Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Anderson, Katherine

D. Graham Burnett, "Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put a Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Oliver, Bobbie

Peter Brock, "Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War" (oronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)

Perry, Adele

Reading "Haunted by Empire" in Winnipeg: The Politics of Transational Histories

Kirby, Lisa A.

A final historiographical question provoked by both books: is it possible
for historians of social activism to avoid the heroic (or anti-heroic) treatment of
their subjects? Do there always have to be retrospective political winners and los-
ers? And shouldn’t historians (whatever their political biases) serve as investigators,
narrators, and storytellers of lives and times rather than as moralists and judges?
These questions are not entirely rhetorical.
Paul Axelrod
York University
Laura Hapke, Labor’s Canvas: American Working-Class History and the
WPA Art of the 1930s (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2008).
In the triumvirate of New Deal-sponsored cultural initiatives, several studies have
examined the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theater Project; however, a
comprehensive survey of the third artistic component of the WPA, the Federal
Art Project (FAP), has been largely absent. Fortunately, there is now Laura
Hapke’s Labor’s Canvas. For over two decades, Hapke has sought to place at cen-
tre the lives of labourers so often on the margins of American culture. This is evi-
dent in her previous works, such as Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction
(Rutgers, 2001) and Sweatshop: The History of an American Idea (Rutgers, 2004).
Labor’s Canvas emerges as a continuation of these studies, seeking to again place
value on working-class history and culture. This text, at once an examination of
art, history, politics, race, class, and gender, emerges as a seminal work for schol-
ars of history, labour studies, art history, and American Studies.
What is evident from Hapke’s study are the diverse and complex nuances
that permeated FAP art. Divided into two main parts, Part One, “Male and Pale:
Unionism and Art,” and Part Two, “Catching the CIO Spirit: The FAP and
Multicultural Workers,” Labor’s Canvas explores the complicated notion of “a WPA
artistry both responsive to and ambivalent about labor” (8). This statement makes
clear the thorny nature of the job for many WPA artists: “artists saw themselves
as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet
artistically, they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance” (2).
Whether seeking a way to accurately depict the “self in industrial work” or balanc-
ing their radical impulses with the aims of a government-subsidized arts program,
artists found themselves in complicated and often contradictory positions (9). Yet
these intricate political and cultural subtexts, Hapke observes, provide the rich
undercurrent of FAP art .
Another important focus of Hapke’s project, made especially apparent in
Part Two, is the attention given to diversity and multiculturalism in WPA art. Many
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FAP artists, as she contends, worked hard to represent race, gender, body, and
labour accurately in their art. Hapke is astute in her observations about FAP artists
and their accomplishments, particularly in that they “recognized that the American
labor force was not monolithic” (2). She acknowledges that these artists produced
works that recognized and celebrated the very diverse nature of Depression-era
labourers and were integral in providing an alternative to mainstream America’s
view of the blue-collar labourer as essentially male and white. Instead, these artists
d epicted wo rke rs, both male and fe m a l e, and in “va rying racial hues” ( 9 0 ) . In this way,
FAP artists sought to expand the country ’s notion of wh at it meant to be wo rking cl a s s.
One of the many accomplishments of Labor’s Canvas is its recovery of
WPA artists whose names have been largely excluded from American Studies—
Reginald Marsh, Dox Thrash, Isabel Bishop, and Raphael Soyer, just to name a
few. Hapke offers in-depth analyses of their works, as well as context for how
these artists fit into the larger, Depression-era cultural zeitgeist. Alongside this
examination are the powerful images themselves. With over thirty illustrations
accompanying Hapke’s study, the reader can see firsthand some of the complicat-
ed images from the FAP. Moreover, exploring these depictions calls for a reposi-
tioning of FAP art, which has traditionally been maligned: “from the New Deal
era to our own, well-heeled art critics have often sneered at the simplified or bru-
tally expressionistic figures who man concrete mixers, build bridges, chafe on or
mournfully occupy breadlines, crowd factory gates, or swarm into mega-factories”
(4 ) . This is a common attitude towa rds wo rk i n g - class culture, whether it
ap p e a rs on canva s, in print, or on the stage. L a b o r ’s Canva s fo rces critics and
s ch o l a rs to reconsider their previous dismissal of s u ch wo rks as well as their
aesthetic notions.
Hapke focuses attention on this often overlooked segment of American
labour history, emphasizing that “of crucial importance is the ‘bottom-up’ story of
the common experience of company towns, family and community hardship,
industrial speedups, grassroots activism, government relief jobs, and breadline
homelessness” (2). In this way, Hapke’s work becomes part of the tradition of
other “bottom-up” approaches, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the
United States and Studs Terkel’s Working. Much like Terkel and Zinn’s projects,
Hapke’s Labor’s Canvas underscores the vitality and intricacy of working-class cul-
ture in a time that was wrought with political, aesthetic, and classed concerns.
Hapke has succeeded amply in this endeavor, producing a work that is superbly
researched and thoughtfully written. In exploring these complicated and impor-
tant issues, Hapke has produced a truly significant work in Labor’s Canvas, one that
solidifies her reputation as one of our most important labour studies scholars.
Lisa A. Kirby
North Carolina Wesleyan College
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Laura Hapke, "Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s" (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)

