Complete Mystery Research Articles

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country.

Dobbs in Historical Context: The View from Indian Country Brianna Theobald (bio) Even as the field of reproductive history dedicates greater attention to racial subjectivities and other forms of difference, attention to Native peoples and Indian Country remains limited; this relative absence persists despite Indigenous feminists’ frequent engagement with the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. The cause of such marginalization is not a complete mystery. The marginalization of Native reproductive histories reflects continuing patterns of Indigenous erasure in the context of U.S. settler colonialism and derives from the specificity of tribal nationhood, sovereignty, and Native nations’ trust relationship with the U.S. government, all of which defy tidy integration into the field’s existing narratives.1 It is also a product of the methodological challenges that these realities pose for nonspecialists. I wrote Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century in part to intervene in these trends. Published in 2019, Reproduction on the Reservation is the first book-length history of reproduction that centers Native American women.2 It contends that in a nation like the United States, colonialism is a vital frame for understanding histories of reproduction. This is the vantage point from which I have been assessing the consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and from which I approach this forum. A Native-centered historical analysis underscores the limitations of a narrow scholarly or political focus on the now overturned Roe v. Wade and the question of abortion’s legality, a point long emphasized by Indigenous women, women of color, and working-class [End Page 39] women. As Indigenous Women Rising founder Rae Lorenzo (Mescalero Apache, Laguna Pueblo, and Xicana) recently argued, “Roe v. Wade has never been a reality for Native people.”3 Nor, one might add, has Roe ever been enough to meet Native people’s needs, as they have faced countless other obstacles in the pursuit of abortion access, reproductive health, and bodily autonomy. And yet, as Native attorneys and reproductive activists powerfully argued in an amicus brief submitted for the defendants in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe portends particularly harmful consequences for Native peoples.4 While in tension, these realities—that Roe was illusory in the lives of many Native people and that its repeal carries particular burdens and dangers—reflect the duality of federal control and neglect that the sociologist Barbara Gurr has identified in the provision of “imperialist medicine.”5 They speak to the need for robust reproductive justice agendas that attend to settler colonialism in the past and present and imagine vibrant Indigenous futures.6 Native reproductive agendas have long been informed by the exigencies of Native women’s struggle to have children and Native families’ struggle to raise them in safe, healthy, and culturally centered environments without undue external intervention.7 For centuries, Native peoples have endured the efforts of policy makers, Bureau of Indian Affairs employees, and missionaries to assimilate them into U.S. society, a thankfully unsuccessful yet nonetheless destructive attempt to eliminate Native cultures and dissolve tribal nations. The education of Native children was a cornerstone of federal assimilation efforts. Well into the twentieth century, authorities removed Native children from their homes and communities to carry out this education, an intentional effort to destabilize children’s ties to their families and homelands. Authorities justified these actions [End Page 40] in part on allegations of Native maternal apathy or incapacity.8 Such stereotypes existed alongside and buttressed self-serving tropes regarding Indigenous promiscuity and domestic deficiency, even as colonization rendered Native women vulnerable to sexual violence.9 Colonial surveil-lance of and intervention in Indigenous home and family life rested on racist assumptions about the need for “moral uplift” of individuals and communities. Health and healing, too, were sites of assimilationist intervention in Indian Country. The reservation system that federal officials embraced following the Civil War produced a cascade of public health disasters. Native nations faced land dispossession, a forced sedentary lifestyle, malnutrition due to government neglect, and economic underdevelopment. These conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, and infant mortality and maternal morbidity rates reached alarming heights in many locations. The federal government further hindered communities...

