feminist theory

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

alicia — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:00:00 +0000

Historiography and corporeality have challenged queer theorists, or perhaps more accurately, have been fiercely challenged by queer theorists. From deconstructive viewpoints that question physicality as such, to radical disavowals of any belonging to historical legacies, the transcendental tendencies of queer thought have not come without their casualties.

In her most recent addition to the burgeoning queer theory bookshelves, Elizabeth Freeman tackles both historiography and corporeality head on. With her feet firmly rooted in historical instances, Freeman delves into queer familial structures, temporal gender performativity and (perhaps most provocatively) racial legacies of sadomasochism. Freeman eloquently challenges heteronormative teleologies, but not through deconstrunctionism or transcendence alone; instead, she lays claim to the possibilities of queer temporalities and histories.

Coining terms like erotohistoriography, temporal drag, and chrononormativity Freeman’s queer resistance is embodied in the new temporalities and chronologies that she lays out. Her refashioning of historiography is not only deeply experiential, but it is embodied as well—two strands of thought that has troubled feminist and queer thought alike for decades. More than this, in the same way Audre Lorde theorized about the potentialities of erotics, Freeman re-envisions the political potential of the historical as experienced through eroticism. She moves beyond shame and loss as traditionally explored in queer theory: Freeman’s history is one of carnal enjoyment, enjoyment that does not foreclose racial histories of pain.

Her insistence on addressing both corporeality and experientiality is most stimulating in her chapter on sadomasochism. In this chapter she criticizes queer theory’s inability to adequately unpack the racial baggage of S&M practiced and theorized in the queer community. In this chapter she outlines new ways of theorizing Marquis de Sade through Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant. The film features interracial S&M encounters between two men who engage in deeply historical play that replicates chattel slavery, and occurs in a deeply historical space, the art museum.

Yet another move that Freeman masters as an historian herself is her ability to renegotiate the value placed on historical texts. She gracefully moves between more canonized works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (both literary works), to Cecilia Dougherty’s Coal Miner’s Daughter and Elizabeth Subrin’s Shulie (both video pieces). In this chapter she uses Isaac Julien’s film to access Marquis de Sade, not the other way around. In doing so she successfully restructures which texts shape her historiographies: minor visual works by lesser known authors occupy the foreground of Freeman’s discussion.

This is queer theory at its best: imaginative and troubling while remaining entrenched in lived (a)historical experiences. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman finds herself among the ranks of queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, David L. Eng and Jasbir K. Puar. Without cleansing their hands of the complicatedness of history’s racial legacies, these theorists explore the messiness of queerness. This theory is centered on queer time and queer history’s exciting and, at times, (corporeally) violent moments.

As she herself explains when closing her remarks on S&M’s deeply racial historical potentialities, “These are not, to be sure, reparations for past damages (as if the perfect redress were possible), or the means of transcending all limitations. They are, however, ways of knowing history to which queers might make fierce claim.” Fierce, indeed.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, February 4th 2011

Feminaissance

barbara — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Edited by Christine Wertheim

Les Figures Press

French theorist Hélène Cixous first coined the term ècriture feminine in her 1975 essay “Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she wrote “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” Within the essay, Cixous posited that women write their gender into their writing, that gender is embedded in the language women use.

Écriture feminine is the focus of the anthology Feminaissance, which began as a Cal Arts conference held in 2007 on the topics of feminism and women in writing. One of the key questions that arose at this conference was the concept of ècriture feminine, and whether there were in fact specifically feminine forms of text. The ideas expressed at this conference later lead to the creation of this rich anthology, in which multiple women explore the concept of feminine writing and gender in language through a myriad of methods. All of the pieces of the anthology are laid out on the page in halves and thirds, so that each page shows a discussion of the topic from many voices.

The responses vary vastly, with some women exploring theory, some women exploring concepts of what it means to be a woman, and some women writing fiction and memoir related to gender and sexuality. As a whole the book presents a compelling and thought-provoking discussion on the concept of feminine language and what it means to be female within today’s society.

Among the most compelling pieces within the anthology is Dodie Bellamy’s short story “Sexspace.” Bellamy explores the connections between language and gender and sexuality by depicting characters that enter into an Internet-like world in which sexuality is expressed through energy and language, rather than merely imprisoned within our physical bodies. The protagonist’s femaleness then becomes something that transcends her body, and is rooted instead within her language and energy. In a day and age where much of the communication around sexuality now happens online or via text message, this concept seems highly relevant. Eileen Myles then depicts the reverse within her work “Tapestry,” in which she explores women whose sense of self and sexuality is linked to their bodies; the protagonist then remembers her own female lovers by describing their breasts and vaginas in detail, linking them to their physicality and sexuality. In “Continuity” Chris Kraus laments on the state of female writing, declaring that such writing has a “pervasive schizophrenia” as the identity of women within society is constantly in flux.

