Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall is the 2015 edition dealing with Russia, China, USA, Western Europe, Africa, The Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America and The Arctic. The first chapters were more relevant to the thesis: how a region’s geography confines it in ways that are unavoidable, such as dealing with mountain ranges, rivers, deserts and oceans. I felt that the author drifted from the “prisoner” relationship in the later chapters, but that may only be because the first regions, namely Russia, PR China and the USA are so vast and are among the most vital to international politics and economics.

Marshall covered how a country’s terrain could render it vulnerable to attack, and outlined past wartime strategies that sent troops into Russia and the Chinese mainland, and why these two nations desire buffer zones to keep them protected. In spite of their sporadic antagonism, India and PR China will never go to war because they have a little hurdle called the Himalayas straddled between them. I appreciated the explanation about the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. In spite of their single instance of glacier warfare, these two countries cannot engage in any kind of long-term ground conflict in Kashmir. I had memories of my university political geography class whenever I read about the slashing straight lines of colonial borders. Africa and the Middle East are full of them. They divide people indiscriminately and conflicts brew when people find they have to show a passport to go into an area that they and their ancestors have visited for generations. The author devoted a single paragraph to the Canada–Denmark dispute over Hans Island, yet misplaced the tiny speck on the Arctic map. Maps were essential to each chapter and it was helpful that Marshall included all the minor bodies of water and landforms that he was talking about.

I had to laugh at what Marshall wrote about the European Union:

“What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.”

Map geeks will love this book and will wonder when the next edition will come out, as there are plenty more than just ten regions where geographic prisoners are incarcerated. I see that the junior version of this book includes two additional maps: that of Canada and Australia, so Marshall has at least covered two of them.

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The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare Called North Korea

  

JP Floru spent nine days in the DPRK in early 2016 and The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare Called North Korea is his travel diary. It was irresistible to compare travel experiences since I spent nineteen days travelling throughout the country in 2011 yet saw far more than Floru. His book seemed sorrowfully lacking and rather dull since tour companies do offer more extensive packages which unfortunately he didn’t take. I did recognize many of the sights and could anticipate what would happen next, as the museums and war memorials are mandatory stops on any tour. To compensate for his lacklustre experiences I found that he dramatized the mundane, overcompensating for what he didn’t find elsewhere. Thus every landscape he saw was treeless and grey, all pottery was mud-coloured and all the locals unsmiling automatons.

Tourists to the DPRK are informed beforehand what will happen when they visit the statues of the Great Leader Marshal Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Comrade General Kim Jong Il. The protocols can become pretty tedious but one does not go to the DPRK without doing any homework in advance. You go there knowing what is going to take place, and if you object to bowing before the statues of the leaders and laying flowers at their feet, then you had better stay home. The same goes for visits to any buildings or so-called tourist attractions. You can’t really act surprised when your group is herded through museum rooms while being fed propaganda about the Korean War. That said, Floru never seems to get his head around it, and bemoans again and again having to endure the Northern spin on things. His description of his minders and hosts was eye-rolling unfunny, as he introduced each one the same way every time:

“Our minder, in a long, black velvet robe with diamanté sequins and regulation socialist perm, welcomes us.”

I get why he did this: to emphasize the lack of individuality in the country and their painstaking verbose way of referring to people (as when I made a facetious reference to the two Kims in the second paragraph). But to introduce each host the same long-winded way? Definitely not funny.

Floru was in an obligatory group tour, and he learned the secret to taking verboten photos:

“Then again, however, it’s a pretty good idea to travel to North Korea in a group as you meet far more people than on an individualised tour; your fellow travellers are a support network in case of trouble, and they can distract the minders while you take illegal photos.”

In my case, however, I didn’t have to rely on distracting the minders. My group had its share of delinquent photographers who were always being followed by the minders. That left the rest of us free to photograph whatever we wanted when we realized no one was watching us.

I travelled to the DPRK in 2011–before the death of the Dear Leader Comrade General–when all visitors had to surrender their cellphones before departure. Floru and his group had the luxury of bringing their phones with them, and, while visiting the DMZ:

“What I didn’t observe at the time and heard only later is that virtually everybody else in my group uses this moment to send text messages to their loved ones across the world using the South Korean mobile phone network.”

Policy at the time of his visit precluded a visit to the Joint Security Area blue huts that straddle the actual border. I was able to go inside one of them.