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman Constance Adler (bio) There is a scar in the center of my chest. A whitish and shiny round patch, the size of a silver dollar, the scar does not match the surrounding skin. It does not blend with its environment; it cannot not hide. Located just above what we might generously refer to as my "cleavage," this scar marks the place where a hard pad pressed into my skin for the months that I wore a back brace, known as the Milwaukee brace, when I was fourteen years old. Here is a picture of the brace: Imagine a contraption that clasped my head in a metal loop, secured tight against my chin and the back of my skull. Metal posts connected the head restraint to a hard, plastic girdle that encased my pelvis and was locked shut at the back with straps, so tight that it left deep-red indentations in the soft flesh of my backside. Once in place, the whole thing resembled a medieval instrument of torture. I came to think of it as a cage that I carried around with me all the time. It was hideous, and it made me hideous. While I was in the brace, it was impossible for me to move from hips to head. The cage held me in a rock-rigid grasp. I could not sleep curled up in a protective knot, as was my habit, but had to lie on my back like a corpse on a slab. I could not bend or turn side to side or look up or down. I could walk, but it was difficult to eat or talk because my chin kept hitting the metal loop around my head when I opened my mouth. I could not tip [End Page 111] my head to look down to the food on the plate in front of me and had to guess at what I might be forking into my mouth. I could go to school, and spend time with my friends, but I was always caged. I had to wear extra-large clothes to fit over the brace, and its hard unsightly lumps protruded through my clothes instead of the normal soft form of my girl's body. I could not see my own feet or reach down to tie my own shoelaces. If my shoe came untied at school, I had to ask a friend to tie it for me. Some kids asked if I'd been mangled in a car accident. The clinical purpose of the Milwaukee brace was to maintain my girl's body in this unyielding position for a year until my back and shoulders grew accustomed to a center plumb line. Then I'd be released, ideally as a more perfect girl. One day I'll have to find out why Milwaukee gets credit for this instrument of torture. What I can tell you now is that my parents put me into this brace for reasons that were a complete mystery to me. They had threatened me with a back brace if I didn't stand up straight, a threat that I did not take seriously. At the dinner table, my father enforced the posture requirement by hitting the back of my head. Slouching made me ugly, apparently, or less than perfect, which for a girl was a moral stain. But I wasn't paying much attention to threats or perfection. I was a dreamy, distracted child with other things on my mind, far more interesting than my posture. This private realm of my imagination also offered an escape from beatings, so I went there often. When I failed to be mindful of my posture, my parents followed through on the threat. My mother and father presented this back brace to me as a punishment for my willful disobedience. This sounds crazy, I know. Why would anyone do that to their kid just to win a power game? But that was thrust of their argument at the time. My mother was in charge of bringing me to the DuPont Orthopedic Clinic in Delaware. During the course of fitting me for the brace, one of the doctors took photographs of...

Initial energy of a spatially flat universe: A hint of its possible origin

AbstractThe evidence for a Big Bang origin of the universe is truly compelling, though its cause remains a complete mystery. As the cosmic spacetime is revealed to us with ever‐improving detail, however, we are beginning to refine the range of its possible initial conditions—at least within the framework of current physical theories. The universe, it seems, is spatially flat, and here we discuss in clear, straightforward terms why this trait implies a cosmos with zero kinetic plus gravitational energy, though apparently not zero total energy. Such an outcome has far reaching consequences because of the possibility that the universe may have begun its existence as a quantum fluctuation. Was this from “nothing,” or perhaps a preexisting vacuum? A nonzero total energy would seemingly preclude the former scenario, but not necessarily the latter, though this would then raise the question of how a fluctuation with nonzero energy could have lived long enough, or classicalized, for us to see it 13.5 billion years later. The high‐precision measurement of the universe's spatial curvature may thus constitute the first tangible piece of evidence impacting a possible quantum beginning.

WITHDRAWN: Research on Encrypting Accounting Data Using Des Algorithm under the Background of Microprocessor System

E-banking data through Internet banking and e-banking is known for its various authorities to get to the source. The essence of the banking sector is the management of current accounts. Data discovery is a significant change in the atmosphere of working in the banking sector purchased. The bank's actualized innovation strategy is data security on Automated Teller Machines (ATMs)-ATMs, online banking, telephone banking, mobile banking, etc. Security is an important concern of all online banking systems. The last ten years have seen a tumultuous development of data discovery, which has led to significant encryption advances to ensure reliability and data classification worldwide. The most influential secure information or business is the currency industry on the Internet and online business in need of security during any transaction. Cryptography is the center of the mystery. A common-sense method of encoding data complete mystery. DES (Data Encryption Standard) - symmetric key encryption Triple-DES and its variants have emerged in economic and other structures and are considered an important component in ensuring that personal information about the security office in the past three decades part of the area. And the investigation of speculation in the implementation of DES in the future to ensure that information is properly are described. Symmetric key encryption options and other transactions are also considered legitimate.