As a graduate student in English reading the writing of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigay, ècriture feminine often felt a bit disconnected from real life, mired down in academic purposes. Feminaissance makes the ideas behind ècriture feminine far more accessible by applying and exploring Cixous’ ideas within the context of real life. Much like Inga Muscio’s groundbreaking book Cunt, Feminaissance succeeds in its ability to take feminist theory and apply it both to artistic expression and real life experience, making feminism feel more relevant and accessible.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, December 8th 2010

Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture

farhana — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Stacey Weber-Fève, Olga M. Mesropova

The John Hopkins University Press

This book collects an array of articles previously published in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, brought together for the first time under the auspices of elaborating on the theme of visibility in both performance and visual culture. As with all such collections, some pieces stand out in caliber, notably "Practical Perfection? The Nanny Negotiates Gender, Class, and Family Contradictions in 1960s Popular Culture" by Anne Mcleer, "Fractured Borders: Women’s Cancer and Feminist Theater" by Mary K. DeSchazer, and Vivyan C. Adair’s must-read piece "The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poor Women, Power, and the Politics of Feminist Representation."

I picked these three out of the rest because of their remarkable quality of questioning. These three theorists take nothing for granted in their articles, managing to question everything down to the marrow of their subject. They escape clichés of feminist critiques of art culture and add something truly important to the canon of thought.

One of the major pitfalls for many of the articles is a failure to complicate the viewer-viewed relationship. This is one reason Adair’s essay is such a breath of fresh air—she affords a much needed shift from the “educated” woman writing about the “disenfranchised woman” who presumably need to be made visible by the well-meaning author of the article. Adair, on the other hand, sensitively addresses the viewed body as text, which is simultaneously produced and read by policy-producing discourses. There is a need for some of the other authors to readdress the question of who is doing the looking, and who is being looked at. The simplistic tradition of the “male gaze” is no longer groundbreaking. What more can we say about the looker and the looked-at?

Throughout the different pieces, the theme of visibility effectively arises, but also the theme of invisibility. It becomes evident that what one does not see—in an Alice Neel painting, in a Lucille Ball show, or even in a feminist essay—that what is not seen and not said is just as important, perhaps more important than what is seen. The point of interest then becomes these cracks in visibility: looking and asking as much about “why absence” as “why presence.” Even beyond that, “becoming visible” is effectively related not only to telling a previously untold story, but complicating the stories that already do exist. “Visibility” comes to mean the visible(ness) of ambiguity, and each essay moves in its own way toward promoting understanding of that space that exists in between the dichotomies of dangerous thinking.

This is a valuable collection, which brings together articles that otherwise perhaps would never meet eye-to-eye. There is something integral in the attempt to bring together cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theory to address a theme which is so at the edge of both feminist and visual studies.

Written by: Beth Fagan, December 7th 2010

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia. The metaphor refers to the time when slaves could be whipped for selling sugar from the plantations for any reason; it embodies both transgression and forbidden pleasure. Tinsley points out that using the term is “stealing language itself” to evoke a “transformative desire” to change the status of women and challenge the injustices of society.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature incorporates black, queer, and feminist theory into its analysis. It draws on literature, history, geography, anthropology, economics, and linguistics to paint a colorful, multilayered portrait of Caribbean women. Texts from Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad (along with occasional references to Cuba, Grenada, Aruba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the region) are used to explore the history of sexuality and the complications of Creole traditions. Tinsley begins with love songs sung by black working-class women to their female lovers, along with accounts of birthday parties and erotic dances and religious ceremonies, as well as messages exchanged in the symbolic language of flowers, to show the intricacies of gender identities in the West Indies.

In succeeding chapters she turns to Luminous Isle, an autobiographical novel by the white Jamaican woman writer Eliot Bliss, then to the erotic poems written in the 1920s by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican Woman, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel, No Telephone to Heaven, and, finally, Dionne Brand’s poetry collection No Language Is Neutral, in order to trace “their poetics of decolonization” and to point out how these texts suggest reconfiguring gender history to acknowledge the strength and beauty of Afro-Caribbean woman-identified women. Tinsley’s brilliant, sensitive explications, her frequent references to artworks from the area, and her descriptions of lush landscapes make reading her work a delight and a surprise.