Pelz, William A.

Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton. N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
People make their own history but not, as Karl Marx noted, in conditions of their
choosing. Seldom has the truth of that observation been more clear than in the
brief life of the German Republic which was born in the wake of war and revo-
lution. Known as the Weimar Republic after the city of its formal birth, this
republic lurched from crisis to crisis until being murdered by the Nazis. In this
remarkable introduction to the German republic’s all too short existence, Eric
Weitz successfully brings to life Weimar Germany’s innovation and richness woven
into the tapestry of German history.
For a time Germany, most particularly Berlin, was arguably the most
exciting, vibrant society on the planet. Weitz does a superb job of showing
Weimar in all its nuances, from art and architecture to the sex reform movement.
Above all, the reader can feel the sense of possibility that permeated Germany in
those years (1919-1933). Change was in the air and even in the worst of times
artists and artisans, proletarians and painters could all feel something unprecedent-
ed might soon happen. That this was to be Hitler’s murderous Third Reich was
not preordained. As the author of Weimar Germany makes clear, the republic did
not die a natural death but was viciously murdered.
Nor was this institutional republicide the result of a majority of
Germans clamoring for fascism. As the author documents, Hitler received less
than two out of every five votes cast in the last truly free election. Significantly,
that was at the peak of Nazi electoral support and soon after the Nazi’s vote began
to fall sharply. In refuting the widely-held myth that Germans freely chose
Nazism, Weitz corrects a widespread, racist, misunderstanding that “Germans love
taking orders thus...”
The circumstance that left the republic defenseless against Hitler was the
fact that, in the words of a leftist saying popular in the 1920s, “the Kaiser went,
and the Generals remain.” Although the author is plainly reluctant to underline
this fact, the German Social Democrats (SPD) bear a deep responsibility for this
situation. Virtually handed office after the Kaiser fled into exile to Holland, the
SPD failed to purge the old monarchist governmental apparatus, most of all the
Imperial German army. This meant that the party in effect gave a pass to the old,
embittered ruling classes who bided their time until they seized on Hitler as an
unpleasant but reliable weapon to wield against democracy. Fixated on their ene-
mies to the left, the Social Democratic Party that led the early Republic failed to
democratize not only the army but also the courts and the civil service, not to
mention the capitalist economy. Curiously, Weitz presents damning evidence to
this effect yet hesitates to develop the logical conclusion of his own research.
There are other flaws in this generally excellent work. For example, the
author has a curious (American?) antipathy toward the Weimar Republic’s demo-
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cratic system of proportional representation, repeating without evidence that this
was a major source of weak governments. (What about, say, runaway inflation or
the Great Depression?) Could a stronger government have changed the world eco-
nomic crisis, let alone the devotion of the right to the use of violence to enforce
its will?  Weitz seems to make the common mistake of confusing being in office
with being in power. Even a Social Democratic-led majority government did not
change the fact that when the old ruling families, like the Krupps, felt the moment
was right, the old order stuck back with violence, using Hitler as their instrument.
This was possible as they had remained the ones truly in power.
It could be that, on some level, the author felt his story needed a hero.
Once he ruled out this role as impossible for the Nazis, and politically incorrect
for the Communists to fill, all he was left with was the SPD and those (few) bour-
geois parties loyal to the republic. To steal a formulation from Bertolt Brecht, pity
the author who needs heroes. Nonetheless, these are relatively minor flaws in an
otherwise brilliant survey of Weimar Germany. Weitz is sensitivity to the nuances
of Weimar culture and politics all too rare in many treatments of this period. It is
a tribute to the author that readers can feel they are actually walking through
Berlin, not merely reading about it three-quarters of a century later. The strengths
of this work far outweigh the imperfections and thus it is to be highly recommend-
ed.
William A. Pelz
Institute of Working Class History (Chicago)
Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Editors), English Radicalism,
1550-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
“Class analysis of radicalism has not, so far, proved productive” (64). Thus writes
Glenn Burgess in the recent collection of essays on English radicalism the he co-
edited with Matthew Festenstein. Burgess aimed this barb directly at the British
historians Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson; it lands wide of the mark. Hill
and Thompson’s work placed class and radicalism at the centre of British and
many other historiographies for much of the last century, and continues to shape
scholarship today despite the lingering and effete post-modernism heralded by
Burgess and other contributors to this volume. With notable exceptions, Burgess’
misguided observation sounds an emblematic note for the tone and quality of the
scholarship in the collection. Inspired by the rise of the ‘linguistic turn’ in
English political studies, Burgess and Festenstein take an agnostic approach to rad-
icalism’s existence and a cold-eyed look at the concept’s historiographic record.
First, compelled by the scholarship of contributors J.C.D. Clark and Conal
Condren, the editors question the legitimacy of writing about ‘radicalism’, an
allegedly modern concept, in the early modern period. Secondly, they question
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Eric D. Weitz, "Weimer Germany: Promise and Tragedy" (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)

