I have no idea where the book came from. It might have been
my mother's and I may have simply overlooked it until now,
15 years after her death, but then again, I keep discovering
books she collected. This one was on a bookcase of cheap
detective novels.

The spine identifies it as "Keystone World Cruise". The
title page calls it: *A Trip Around the World Through the
Telebinocular in Three Dimension Pictures* selected and
edited by Burton Holmes and other distinguished authorities
for the Keystone Travel Club (Meadville PA, Keystone View
Co. 1936). It has a hard leather binding and yellowing pages.

It is the accompanying text of 1200 binocular photographs.
Alas, the photos are missing. But commentaries about
spectrographic viewing and related subjects by Carl
Sandburg, Ernest Thompson Seton and others spice up the
text, a text which at some times lapses into unhistorical,
unscientific descriptions based more on bias and religion,
as when the comment is made, "The Masai are a mixed people,
probably of Hamitic stock." This in 1936. No wonder so
much superstition still abounds.

Or of the Australian Aborigines: "[They] belong to the black
race. They are descendants of the old warriors and huntsmen
of Australia and are among the most primitive people of the
earth." So much for the commentator's ability to appreciate
the superb adaptation of the Aborigine to his or her
environment. If humanity destroys itself, we will not have
to heap any blame on the Australian Aborigines.

An obsession with race dominates much of the commentary,
viz., "Only the highland Scotch [sic] are Celtic. The
lowlanders are Teutonic." And usually such comments show a
very limited knowledge of the history of these places.

In short, the book tells you more about the people who wrote
it and the times in which it was written than about the
peoples and places it attempts to explain.

--
Francis A. Miniter

In dem Lande der Pygmäen
gibt es keine Uniformen,
weder Abzeichen, noch irgend welche Normen,
Und Soldaten sind dort nicht zu sehen.

Siegfried von Vegesack, "Es gibt keine Uniformen"
from In dem Lande der Pygmäen