I can understand that with so many Koreans sharing the surname Kim, keeping track of people might get confusing. He mixed up the birthplace of Kim Jong Il, incorrectly assigning him to Mangyongdae, and much to his embarrassment, identified Kim Jong Il’s mother as Kim Sŏng-ju, which is not the name of his mother (that’s Kim Jong Suk) but rather the birth name of Kim Il Sung. Floru made other Kim errors, and some of them weren’t even cases of mistaken identity. On two occasions he referred to King or Kin instead of Kim.

A nine-day trip to the DPRK that excluded some Pyongyang sights and other cities outside of the capital did not make a very interesting read. The author didn’t even include any photos. I found the footnote text too small to read without a magnifying glass and the asterisks indicating them within the page text were so small my eyes always passed over them. Thus when I got to the end of a page I always had to reread it in order to find the place where the footnote referred. For a longer DPRK country-wide tour, visit my blog.

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George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters

George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters was a hefty book of 573 pages, compiling interviews conducted with Harrison between 1962 and 2001, the year of his death. In the spring of 1980 when I fell in love with the music of the Beatles my first favourite member was John. As I listened to more of the Beatles’ oeuvre I changed my obligatory favourite Beatle to George. I recall when I bought the Revolver album in the summer of 1980 that A&A Records had a promotion where customers could pick a button of one of the individual Beatles with every purchase. Although I had decided before Revolver that Harrison was my new favourite, the decision on which button to choose cemented the deal.

And what an aural treat that decision would yield: there were three ( ! ) George songs on Revolver, all of them winners: “Taxman”, “Love You To” and “I Want to Tell You”. When it came to the Beatles’ solo albums, the first ones I received were as Christmas presents in 1980: Paul’s latest (McCartney II) and John and Yoko’s (Double Fantasy) however the first solo album I ever bought was The Best of George Harrison.

In George Harrison on George Harrison, the very first interviews were light and unrevealing, showing more the frenzy the Beatles were caught up in and Harrison’s bewilderment by it all. I have read plenty of his interviews already–and I was happy that the editor, Ashley Kahn, included so many that were new to me–yet I could never get into Harrison’s religious philosophy and his often lengthy answers about Krishna, meditation, reincarnation, the Bhagavad-gītā and so on. I found these religious segments tiring and, as is often the case with oral transcriptions, difficult to follow when every single sentence false start and mid-sentence change of subject is included. These interviews would have been easier to follow if listened to, or watched, versus by being read.

Harrison offered some witty replies that made me laugh out loud. Dick Cavett, who had just had John and Yoko on his show, informed George:

“Yoko sat in that very chair.”

to which George replied:

“Ah! [Gets out of chair in mock fear; audience laughs.]”

And in a curious pairing of two reclusive types who are both averse to giving interviews, George and Michael Jackson took part in a rate-a-record show for the BBC in early 1979. Jackson informed George:

Jackson: “I never…you wrote ‘Something’?”
Harrison: “Oh yeah.”
Jackson: “Oh, I didn’t know that. I was surprised. That’s another one of my favorite ones. I thought Lennon and McCartney did that.”
Harrison: “Everybody thinks that.”

In a conversation with Mick Brown of Rolling Stone in spring 1979, they had the following exchange:

Brown: Another sub-industry that’s grown up in the Beatles’ wake is all that personal reminiscence about the band. There seems to be an extraordinary number of people who were either your manager, your road manager, delivered the milk….

Harrison: [Laughing] Yeah, and the fifth Beatle…there’re about 10 million fifth Beatles. No, really, that’s sickening. All those Beatlefests and things are a terrible rip-off. These people–“the man who gave away the Beatles“–none of them know what they’re talking about. It’s like Britain has always been hung up talking about the Second World War–even now you turn on the TV and they love to talk about the war. It’s like that. The Beatles were in and out of these people’s lives in a flash, and yet they’re still there fifteen years later talking about the ten minutes we were in their lives, and robbing the money of innocent kids while doing it. It’s pathetic. It’s immoral; it shouldn’t be allowed.

Towards the end of the eighties, while Harrison was promoting his Cloud Nine album and talking about being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was more at ease during interviews, talking less about spirituality and religion and not shying away from sensitive questions. He did not shirk questions about John Lennon’s murder, and shared how he first heard the news and how he felt afterward.

Harrison answered the same questions over the years and often gave the same replies, down to the last word. He obviously had stock answers that rolled off his tongue as soon as he heard the interviewer’s first words. The most amusing exchange was his Q&A session with Yahoo! in early 2001. He would die in November of that year, but some of his on-line answers had me laughing out loud, reminiscent of the early Beatles press conferences.