Arden Hoppe, Kirk

might investigate not only how fire policy affected First Nations, but whether they
later participated in state fire fighting efforts. Certainly, they have done so in other
countries such as the United States, where many Native peoples on reservations
have found well-paying seasonal employment fighting fires, both on reservations
and elsewhere.
Given Pyne’s relative inattention to social relations, readers of Left History
might think Awful Splendour is not worth the trouble. That would be a mistake
because while Pyne is relatively uninterested in social history, he shows clearly the
pivotal role of fire in shaping the Canadian landscape. Wildland fire reworked
thousands of hectares in the span of few days or weeks. Global warming will, in
the words of Pyne, “only enhance the habitat for fire” (478). Pyne’s monumental
book on Canadian fire history has not exhausted the topic. Rat h e r, it has left a cl e a r
p ath for sch o l a rs with other pro cl ivities to ve n t u re in new directions with diffe re n t
sets of questions about this fundamental element in the Canadian env i ro n m e n t .
Robert Wilson
Syracuse University 
James C. M c C a n n , Maize an d Gr ace: A f ri ca’s Enc o unte r w i th a New Wo r ld
C ro p , 1500 -20 00 ( C a m b r i d ge, M A : H a rva rd Unive rsity Pre s s, 2 0 0 5 ) .
Maize and Grace is an African environmental history of the maize plant itself, of
the advantages and dangers to farmers and markets of an early-yielding, low-
labour, but drought-vulnerable grain, of the different hardness and starchiness of
kernels, of plant and human diseases, seed hybrids and genetic variations. James
McCann has a great admiration for the maize plant. He appreciates the plant’s his-
tory of adaptability and unpredictability. His fascination with maize and his cre-
ative structuring of the monograph make Maize and Grace one of a rare breed: a
successful single commodity history. Though the book sits at the intersection of
three literatures—African environmental history, the single commodity history,
and the history of food—it succeeds less as a history of food, or even as a chron-
icle of a single commodity in a particular venue, than it does as an innovative and
exciting African environmental history.
The single commodity history seems to hold great promise as a method
for doing world history, for revealing world systems and transnational connections.
But in the years since Sidney Mintz’s groundbreaking Sweetness and Power, which
McCann lauds in his introduction, and Emmmanual Wallerstein’s explication of
the commodity chain, the single commodity history has struggled. The literature
has tilted toward gift and coffee table books on coffee, tea, oil, gold, salt and
bananas. Most of these texts contribute in small ways to the scholarly conversa-
tion about world history, but for the most part are episodic, meandering, and at
times are often lacking in theoretical rigor and even substantive theses. The diffi-
Book Reviews174
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 174
culty lies with the sort of daunting coverage across great expanses of time and
space, along with a consideration of issues as broadly different as production and
processing is from marketing and consumption, that this genre of historical writ-
ing seems to demand from authors. The single commodity history approach
seems to have been most successful when authors have limited themselves,
instead, to a particular time and place and to analyses of specific emerging systems
such as industrialization or empire.
McCann avoids the pitfalls of the single commodity history by not offer-
ing case studies of maize in different locations and periods in Africa, but by form-
ing chapters around aspects of the plant most germane to the history of Africa.
Spatially, Maize and Grace ranges between western, southern and northeastern
Africa but not in a mechanistic attempt at continental coverage, simply as the best
way to get at the themes McCann wants to explore. He begins in West Africa with
the sixteenth-century introduction and spread of maize to the continent—and the
demographic implications of what he calls the “Africanization” of the new food
crop as local farmers included it in different ecological niches and intercropping
mixes. By way of highlighting issues involved in the process of introducing maize
to a new ecology and commercial economy, Maize and Grace includes a chapter on
the political impact of the introduction of maize in Venice which is contrasted
with imperial Ethiopia. Venice is an odd and unexplained detour. It is certainly
valuable to keep in mind that maize reached Africa and Eurasia at the same time,
and that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of Italy and Ethiopia are