The Functional Characterization of TcMyoF Implicates a Family of Cytostome-Cytopharynx Targeted Myosins as Integral to the Endocytic Machinery of Trypanosoma cruzi.

Of the pathogenic trypanosomatids, Trypanosoma cruzi alone retains an ancient feeding apparatus known as the cytostome-cytopharynx complex (SPC) that it uses as its primary mode of endocytosis in a manner akin to its free-living kinetoplastid relatives who capture and eat bacterial prey via this endocytic organelle. In a recent report, we began the process of dissecting how this organelle functions by identifying the first SPC-specific proteins in T. cruzi Here, we continued these studies and report on the identification of the first enzymatic component of the SPC, a previously identified orphan myosin motor (MyoF) specifically targeted to the SPC. We overexpressed MyoF as a dominant-negative mutant, resulting in parasites that, although viable, were completely deficient in measurable endocytosis in vitro To our surprise, however, a full deletion of MyoF demonstrated only a decrease in the overall rate of endocytosis, potentially indicative of redundant myosin motors at work. Thereupon, we identified three additional orphan myosin motors, two of which (MyoB and MyoE) were targeted to the preoral ridge region adjacent to the cytostome entrance and another (MyoC) which was targeted to the cytopharynx tubular structure similar to that of MyoF. Additionally, we show that the C-terminal tails of each myosin are sufficient for targeting a fluorescent reporter to SPC subregions. This work highlights a potential mechanism used by the SPC to drive the inward flow of material for digestion and unveils a new level of overlapping complexity in this system with four distinct myosin isoforms targeted to this feeding structure.IMPORTANCE The parasite Trypanosoma cruzi is the etiological agent of Chagas disease and chronically infects upwards of 7 million people in the Americas. Current diagnostics and treatments remain grossly inadequate due, in part, to our general lack of understanding of this parasite's basic biology. One aspect that has resisted detailed scrutiny is the mechanism employed by this parasite to extract nutrient resources from the radically different environments that it encounters as it transitions between its invertebrate and mammalian hosts. These parasites engulf food via a tubular invagination of its membrane, a strategy used by many protozoan species, but how this structure is formed or functions mechanistically remains a complete mystery. The significance of our research is in the identification of the mechanistic underpinnings of this feeding organelle that may bring to light new potential therapeutic targets to impede parasite feeding and thus halt the spread of this deadly human pathogen.

Bauduin, Tessel M., Ferentinou, Victoria y Zamani, Daniel (eds.): Surrealism, Occultism and Politics. In Search of the Marvellous

Over the past few years, several aspects have improved and enhanced our knowledge of the occult foundations of Surrealism. These gateways between the art movement and Esotericism should not be a complete mystery, since readers are sure to have already read well-founded analyses in papers and books...

Methodological framework for the investigation on the rapidly growing air travel market – An application of multivariate statistical analysis

The paper develops an integrated multivariate statistical model which can be used as a methodological framework for investigation the factors affecting the airline choice in rapidly growing air travel markets such as those in the Central (CE) and South-East Europe (SEE) countries. The methodological framework consisting of three multivariate statistical techniques (Principal Component Analysis, Canonical Correlation Analysis and Discriminant Analysis) are applied to data (766 passengers) collected at Belgrade Airport on the routes where there is competition between a full-service and a low-cost carrier to investigate the determinants affecting airline choice. The results reveal that passenger perceptions are significantly different across airline type and usage frequencies. Although a number of managerial implications stem from the applications of the methods, the results reveal the major finding that western concept of value added and purchasing decision making concept tend to be a ”complete mystery” for CE and SEE passengers due to its historical legacy.

