is faltering. Her husband has a Peter Pan complex and talks in bad poems. When Arden doesn't survive the road, both her husband and son are left behind to make sense of an often insane and unjust world. An engaging and thoughtful read, A Game To Play On The Tracks is a sophisticated, albeit moody, reflection on the inequalities and distant dreams of one human life.

This beautifully illustrated book is interesting and informative. I had purchased it for my 6 year old, who enjoyed looking at it, but prefers a fictional story to a non-fictional account. I believe it will be considered a treasure in a few years. I would recommend this book if you are interested in rainforests, the far north, or spirit bear, or if you just want a lovely book.

Alice Joyce has the rare gift of capturing a garden's essence and special beauty. Reading her descriptions is the next best thing to going there.

Dr Christopher N Kendall's book, "Gay Male Pornography: An issue of Sex Discrimination" is the book that the pornography debate simply had to have. There is no doubt that this book will rate as one of the most important texts on gay male pornography this century. This book is also critically important for victims of incest and sexual assault whose voices are consistently berated and silenced by those who enjoy pornography and who benefit financially from the pornography industry. Dr Kendall tackles the evidence of the harms of pornography and his critics head on with his fierce logic, intelligence and honesty.

Bailey, a political scientist who until his untimely death in 2001 was one of the foremost authorities on gay politics and voting patterns in large cities, blends data with detailed studies of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Birmingham, Alabama, to illustrate the role gays and lesbians play as distinctive members of urban political communities, where they have traditionally been part of liberal coalitions. Bailey argues that the ends of urban-based gay political involvement have had more to do with the definition and assertion of identity than with influencing the levers of economic policy-making. At a time when "identity politics" as a mode of analysis has fallen out of fashion in academic gay studies, Bailey compiles an impressive array of evidence that identity politics, at least in the urban setting, actually is becoming more important as municipal politicians seek to build coalitions and consensus.

Once you get over reading the name "Abe Sada" as though it were "Abe Lincoln," you'll have a whale of a time reading Dr. Johnston's account of a famous modern Japanese geisha and killer. He is a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but don't let his distinguished credentials put you off, he is also a tip top storyteller. Many of us in the West heard about this case first from the shocking "art film" directed by Oshima called, IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, and many guys who saw this movie back in the day will still not uncross their legs.

Johnston has won access to the original testimony and court transcriptions of Sada's arrest and trial. He quotes from memoirs of Sada provided by the man who interrogated her directly after the crime. "What really left an impression," said Adachi Umezo, "was when I asked her, 'Why did you cut him?' Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way. At the time people were saying thaat she had cut off Ishida's thing because it was larger than average. But in reality, Ishida's was just average." Johnston asks the question, how did Udezo know rhat Ishida's penis was just average. Who can say, but as Johnston proves, Udezo must have seen a lot of men's genitals to make such a judgement.

As an appendix, the historian wins out over the storyteller, and Johnston's narrative voice slips discreetly away and we hear Abe Sada's own account of what happened, the way she saw it. For the first time, we see the whole murder slash castration story from the point of view of the woman who committed it, and we see that a society, like pre-war Japan, that had driven women to the point of insanity, their backs against the wall, monitored and legislated through rape and coerced brothel activity, might expect plenty more from any woman brave enough to strike back. If Abe Sada was a star, as Johnston foregrounds in his title, she became a star in much the same way that Valerie Solanas did, for political and economic reasons, however badly understood by both perpetrator and victim.

Joan Scott's "Gender and the Politics of History" is one of the landmark books in the field of gender history. What is gender history, you ask? To a large degree, that's a question this book is trying to answer. This book can be regarded as an explanation of *what* gender history is (as Scott defines it, at any rate), why it's important, and how it can be done.

