[REVIEW] Four Brief Reviews

[rfmcdonald]

• Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (Nicholas Brealey: London 2000) surprised me, inasmuch as I didn't like it. I'd read their first book, China Wakes - the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and was quite impressed by it. Then again, I was 13 at the time. Part of the problem might lie with the somewhat choppy and journalistic style of the book, though that's a bit of an unfair criticism since this is assembled from their journalistic experiences throughout East Asia. I was bothered by the occasional glibness, perhaps, by the identification of Asians as unusually desperate in the period of their industrialization as compared to Westerners, since, of course, the treatment of women as disposable labourers lacking in basic civil and political rights, authoritarian political systems placing a premium on tradition and hierarchy as opposed to innovation and democracy, and an ability by workers generally to tolerate substandard conditions for menial rewards. No, those are all Asian innovations.


• Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin (Duke UP: Durham 2004) was an enjoyable study of the rise and fall of the Pokémon children's entertainment universe worldwide. Working at the Charlottetown public library, it was interesting to see young children as they clamoured for copies of the Pokémon books in our system--for comic books, or picture books, or children's short novels. What the 13 essays included in this volume do is use Pokémon as a tracer, to examine how young children worldwide in a globalized society react creatively to the spread of Pokémon. Samuel Tobin's essay "Masculinity, Maturity, and the End of Pokémon" stands out as a fascinating ethnographic investigation of how, over time, older boys at the elementary school where he worked came eventually to reject Pokémon as a kid's game. One interesting element that Pikachu's Global Adventure makes clear is the problems of translation that Pokémon faced, first in transcending its Japanese origins, then in permeating markets where relatively minor languages (i. e. Spanish, Italian, Hebrew) are used.


• Gloria P. Totoricagüena's Identity, Culture, and Politics in the Basque Diaspora (Reno: University of Nevada 2004) examines the basic dynamics of the Basque diaspora, in the Anglophone United States and Australia, in Hispanophone Latin America (particularly Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru), and in Francophone Europe (mainly Belgium)
, as well as the diaspora's relationship with the Basque homeland (particualrly with the Basque Autonomous Community). This sociological study of impressive depth demonstrates how, despite a centuries-long history of Basque transatlantic emigration, only now with the creation of an autonomous Basque quasi-state can links with the Basque diaspora be formalized. Totoricagüena's study is a fascinating examination of how the institutionalization of transnational communities can meet unexpected problems, as assumptions of a common identity are disproven by practical experience and different communities argue about what institutions and policies are needed to maintain the diaspora, particularly when it's facing more-or-less rapid assimilation. Her pessimistic conclusion--that unless the Basque government adopts policies more favourable towards the diaspora, the chance for nonpartisan institutional links between homeland and diaspora could be missed--seems to hint at what more often than not might be the fate of diaspora-homeland contacts.

• Jan Kott's Shakespeare our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974) is a powerful piece of Shakespearean criticism. The preface and introduction of Shakespeare our Contemporary try to position Kott, a Polish intellectual who managed to survive and outwit both Nazi occupation and the 45-year-long Communist People's Republic, as someone who knows from first-hand experience the travails experienced by the English at the end of the capricious Tudor state, as someone who can apply this first-hand experience towards clear and lucid and convincing explanations of the motives of the playwright Shakespeare and of his characters. I think they're right. I don't know whether Kott's magisterial style is his own in Polish or that of his translator (Boleslaw Taborski, incidentally), but the effect of his superb style, his profound explanations of Shakespeare's characters, and his obvious erudition in referring to European literary culture in its entirety is stunning. I'm particularly fond of his essays "Hamlet of the Mid-Century" and "King Lear or Endgame."