Identifying the RNA Kinetic Traps in Ribosome Assembly

The ribosome is the cellular machine responsible for protein production in every living cell. While the final structure of the mature ribosome is known from x-ray crystallography studies, the assembly process remains largely unknown. To fulfill the cells’ demand for proteins, ribosome assembly in vivo occurs fast and efficiently. Consequently, intermediates of the assembly process are short lived and do not accumulate in large amounts for investigation. To increase the accumulation of in vivo intermediates of large subunit ribosome assembly in Escherichia coli, we take advantage of the helicase inactive DbpA construct R331A. When R331A DbpA is expressed in cells, three large subunit particles, with sedimentation coefficients of 27S, 35S, and 45S, accumulate. The particles rearrange to form the native 50S large subunit via parallel pathways. We interrogated the RNA structure of the 45S particle using dimethyl sulfate and SHAPE chemical probing reagents combined with Next Generation Sequencing. The structural probing experiments revealed perturbed secondary structures of the P-loop and the helices of the peptidyltransferase center. Additionally, it revealed an incorrect orientation of helix 38, the finger of the A-site, and several critical, broken tertiary RNA contacts between distant regions of the 23S rRNA. The data suggests the peptidyltransferase center's maturation is one of the final events during assembly. This severe misfolding explains the slow rearrangement of the 45S particle to the native 50S subunit. Next, we will characterize the RNA structure of the 27S and 35S particles. The structural probing of the 27S and 35S particles will provide insights into the early steps of ribosome assembly, which remain a complete mystery.

Symposium on The Price

Symposium on <i>The Price</i>

New insights into the function of a versatile class of membrane molecular motors from studies of Myxococcus xanthus surface (gliding) motility.

Cell motility is a central function of living cells, as it empowers colonization of new environmental niches, cooperation, and development of multicellular organisms. This process is achieved by complex yet precise energy-consuming machineries in both eukaryotes and bacteria. Bacteria move on surfaces using extracellular appendages such as flagella and pili but also by a less-understood process called gliding motility. During this process, rod-shaped bacteria move smoothly along their long axis without any visible morphological changes besides occasional bending. For this reason, the molecular mechanism of gliding motility and its origin have long remained a complete mystery. An important breakthrough in the understanding of gliding motility came from single cell and genetic studies in the delta-proteobacterium Myxococcus xanthus. These early studies revealed, for the first time, the existence of bacterial Focal Adhesion complexes (FA). FAs are formed at the bacterial pole and rapidly move towards the opposite cell pole. Their attachment to the underlying surface is linked to cell propulsion, in a process similar to the rearward translocation of actomyosin complexes in Apicomplexans. The protein machinery that forms at FAs was shown to contain up to seventeen proteins predicted to localize in all layers of the bacterial cell envelope, the cytosolic face, the inner membrane (IM), the periplasmic space and the outer membrane (OM). Among these proteins, a proton-gated channel at the inner membrane was identified as the molecular motor. Thus, thrust generation requires the transduction of traction forces generated at the inner membrane through the cell envelope beyond the rigid barrier of the bacterial peptidoglycan.

Advent and Nature of Dark Matter - A Brief Summary

Thanks to the recent developments in observational technology, the study of cosmology today is often called precision cosmology. Nevertheless, present cosmology still involves a big mystery. That is, among the Universe's energy budget, cosmologists have known for some time that dark matter occupies 23% of the Universe, dark energy occupies 73%, and the baryon occupies the remaining 4%. That is, 76% of the Universe still remains a complete mystery. In the present work, therefore, we would like to present our current understanding of dark matter, as well as the puzzle associated with its existence. That the nature of dark matter in the present Universe still remains a complete mystery or puzzle is fair to say. In the present work, however, we challenge a brief, albeit reliable, summary of up-to-date observational evidence for the existence of dark matter and introduce the theories underlying it.