However, I do wish that she had studied more than one Hispanic writer, Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro Espín. But I understand that bringing in a substantial number of texts in Spanish would have enlarged her project’s boundaries to perhaps unmanageable proportions. Several references to U.S. interventions in Grenada also left me wanting more information on the effects of North American activities in the region. I hope that Tinsley herself or one of her readers will expand on the groundbreaking work she has done in this book. I highly recommend it to a cosmopolitan audience.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 3rd 2010

The Cinematic Life of the Gene

admin — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Jackie Stacey

Duke University Press

The Cinematic Life of the Gene is a challenging and complex collection of essays that uses cinematic representations of genetics and cloning to consider the cultural impact of genetic breakthroughs. Jackie Stacey draws on some of the most well known theoretical works regarding cinema, art, and the body to consider the fascinating link between cinema and genomics. Her essays cite everything from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to theories of passing and reassemblage. It is the text's interdisciplinary nature that makes it both challenging and significant; cinema scholars, scientists, and feminists alike will find this work compelling. Still, The Cinematic Life of the Gene roots its examinations in the moving image, and serious scholars of the cinema (and particularly of science fiction cinema) will benefit from this “cultural study of film.”

Stacey’s work centers on an interesting premise: that cinema is uniquely tied to the science of cloning, since both are “technologies of imitation” which illustrate “a fascination with the boundary between life and death, and with the technical possibilities of animating the human body.” More than their fascinations with life and death, however, Stacey is interested in how scientific conceptions of cloning and genomics work concurrently with cinematic representations in creating “aestheticized forms of envisioning the human body.” In other words, scientists and filmmakers alike have visually codified genetic manipulation as a means of understanding and coping with its cultural and social ramifications. Stacey examines these attendant fears and desires surrounding genetic manipulation, referring to them as “the genetic imaginary,” a theoretical and cultural space in which “the fears and desires” around cloning and genomics are expressed and explored. She utilizes analyses of films from multiple genres (science fiction, the art-house thriller, feminist independent film, and body horror) to examine how fears surrounding genomics are expressed through both narrative and visual structure.

Stacey's explorations of the cultural impact of genomics on the psyche are fascinating but rather overwhelming, particularly because of her heavy dependence on prior theoretical works by the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Unfortunately, Stacey focuses so heavily on explicating her predecessors’ works that she tends to obscure her own thoughts; her contributions to these theories get lost amongst the jargon of her theoretical ancestors. Stacey serves her reader well by anchoring her arguments in popular works like Gattaca and Alien: Resurrection, making her work more approachable and comprehensible. She succeeds when she pares down her writing and engages with fewer theoretical texts in an essay; for example, she provides an inspired and fascinating examination of feminine masquerade in the science fiction film, applying the theories of well-known feminists Luce Irigaray and Mary Ann Doane to constructions of men in narratives of cloning.

The Cinematic Life of the Gene is not for the novice cinema or science fiction scholar, but those seriously engaged in a cultural study of the moving image or genetics would serve themselves well to tackle it. Scholars aligned with feminist and queer theories will also find rich fodder for thought in Stacey’s attentions to feminism, gender, and sexuality on screen.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, August 12th 2010

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Deborah M. Withers

HammerOn Press

Since the late 1970s, Kate Bush has been the original weirdchik in modern female pop music—press- and tour-shy, highly literate and culturally aware, witchy and Catholic, English and Eastern, masculine and high-femme. Above all, Kate has that voice, which she debuted at age nineteen with her song 'Wuthering Heights,' an eerie tale told from the point of view of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost. If there had been no Kate Bush, there would have been no Tori Amos, and most likely no PJ Harvey or Bjork either. Deborah M. Withers is unsurprisingly a big fan of Kate's body of work as well as a self-identified queer woman and academic who draws on Kate's music and the gender theories of Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Adriana Cavarero, and Donna Haraway to present feminist and queer interpretations of Kate Bush albums.

Normally, this is the kind of ambitious academic project that I love and that my friend Brendan calls 'grad school crap.' Withers applies her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theories to all of Kate's albums and her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve, mostly by cherry-picking fairly obscure lyrics and describing musical beats that she believes support her particular idea for that song or album. Withers has created the idea of what she refers to as the 'Bushian Feminine Subject' or the BFS, which is the 'I' in all of Kate's songs; the BFS can be either male or female, of any race, and refers essentially to the character that Kate becomes for each song. It's an interesting interpretation since far too often the casual music fan thinks that every 'I' in a song refers to the musician herself. (For example: Kate's song 'Cloudbusting' is sung from the point of view of Wilhelm Reich's son.) Withers also wants to provide her own view into Kate's music since Kate has long been interpreted via the white, male, heterosexual music critics of the 1970s and 1980s. I am certain that Kate's occasionally difficult lyrics and complex musical arrangements point to something deeper than what is perceived superficially, but I am unconvinced by Withers' hodge-podge of queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and post-human (a new one to me) theories. She makes much of the Bushian Feminine Subject's putative queerness, racial appropriation, male and female performance, suicide, and rebirth.