closely intertwined. I also applaud the poke this comprises at the idea of the
African continent as a legitimate and coherent historical unit of analysis. North
Africa was part of a Mediterranean world system, as West Africa was part of the
Atlantic World, and East Africa part of the Indian Ocean world system, and a
comparative focus including Venice could have made that point eloquently. As it
is, the untutored reader would have benefited from a more explicit explanation of
the rationale for this comparison.
Later chapters on colonial plant disease control, genetic engineering and
standardization, and an impressive argument regarding malaria make for particu-
larly compelling reading. Maize seemingly cured itself in the 1950s of a massive
rust outbreak in West Africa with the possible re-emergence of a rust-resistant fos-
sil gene latent for centuries (135). The new hybrid maize seed SR-52, released in
1960, tripled some southern African crop yields as long as industrial fertilizer and
tractors were on hand. And in a chapter characterized by some remarkable
sleuthing conveyed in the first person, McCann persuasively argues that in north-
west Ethiopia in the late 1990s, a fatal combination of climate change and new
farming practices that situated maize close to farmers’ homes led to a malaria out-
break. As McCann points out, mosquitoes thrive on maize pollen.
While fine environmental history, Maize and Grace is less a history of
food. It does not examine the history of cooking, eating and the meaning of
Left History 13.1 175
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 175
maize. A chapter on the twentieth-century shift in Africa to white corn produc-
tion (90 percent of Africa’s total maize crop is white maize) mentions that this
preference is based on a recent aesthetic bent but avoids any cultural analysis of
what whiteness might mean to African consumers (112). Maybe it does not mean
anything, but apart from any cultural analysis, the reader is left wondering. Little
time is spent on the intimacies and economies of household food production and
consumption or on how a new grain changed eating in Africa.
The title Maize and Grace is resonant with many meanings, among which
most importantly is an allusion to the ongoing controversy over whether maize is
a blessing or curse to future food security in Africa. McCann addresses the cur-
rent and future politics of maize directly in a well crafted conclusion. He weighs
climate change, African urban growth, nutrition, the volatility of global markets in
grain, fertilizer, fuel, and farm equipment, human and plant diseases, and crop
yields against each other in a carefully balanced argument against maize as a
panacea. Though maize gives historically creative and adaptable African small-
scale farmers another option in their bundle of crop-mixing strategies, it is one
that comes with nutritional, epidemiological and environmental risks. Its very
adaptability as a plant leaves McCann hopeful that scientific breeding programs
can prioritize genetic mutations that tolerate drought and low fertility (211). Apart
from this hope, prospects for Africans are, as he concludes, gloomy.
McCann’s point that Africa has been and still is strongly affected by the
global maize market, but has little impact on it, is all the more salient in light of
the current explosion in global grain prices resulting in food riots throughout
Africa (and elsewhere) in the spring of 2008. The related ever more obvious link-
ages between maize and fuel markets through growing global ethanol production
only heightens this dynamic. As McCann reports, while most sub-Saharan African
maize is consumed locally as food, Africa as a whole is a net importer of maize
with Egypt alone importing nearly three million tons of maize annually (209).
The enthusiasm and fascination with the maize plant that McCann brings
to this project is contagious. His book is the result of careful and thoughtful
research built upon a variety of types of evidence and methodologies. Maize and
Grace is about people’s relationships to the biology of the plant itself: maize’s rela-
tionship to climates, to soils, to human nutrition, malaria, fungus that is toxic to
humans, rust, and mutations both engineered and not. In bringing these histories
to light, Maize and Grace makes a strong case that no matter the science, technolo-
gy or agricultural adaptability people have brought and continue to bring to bear
around maize, the plant has a history of its own.
Kirk Arden Hoppe
University of Illinois at Chicago
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James C. McCann, "Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop 1500-2000" (Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