Essentially, the book is a set of collected essays organized around the idea of "gender and the politics of history". The first few essays are polemical/theoretical-- and in them, Scott puts forth her argument as to what gender is and why it's an important category of historical analysis. In many ways, these are the most important essays in this volume-- and I *highly* recommend them as a primer to folks who are interested in learning more about why historians are now talking about "gender". In a nutshell, Scott argues that that one of the most fundamenal ways in which people, in all times and plaes, have organized their intellectual/cultural/political world has been through the use of gender-- and that historians should treat gender as a fundamental category of historical analysis-- along with class, nationality, etc. In making this argument, Scott carefully distinguishes between what she calls "gender" (i.e. by which she means the network of arbitrary and socially constructed meanings, ideas, and assumptions that are attributed to masculinity and feminity *and* the way in which these meanings are deployed in everyday life and discourse) and mere "sex" (mere biological/anatomical distinction between men and women). This is subtle point, but it's an essential one-- and it has many important implications for Scott's view of gender history. Of especial note, it means that she understands writing about the history of gender to be a specific kind of intellectual/cultural history-- she is *not* talking about merely writing the social history of women. For her, gender is an idea that gets used in discourse because it involves very basic, and highly value-laden assumptions-- and the task of the gender historian is to understand *how* and *why* it has been used and changed. Scott thus sharply distinguishes what she would call "gender history" from the so-called "women's history" that was pioneered back in the 70s (whose main emphasis was to recount how women had been dominated and abused in the past and to correct the errors of previous historians who had ignored the contributions and experiences of women).

The remainder of the essays fall into three groups. One pair of essays are historiographical-- they are methodological critiques of two of the most seminal works on English labor history: E.P. Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class" and Gareth Stedman Jones' "Languages of Class". Though Scott recognizes-- and lauds-- the contributions of both of these works, she also notes that they ignore the role that notions of gender played in the formation of working class identities and politics. She also suggests how their descriptions of the 19th century English class would be different if they *had* considered gender as a factor.

The next set of essays are case studies in how gender can be used to explore different issues pertaining to 19th century French labor history. While the actual arguments here aren't probably going to be interesting to anyone but other labor historians, these essays are more valuable as illustrations of how Scott's methodology can actually be used in practice. The variety of sources she uses in these essays (including several whose use of gendered categories is subtle) shows just how powerful, and useful, a tool that gender analysis can be in the writing of history (labor history, at any rate), regardless of the source material.

The final pair of essays are more concered with "historians" today than with the past. In one, Scott address the famed sexual discrimination trial against Sears in which both sides hired femal labor historians to testify about the history of sexual discrimination. In this, Scott shows how their own claims were shaped by notions of gender-- notions that they did not consciously articulate, but which seemed to lay in the background as unstated assumptions. The final essay has to do with how one might try to deconstruct the "false opposition" that our own contemporary value system has established between the notions of equality and difference-- particularly in the field of legal rights and opportunities.

Overall, this is an important, thoughtful, and extremely influential book. I *highly* recommend it to all historians or would-be historians-- and I'd especially recommend it to anyone who's really not sure what gender history is supposed to be or why anyone would want to do it. I could make a few criticisms of some small details (e.g. pointing out the title probably should be "Gender, Class, and the Politics of History" or "Gender, Labor, and the Politics of History" to reflect the fact that's Scott's primary interest is in applying gender theory to the field of labor history-- or that a lot of her criticisms of straw-men like "conventional labor history" and "traditional intellectual history" are unfair), but those really are minor nitpicks in an otherwise eye-opening and profoundly important work.

In recent years it has becomm possible to use DNA to trace human development. For instance the people of iceland believed themselves to be of Viking descent. DNA testing has shown that yes, the men of Iceland are of Viking descent. But the women came from England and Scotland. Apparently the Vikings stopped off to capture a few women on their way west.

This little tidbit of knowledge is a mixture of multiple sciences and fields of study. The beliefs of the Icelanders has to come from a humanities perspective. The DNA evidence has to come from the hard science in the laboratory. (The supposition at the end is my own.)

Dr. Cavalli-Sforza, as the title of this book says, has spent a lifetime of study spanning across many fields of study in the hard sciences and in many different areas of the humanities. This is a book that spans the globe from his offices in California and Italy to field studies in Africa and elsewhere.

Written by an anthropologist and a geneticist, this book is also a good combination of crossing the fields of science and humanity.