At 157 pages, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory seems more like a particularly ambitious college thesis than a book-length treatise on an important female artist with far-reaching cultural impact. It isn't poorly written, but it does appear to reach too far in its quest to assign theoretical meaning to Kate Bush's records. I was more curious to delve further into Withers' source materials than into the book itself. I might still recommend it to fans of Kate Bush and those who are into high theory; it is a short read and interesting and entertaining in its own right.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, June 17th 2010

Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African Middle Class

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Lisa B. Thompson

University of Illinois Press

In Beyond the Black Lady, Lisa B. Thompson analyzes representations of black middle class female sexuality in literature, theater, film, and popular culture. Her discussions highlight the need to go beyond the “overly determined racial and sexual script” to which middle class black women are expected to conform, which includes a sense of propriety and restraint as a counter to stereotypes of promiscuity that proliferate in the media. Thompson aims to move beyond valorizing black women, with an unattainable (and undesirable) idea of purity, and demonizing black women with assumptions of excessive and inappropriate sexual expression.

For African American women, there is a long history of misrepresentation and a limited menu of options. As Thompson writes, the “intersection of sexism and racism continually undermines black female representation.” In Thompson’s analysis, middle class black women might feel pressure to prove their morality to a critical white majority, while also feeling pressure to prove their legitimacy and belonging to the larger African American community.

Thompson’s scholarship seeks representational strategies that empower black women and subvert dominant stereotypes. She offers examples to illustrate that it is possible to move beyond stereotypes, to embrace a more holistic personhood complete with sexual agency. She offers a lively discussion of Judith Alexa Jackson’s performance piece “WOMBman Wars” as a site of freely expressed sexuality. Through her discussion of independent film, including Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust and Kasi Lemmon’s Eve’s Bayou, Thompson highlights alternatives to the stereotypes of options available to middle class black women in many films. She also includes helpful examples from the genre of autobiography.

Living in a racialized society, according to Thompson’s analysis, middle class African American women might feel a pressure to conform to conventions of propriety and respectability, as an act of responsibility to the African American community and a means to meet familial expectations. However, by leaving conventions behind, we can see more realistic portrayals of women, and women might have a less restricted experience.

This volume is solidly grounded in African American feminist theory, and Thompson deftly weaves in the work of her predecessors. She demonstrates that cultural criticism has a role to play in movements for social justice, because our representations are both fruits of and seeds for representations. With First Lady Michelle Obama in the White House, this book is a timely volume.

Written by: Lisa Rand, January 9th 2010

Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Molly Haskell

Yale University Press

When I was about ten years old, my mother sat me down one Saturday afternoon and said “Sara, today we’re going to watch Gone with the Wind. You just need to see it.” That was over a decade ago, and I’ll never forget that cinematic experience, even if it did just involve sitting on the couch in front of a thirty-two-inch television and eating cherry turnovers with my mom.

I’ve always loved movies, but seeing Scarlet O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) taunt and toy with the people around her and demand what she wants had a profound effect upon my views of womanhood in both cinema and the rest of the world. Gone with the Wind remains, to this day, one of the few films I feel the need to re-visit on a yearly basis. And, despite her flaws, I still look up to Scarlet O’Hara with her green velvet curtain dress and “fiddle-di-dee” mentality.

If you know anything about classic Hollywood and the studio system, you’ve probably heard of the monumentally challenging efforts it took to bring Gone with the Wind to the screen in 1939. Its entire production, with the two year search to find the right Scarlet O’Hara, fifteen different screenwriters, and five different directors, is flat-out legendary. The film never should have worked on any level and yet, somehow, it did and still does for this generation. If adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time, and it continues to be played regularly on television, DVD, theatrical revival circuits, and in the near future, Blu-ray.