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The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood

In this compilation of short essays from 2015, 48 authors wrote over sixty stories about the area known as The Ward. Bordered by College and Queen to the north and south and Yonge and University to the east and west, The Ward housed immigrants in densely populated, yet often rundown homes. For over one hundred years from the 1840’s until the Second World War, waves of immigrants, most specifically Italians, Jews, Chinese, Irish and blacks came to settle in The Ward and set up their businesses.

The Ward provided an area where these immigrant populations would be welcomed, and various authors wrote about the multicultural harmony which even led to mixed marriages. One of my favourite chapters was “Paper Pushers” by Ellen Scheinberg, about the paperboys who peddled the news, often to earn money for their impoverished families. Kristyn Wong-Tam wrote “Remembering Toronto’s First Chinatown”, which only later relocated further west to Spadina. Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris often visited The Ward to make paintings of its houses, revealed in “Lawren Harris’s Ward Period” by Jim Burant.

In a wave of urban renewal, the City of Toronto gradually expropriated lands and razed buildings in The Ward to expand hospitals, erect office buildings and build the (then) new City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. The Italian, Jewish and Chinese immigrants resettled to establish new communities. Little of The Ward is left, aside from a few row houses on the northwest corner of Gerrard and Bay, the four peaked gables running from 181-187 Dundas Street West and the former Wineberg apartment building on the northeast corner of Dundas and Elizabeth. Patrick Cummins even wrote a chapter on these areas that didn’t get demolished and explained the buildings’ histories and why they were left standing.

I have found that books that compile short essays by different authors are not always the most flowing of reads. The lack of continuity in writing styles makes an uneven reading experience after only a few chapters. Yet in this case, I could go on reading without feeling restless. The writers kept their chapters between three and seven pages, and each one was supplemented by archival photos from that specific area. It was a read I couldn’t put down, and will gladly share it with others.

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Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World

Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World by Eliza Reid was written by the “First Lady” of Iceland. Reid is the wife of current president Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson. She states at the beginning that the title and formal role of First Lady do not exist in Icelandic politics, and that she used the term (and the publisher probably had a huge say in using it too, displaying it so prominently on the cover) as a way for North Americans to relate to her position. I misinterpreted the subtitle; I interpreted the book as a collection of profiles of specific Icelandic women whose names were already well known, and how they are each doing something to change the world. Thus I was expecting to read chapters on notable women such as the country’s (and indeed the world’s) first elected woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and perhaps former prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and even singer Björk. While Reid did write a few pages about Vigdís, instead of profiling those specific Icelandic women separately within her own chapter, the women she did cover might not even be known throughout all of Iceland itself.

Sprakkar is an ancient Icelandic word meaning extraordinary or outstanding women. Iceland is known for being the country most advanced in terms of gender equality, and Reid profiled women who worked towards this goal. She covered comedians, writers, poets, students, immigrants, women of colour, community leaders, gender queers, and others to learn their stories and achievements. Women opened themselves up to her, and I believe that if anyone else had been the interviewer she would not have had such access. It is a testament to Reid’s interview style and comfort factor, as well as her own openness, that brought out such intimate portraits. Reid, in a surprising degree of candour, told about her early days in university where she met her future husband and her highs and lows in her role as First Lady. Her life was an open book, and she revealed her vulnerability as an immigrant learning the Icelandic language. While a respected woman throughout Iceland, Reid disclosed:

“I am not usually nervous appearing on live television or in other interviews, but given that in Iceland I am not speaking in my native language, I am more cognizant of any mistakes in my delivery or my more limited vocabulary detracting from my message.”

Reid inserted both footnotes and endnotes, the former not always immediately detectable since the referential asterisks were so small. They looked like quotation marks and were easily skipped over. Granted, it was obvious that there were footnote(s) appearing on some of the pages, but I didn’t always know where they linked since the asterisks were minuscule. I always got to the end of the page where I encountered the footnote, missing where it linked to, and had to reread the page to find out. Reid’s humorous asides were sometimes laugh-out-loud moments, such as in this particular footnote about Icelandic phone directories:

“Iceland’s online telephone listing is an interesting study on its own. The country has so many Björg Magnúsdóttirs and Jón Jónssons that in order to distinguish one from the other, listees have the option of including their profession next to their name. So you call Sigrún Björnsdóttir the plumber and not Sigrún Björnsdóttir the pilot. Entries are not vetted, though, so it seems Iceland has at least one hamster whisperer, one Cher expert, and dozens of lion tamers. In the now defunct printed phone books, they were all listed alphabetically by first name, because we are so informal in Iceland that surnames (patronymics, really) aren’t significant. Whether addressing your teacher, doctor, or even the president, you just need the first name.”