Thrope, Jocelyn

Sandberg, L. Anders

activism will not bring about a solution to the global environmental crisis. This
requires action at the level of the state, which implies that the left has to under-
stand and come to terms with not only the capital-labour relation in their own
society but with the state itself as a repository of political power in effecting social
and environmental change.
At the very least the book places activism at the centre of the agenda of
analysis and politics. Despite several deficits at the level of leftist analysis and pol-
itics the book will likely stimulate further debate on the way forward. For this rea-
son also the book is worth a critical reading.
Henry Veltmeyer
Saint Mary’s University
Ro b e rt Hunter, The Gr eenpeace to Amchitka ( Va n c o u ve r: A rsenal Pulp Pre s s,
2 0 0 4 ) .
The Greenpeace to Amchitka, written as a series of journal entries by recently-
deceased Canadian environmentalist and author Robert Hunter, offers readers a
first-hand account of the voyage that marked the entry of Greenpeace onto the
stage of global environmental politics. In September of 1971, a handful of
activists boarded the Phyllis Cormack, an eighty-foot fishing boat temporarily
renamed the Greenpeace for the boat’s journey from Vancouver to Amchitka, a small
island in the Aleutians off the coast of Alaska where the US government was con-
ducting a series of nuclear tests. Greenpeace’s precursor, the Don’t Make a Wave
Committee, had conceived of the idea of establishing “a floating picket line” in
the wake of large-scale protests against the last nuclear test at Amchitka in 1969
(167). Although the voyage of the Greenpeace successfully drew media attention to
the issue of nuclear testing, due to a number of factors—news that the test had
been delayed, difficulties encountered with U.S. customs regulations, and conflicts
within the group on board about whether they meant actually to get in the way of
the test or simply to elicit public support for their anti-nuclear cause—the
Greenpeace never reached Amchitka, and the boat’s crew arrived back in Vancouver
a week before the bomb was detonated. Hunter, who would go on to become co-
founder and first president of Greenpeace, admits that he wrote the majority of
what resulted in this book with the conviction that the trip had been a failure: it
had not stopped the test. But in the portion of his tale written in 2004, he states
that in fact “the trip was a success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams … [T]he lega-
cy of the voyage itself is not just a bunch of guys in a fishing boat, but the
Greenpeace the entire world has come to love and hate” (236-7).
While the trip may have been a success (the nuclear program at Amchitka
was cancelled shortly after the voyage of the Greenpeace), Hunter’s account of the
journey is not. He states that he originally wrote the story while “in terrible
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shape,” sitting alone in the recently-docked Phyllis Cormack, stressed out and in
pain, popping painkillers, gulping beer and chain-smoking as he wrote (19). It
shows. Although the 200-page stream of consciousness that he typed as a single
paragraph while on board the Phyllis Cormack has been cleaned up significantly
since Jack McClelland rejected the manuscript over 30 years ago, it is likely that the
fame of its author rather than the quality of the writing led Arsenal Pulp Press to
publish Hunter’s story. Hunter’s writing, with its extended Lord of the Rings
metaphors and constant references to drug trips (“the trip had become a recurring
hallucination” [19]; “our own trip is making LSD look like an aspirin” [162]), is at
times painful to read. We get, for instance, “We are like Bilbo Baggins and the
dwarves attempting to get to the lair of Smaug. No—more like the Fellowship of
the Ring – the ring of Power, which for us is the closed-circle ecology symbol—
and we are on our way to the dread dark land of Mordor” (31).
At other times, his text is more than a little troubling. He supports
Aboriginal rights, yet depicts Native individuals and culture in stereotypical and
demeaning ways. In his description of a stop the Greenpeace made at the Aleut vil-
lage on Akutan Island, for example, he notes that while “the young guys in the vil-
lage hate whites with a passion,” the “beautiful young women… seem extremely
friendly.” Unfortunately, he continues, “the Aleuts are penned in here like ani-
mals” with little to do “but sit around and drink, which they do with a vengeance”
(97-8). Hunter also seems untroubled by what he calls the “machismo-oriented”
character of the Greenpeace voyage (18). Although he recalls it being a “sore point”
