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Found Lying On Its Side on a Bookcase at Home
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 |
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#2
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Found Lying On Its Side on a Bookcase at Home
Francis A. Miniter wrote:
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. Books that contain archaic "information" are so interesting. Too bad it doesn't have its photos. -- Jean B. |
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