I enjoyed Secrets of the Sprakkar and the stories of the inspiring women Reid covered, but most of all I liked Reid’s personal story of falling in love with an Icelander, marrying and starting a large family and how she adapted to her new life in Iceland. Some of the women she encountered in her journey were profiled, so she clearly drew inspiration from them.

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The Atlas of Unusual Languages

The Atlas of Unusual Languages by Zoran Nikolić was published on thick paper which belied its brevity of 240 pages. Thus as a short book where no language occupied more than two pages, it was always easy to read just a little bit more–and finish the book faster. Nikolić stated at the beginning that he wasn’t a linguist, which was obvious by his demeaning choice of adjectives–unusual–in the title. No speaker of any language thinks of his mother tongue as unusual, nor should any linguist or student of linguistics. I carried this tainted feeling of authorial ignorance until the very last page, when Nikolić finally confessed:

“Yes, I am aware that the speakers of these languages would not find their languages unusual, but I have observed this ‘unusualness’ from the perspective of the largest number of people, who speak more numerous and better-known languages.”

I don’t buy this criterion for “unusualness”. As a scholar of minority and severely-endangered languages, I would never consider any of the languages I have studied to be unusual based upon their number of speakers alone.

The blurb on the bottom of the front cover tells the real purpose of this book. Nikolić included languages based on their figuratively insular status. If they were a small language surrounded by a dominant language, they were included in this book. Thus Basque, Sorbian, Breton and the tiny pockets of German spoken in South America. But Pitkern and Ni’ihau Hawaiian? Those are literally insular languages but they are not threatened by any outlying language. Nikolić chose a random hodgepodge of languages, including many tiny “islands” that I had never heard of before, yet ignored others of greater size. I wish he had discussed Obersaxen, an island of Swiss German surrounded by Romansch. This particular idiom is unintelligible to other Swiss Germans–and I have visited the area with them and heard as much. But that is going one degree too deep–he didn’t even write about Romansch and its state within Switzerland.

Immigration or forced deportations brought some languages far from their homelands and some continue to thrive, centuries later. Yet these languages as well as minority languages when considered as “islands” in a sea of otherness do not make them unusual.

The author used the same passage from Le Petit Prince to compare languages from the same family. As a collector of multilingual editions of this book, I found those passages most interesting.

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The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria: The Sinking of the World’s Most Glamorous Ship

 

The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria: The Sinking of the World’s Most Glamorous Ship by Greg King and Penny Wilson was virtually identical to Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria in spite of its different Dewey Decimal call numbers, with this book at 910.91634 (falling under geography and travel) versus the earlier book at 363.12309 (lumped in with “other social problems and services”). I can imagine that the cataloguers took one look at the word voyage in the title and decided it had more to do with travel than with the “social problem” that shipwrecks are. I cannot offer much in the way of a separate review when it felt as if I was rereading the book I had just read. This was another can’t-put-down read, however it offered more survivor testimonials as well as shipwreck salvage stories.

The authors made me laugh out loud with two quotes about cruising:

“Seasickness among passengers had always been treated as something of a joke by those who made their living on the sea, regarded with a kind of ‘bemused tolerance bordering on outright ridicule,’ as John Maxtone-Graham wrote.”

and:

“Overeating is the most popular Atlantic sport.”

King and Wilson quoted these passages from The Only Way to Cross, Maxtone-Graham’s history of North Atlantic cruising. I think I have a future interloan request.

Passenger Dun Gifford offered a poignant perspective as he waited for rescue:

“The ship didn’t settle over gradually. It did it in little tiny, perceptible lurches. And these caused fear.”

If I hadn’t read that observation, I would have thought that as water entered the ship, it leaned over at an imperceptible rate. Gifford made it seem that every so often he would feel a lurch, as the starboard side inched closer to the water. Indeed, those jolts would rouse fear in the passengers, believing that each lurch could be the one to finally topple the ship.

The authors offered a different story in regards to the accident that befell three-year-old Norma Di Sandro. While she did die after lapsing into a coma after hitting her head on the side of a lifeboat, the circumstances that led to that accident differed in this book. King and Wilson claim that Norma’s father did not throw her overboard in a panic to save her life. Instead, a survivor reported that Tullio Di Sandro was lowering himself to the lifeboat with Norma clinging to his back when another passenger leapt overboard, knocking Norma off her father. A tragic accident it still was, yet in this version of events Norma’s father is freed of the guilt he otherwise would have had to live with, inasmuch as a parent can absolve himself of guilt when it comes to losing a child.

This book was supplemented by two glossy photo inserts, many of them in colour. The final photos showed items recovered from dives to the sunken shipwreck.

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