that the Greenpeace crew included only men, particularly given that a woman, Marie
Bohlen, had thought of the idea of the floating protest in the first place and
women had worked for months preparing for the trip (17), he appears to have no
qualms about sharing particularly “machismo-oriented” details about the voyage.
For example, readers learn that on a hike beyond the Aleut village undertaken by
several Greenpeace crew members, Hunter finds himself “starting to get a hard-on”
and wanting “to sink [his] poor tender prick into this mushy vagina-like stewpot of
Earth” (103). He appears to have held off, contenting himself instead by gather-
ing the other crew members together so that they might “lie at crazy angles, gen-
tly probing the tender green flesh” of the earth, looking at insects and coming to
the realisation that “all life is interwoven … And, man, can you dig it?” (104-5).
The Greenpeace to Amchitka does have some redeeming qualities. Hunter’s
explanations of the dangers of the sea as gleaned from Greenpeace captain John
Cormack and fisherfolk encountered along the journey are fascinating and offer a
sense of the risks undertaken by the inexperienced Greenpeace crew members in
order to fight for a cause they believed in deeply. Descriptions of the political cli-
mate in which the Greenpeace voyage took place—Hunter and company had the
support of Aboriginal leaders, the Prime Minister of Canada, and even crew mem-
bers of the U.S. Coast Guard ship whose captain charged Captain Cormack with
customs violations—are also interesting and document an important historical
Book Reviews184
Left History 13_1 (final)  9/24/08  9:49 AM  Page 184
moment. Photographs by Robert Keziere that appear throughout the text make
strikingly apparent the forces, natural and military both, working against the
Greenpeace. In spite of these strengths, however, we are not convinced that The
Greenpeace to Amchitka is a tale worth telling, although it may serve as a perhaps nec-
e s s a ry counter to the often romanticised story told about the origins of
Greenpeace. While this trip is commonly credited with beginning the modern-day
environmental movement, Hunter’s account indicates that, in another way, it was
just a bunch of guys in a fishing boat.
The Greenpeace to Amchitka clearly fits into a larger genre of journalistic
and hag i ographic accounts of G re e n p e a c e, and historians interested in
Greenpeace may well want to skip Hunter’s book and turn instead to works by
Stephen Dale, Grant Jordan, Dieter Rucht, Paul Wapner and Frank Zelko.
Jocelyn Thorpe and L. Anders Sandberg
York University
Brian Luke, Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Manhood (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Brian Luke’s Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Manhood is a fascinating look at
how, through history, men have exploited animals as a way of distinguishing them-
selves from, and giving them power over, women. Luke’s basic premise is that
when men kill or hurt animals, the implicit threat is that they could be killing and
hurting women instead. In this way, he connects the exploitation of animals with
the exploitation of women.
Luke rejects the notion that dominating animals is essential to human
nature. Instead he argues that this domination has been socially tolerated because
proponents of the animal exploitation industries have tied it to “manhood”.
Luke’s work builds on Carol Adams’ famous works The Sexual Politics of Meat and
The Pornography of Meat, which show how both slaughtered animals and women are
turned into objects to be consumed by men. Luke focuses on other forms of ani-
mal exploitation, such as animal sacrifice, modern vivisection, and sport hunting.
He suggests that these forms of animal exploitation function to affirm male
authority—and female subjugation—in western society. Luke argues that animal
exploitation is essential to specific constructions of masculinity.
Brutal makes bold claims about the symbolic links between animal abuse
and patriarchy. For example, Luke claims that animal sacrifice originated as a way
of establishing paternity by compensating for men’s inability to gestate and suck-
le. He suggests that men practiced animal sacrifice so that they “could claim cred-
it for the continued existence of human life” by appeasing the divine powers (128).
He also suggests that sacrifice gave men authority by giving them the means to
either punish or save the community, or by choosing to sacrifice either a human or
Left History 13.1 185
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Robert Hunter, "The Greenpeace to Amchitka" (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004)