In her latest book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, feminist film theorist Molly Haskell succinctly analyzes the history and hubbub of the landmark production as both a movie and a novel. She traces the film’s success, in terms of both box office gross, and at times, cinematic art, back to its three pillar figures: author Margaret Mitchell, producer David O. Selznick, and actress Vivien Leigh. Haskell sorts through their lives and their methods as if she were looking at pictures in a personal scrapbook and re-living the memories. Their towering personalities were the primary contributions to this melting pot of a film that made it work. As a classic film geek and fan of woman’s pictures, my favorite parts of the book dealt with the placement of Scarlet O’Hara as a feminist icon and heroine. Is she or isn’t she? Everyone feels differently.

A significant number of film theory/history books feel mundane because of their intense dedication to evoking every possible fact and foible. Frankly, My Dear, while still intensely dedicated, never feels monotonous or burdensome. Haskell, as a real Southern belle, feels at home in dissecting the step-by-step moments of Gone with the Wind and understanding the flaws and virtues instilled in its pages and celluloid as both a true-blue woman’s picture and racially confused melodrama. She’s as passionate about Gone with the Wind as Scarlet O’Hara is about her beloved Tara. And like Ms. O, Haskell digs deep into what she loves and won’t let go.

Whether you like the film and book or not, I think anyone who’s interested in history or pop culture will find Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited remarkable because of Haskell’s passionate account and for the sheer enjoyment of learning about something bigger than life actually being made for mass consumption. Like Gone with the Wind, I’ll definitely return to Frankly, My Dear on a regular basis and happily place it on my bookshelf right next to my other favorite film books. And if you don’t like that, I don’t give a damn!

Written by: Sara Freeman, May 26th 2009

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art

admin — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:04:00 +0000

By Debra J. Blake

Duke University Press

Debra J. Blake, a professor in the department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota, revisits an old topic in her book Chicana Sexuality and Gender. Many Chicana feminists and writers have wondered, analyzed, and interpreted the roles of archetypal figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, La Llorona, and the mother earth goddesses in their own ways—that is, to decipher the symbols of each iconic representation; however Blake has gone in another direction altogether by introducing the relationship between these important characters and those of regular working class and semi-professional Mexican American women. She uses oral histories and personal interviews to weave together the influence and existence of Mexican female iconography on the lives of these particular women.

Blake brings a new perspective to Chicana Studies through these oral histories and her own analysis of the meanings of these figures on the lives of these women. Through various cultural expressions, Blake's book reveals both Chicana feminist thought and the reflections of women who are not necessarily feminists. She balances both viewpoints and never tries to be forceful or overly aggressive with her own opinions. Instead, she relies heavily on anecdotal evidence from her different subjects, allowing them to tell their stories; Blake simply fills in the details and offers explanations and backstory to each figure. Chicana Sexuality and Gender is a much welcome addition to the canon of Chicana feminist theory.

Written by: Mónica Teresa Ortiz, February 15th 2009

Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:24:00 +0000

By Rosemarie Tong

Westview Press

Rosemarie Tong’s Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction offers a clear, thorough introduction to feminist theory. With detailed chapters on Liberal Feminism; Radical Feminism; Marxist and Socialist Feminism; Psychoanalytic Feminism; Care-Focused Feminism; Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism; Ecofeminism; and Postmodern and Third Wave Feminism, the book presents even-handed coverage of the major schools of feminist thought.

The chapters are on average thirty to thirty-five pages long. The text is, thus, concise enough to be useful in survey or introductory feminist theory courses. The theoretical origins of each school thought are examined, and each chapter also considers supportive and opposing views in relation to the different ‘branches’ of feminism. As such, the book offers a useful dialogue that not only reveals the important contributions of these different feminisms (and the key thinkers from each branch), but also scrutinizes the unexamined assumptions and biases in each approach.

While portions of the book are dry and a bit tedious to wade through, this is understandable given the wide-ranging coverage and the textbook type format. It would be difficult for any author, even one as obviously well-versed in feminist theory as Tong, to share a history of feminist thought that didn’t sometimes tend towards an encyclopedic style. Moreover, even though the coverage of primary sources becomes wearisome at times (especially for readers already well versed in feminist theory), the comprehensive approach that considers the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical branch is well worth wading through (and particularly useful for those new to feminist theory).

One area that seems missing in this revised addition is a consideration of transnational feminism. An overview of this branch, especially considering its current importance to the field, would have improved the chapter entitled “Multicultural, Global, and Postcolonial Feminism.” Another missing area of feminist thought is sexuality studies and queer theory. Given the explosive growth of these branches of thought, this seems an odd omission. However, in spite of these absences, the book is certainly a very useful introduction to feminist thought. In addition to being useful for survey courses in feminist theory, the book also serves as a great reference text to have on hand, especially given the excellent bibliography.

Written by: Professor What If, October 21st 2008