Oates, Thomas

Haley, Elle

Jim Harding, "Canada's Deadly Secret" (Halifax: Fernwood, 2007)

Bonnell, Jennifer

Joy Pa rr and Jon van der Ve e n , M e g a p r o j e c t s, h t t p : / / m egap ro j e c t s. f i m s. u wo. c a / .
Megaprojects brings together three multimedia collections as part of Joy Parr and
Jon van der Veen’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between technology,
risk, environment, and culture: 1) Val Morton: A Guided Archive; 2) Lostscapes;
Visiting Old Iroquois; and 3) Sounding Danger in and Around the Bruce Nuclear
Power Site. Drawing from oral histories and other documentary evidence to
describe the relationship between local residents and the ‘megaprojects’ that dis-
rupt their lives, the collections make an important contribution to the history of
public memory and environmental change in twentieth-century Canada.
“Val Morton: A Guided Archive” uses images, audio interviews, and
written remembrances to create a rich narrative of the life of Val Morton, a ranch-
er whose land in the Kootenay region of south-central British Columbia was
expropriated in 1968 as part of the Columbia River Treaty. The site explores the
ways that disruptions to water, soils and wildlife caused by the expropriations and
the subsequent construction of three reservoir dams in the late 1960s and early
1970s are reflected in the personal disruptions experienced by Val Morton as a
result of the same events. Ejected from his land, Morton comes to lead a peri-
patetic life in a camper truck, “[remembering and grieving] his old life by return-
ing to an archive of pictures, maps, and written accounts of bygone day-to-day
activities at his ranch.” It is this very intimate archive that viewers are invited to
explore, together with several video and audio clips from interviews with Morton.
Navigating the site requires some practice. Introductory text for each
chronological section appears and fades before I finish reading it, and I can’t find
a way to go back without reloading the page. Images pan quickly to the left and
right as I move my mouse, making it difficult to target a particular image or text
excerpt for viewing. It takes me a few moments to figure out that the material
moves, counter-intuitively, in the opposite direction of the cursor. Three reference
maps accompany the chronological collage entries: a hand-drawn sketch of the
Morton ranch annotated with areas of significance in Val’s memory of his daily
activities; a 1963 topographical map of Nakusp and the Arrow Lakes area; and an
aerial photo of the area in 1960. While these maps provide useful context, they
are difficult to compare. Some indication of the location of the Morton ranch on
the topographical map or the aerial photo would have made these materials more
useful. For all these criticisms of the functionality of the site, however, the mate-
rial is rich and evocative, and creates a haunting reflection on the profound sense
of belonging created by daily routines in place, and the disorientation incurred by
the loss of that place and those activities.
The second project on the Megaprojects website, “Lostscapes: Visiting
Old Iroquois”, presents a virtual tour of the Ontario town of Iroquois in 1953,
before it was flooded to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1958. The tour
pieces together photographs of the town’s built environment with audio reminis-
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cences from interviews with former Iroquois residents. A selection of tour start-
ing points, indicated on a 1953 aerial photo of the town, allows me to stroll—vir-
tually—along the town’s two main thoroughfares from east to west or west to east,
an indicator of my location moving along with me. As I move along, black and
white photographs of the homes and businesses of King Street appear in succes-
sion on my screen, reconstituting a lost streetscape. A former resident begins to
speak about the excitement she felt about buying a family home along the river,
and the deep sense of loss that followed when the town was relocated further
inland. Another describes in intimate detail the storefront of a local business, and
the role it played in the town. No unifying narrative appears here: instead, towns-
people recreate their town from memory, relating stories from multiple viewpoints
about the old town and its relocation in 1957, the effects of the move on residents,
and the embodied memories of the town’s physical environment—the constant
sound of the river, its role in people’s lives and livelihoods, and changes in its flow
and physiology after the Seaway is constructed.
The last project, “Sounding Danger in and Around the Bruce Nuclear
Power Site,” comprises four audio “compositions” drawn from interviews with
wo rke rs of the Bruce Nuclear Power Facility and Heavy Water Plant in
Kincardine, Ontario and with nearby residents. The first composition, “Equate
Things,” highlights the use of often misleading analogies by plant managers and
trainers to educate workers and residents about radiation risks. The second,
“Inverhuron Park,” overlays a series of voices relating the shock and disappoint-
ment experienced in losing access to overnight camping in a nearby park due to
the heavy water plant’s emissions of hydrogen sulphide gas. One resident’s com-
ment, “these are the same people who have been saying ‘it’s been safe, it’s been
safe, it’s been safe,’” repeats as a refrain throughout the composition. The third
composition expands upon the theme of risk by detailing a plant protocol to train
all workers in radiation safety rather than relying on specialized safety personnel.
The fourth, “Baffles,” explores the challenges residents faced in comprehending
plant operations and impacts—among them, tractor trailers pulling machinery
parts cartoon-like in their immensity, time frames for environmental impact that
stretched into tens of thousands of years, and massive income gaps between plant
positions and traditional occupations in the area, such as farming. Together, the
compositions offer an aural meditation on the challenges of containing risk, and
the divide apparent between the knowledge structures of plant managers and
those of workers and residents.
On the whole, Megaprojects presents an impressive collection of informa-
tion in innovative and often challenging ways. Each of the collections is framed
as a form of collage, from the aural compositions of “Sounding Danger” to the
visual and aural recreation of Iroquois and, perhaps most evidently, the “bulletin
board” appearance of Morton’s personal archive of place. Each, like a collage,
challenges the viewer to explore material in non-linear ways: overlaid voices and
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looping sound clips in “Sounding Danger” challenge the listener’s expectations of
an oral history interview, while the multiple starting points offered in “Lostscapes”
allow a certain degree of flexibility in approaching the town’s history. The posi-
tioning of material “outside the frame” in Morton’s archive follows the same prin-
ciple of non-linearity, but because of the problems with the functionality of the
site outlined above, it does so less successfully.
Unfortunately, problems of consistency and functionality detract from
the pleasure of exploring these compelling collections. The site’s introductory
page, for example, might have been more successful had it adopted the same for-
matting to present each of the projects (instead, the first two collections are pre-
sented through a page link while the third collection outlines all of its contents on
the main page). An introduction to the site and its creators would also have been
useful here. Consistency of browser navigation tools is another problem: in some
collections, the browser’s back arrow moves you back a slide; in others, it takes you
out of the collection entirely and back to the main page. As a reviewer I was com-
pelled to practice using the unfamiliar navigational tools provided on the site;
other viewers will not be so patient. Addressing these technical points would go
a long way towards retaining site visitors and improving the accessibility of collec-
tions that contribute greatly to our understanding of environmental change, per-
ceptions of risk, and embodied memories of place in twentieth-century Canada.
Jennifer Bonnell
University of Toronto
Alvin Finkel, Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History (Waterloo:
Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2006).
I like to teach against the textbook. So I will often assign for background reading
something bland and vaguely right-wing. A textbook like that gives students some-
thing to sharpen their intellectual teeth on. And if what is missing in the text is a
class or race or gender analysis, then students adopt these perspectives as they dis-
cover the deficiencies in the textbook. The risk in assigning Finkel’s Social Policy
and Practice in Canada will be that what students will ‘discover’ is the absence of a
coherent account of right-wing or centrist economics or a discussion of modern
psychologically-oriented social work theory. Thus, perversely, in telling a clear and
often compelling story of the gender, class, and race dynamics of Canada’s wel-
fare state, Finkel may incite students to champion the perspectives and policy ori-
entations he critiques and dispatches. The very features that make this book so
attractive—such as its moral vision, its attention to popular agency, its emphasis
on material interest as fundamental to explanation, and the breadth of its concep-
tion of welfare—open it to critique and may give right-wing critics persuasive
points of purchase that need not be offered to them.
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Joy Parr and Jon van der Veen, "Megaprojects," http://megaprojects.fims.uwo.ca/

Tillotson, Shirley

Alvin Finkel, "Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History" (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006)

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