New Light on Devabodha, the Earliest Extant Commentator on Mahābhārata

Abstract The name of Devabodha is well-known to specialists of Mahābhārata textual traditions: author of the Jñānadīpikā or “Lamp of Knowledge”, the earliest extant commentary on the Great Epic, he has been duly referred to by the critical editors of this text along with his successors such as Vimalabodha, Arjunamiśra and Nīlakaṇṭha. Yet Devabodha remains an almost complete mystery regarding the period or the place he lived in, or even the conditions that urged him to compose a commentary. Since he commented on a version of the Mahābhārata belonging to the Northern recension and was quoted by Vimalabodha between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he has been approximately assigned to eleventh-century Northern India or Kashmir, but till now no positive evidence has been brought forth to validate this opinion. The purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this important author by proving that, contrary to a prejudice rehearsed in every history of Indian literature, he is one and the same person with a medieval poet and dramatist called Devabodha or sometimes Devabodhi. Then follows a critical and synthetic account on what we can know about Devabodha’s life and career from all the available sources.

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing: An Early Dipt

In his Palladis Tamia published in 1598, Francis Meres gave a list of popular plays, already a fairly long one, written by a young playwright aged 34, William Shakespeare. In Meres’s inventory, an intriguing, unknown play called Love’s Labour’s Won is paired with Love’s Labour’s Lost, a mention which has so far remained a complete mystery. This paper aims at reconsidering the hypothesis according to which Much Ado About Nothing might be the comedy designated under the title of Love’s Labour’s Won and at examining the two-part work then formed by these two pieces which, in many respects, seem to match perfectly. Can Much Ado About Nothing be seriously regarded as a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, if so, what about the notion of dramatic seriality in Shakespeare’s time? In other words, what may have been the playwright’s intentions in writing a comic rather than a historical sequel or sequence?

The Golden Specific by S. E. Grove (review)

Reviewed by: The Golden Specific by S. E. Grove April Spisak Grove, S. E. The Golden Specific. Viking, 2015 [528p] (Mapmakers) ISBN 978-0-670-78503-2 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-8 Sophia returns in this second installment of the Mapmakers trilogy (following [End Page 90] The Glass Sentence, BCCB 9/14), still hoping to find her parents and still seeking knowledge about this wonky, rearranged, mysterious new world that exists since the Great Disruption of 1799. It’s been a year since the last adventure, and her uncle is now too involved in politics to keep teaching her cartography or help her find more clues about where her parents went; Sophia’s not one for waiting, though, and she takes matters into her own hands when she thinks she has a lead. Of course, Sophia meets allies along the way, adding fresh characters into the familiar mix from the first volume, and Grove also carefully develops events in the Boston that Sophia leaves behind, setting up multiple open-ended plot threads for the final outing. There isn’t much point in trying to read this as a stand-alone novel, as the first book sets up much of the richness, complexity, and integral elements. However, return readers will find a wealth to explore, as the author manages to create memorable characters, an endlessly intriguing world that, even with the provided maps and her uncle’s careful explanations, still remains an almost complete mystery, and a plot that merits every single page of this lengthy volume. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Biophysical Underpinnings of the Repeat Length Dependence of Polyglutamine Amyloid Formation

There are now 10 expanded CAG repeat diseases in which both disease risk and age of onset are strongly dependent on the repeat length of the polyglutamine (polyQ) sequence in the disease protein. Large, polyQ-rich inclusions in patient brains and in cell and animal models are consistent with the involvement of polyQ aggregation in the disease mechanism. This possibility is reinforced by studies showing strong repeat length dependence to the aggregation process, qualitatively mirroring the repeat length dependence of disease risk. Our understanding of the underlying biophysical principles that mediate the repeat length dependence of aggregation, however, is far from complete. A previous study of simple polyQ peptides showed that N*, the size of the critical nucleus that controls onset of aggregation, decreases from unfavorable tetramer to favorable monomer over the range Q23 to Q26. These data, however, do not explain why, for all peptides exhibiting N* ∼ 1, spontaneous aggregation rates continue to increase with increasing repeat length. Here we describe a novel kinetics analyses that maps out the nonlinear dependence with repeat length of a nucleation efficiency term that is likely related to aspects of nucleus structure. This trend accounts for why nucleus size increases to tetrameric at repeat lengths of Q23 or below. Intriguingly, both aggregation and age of onset trend with repeat length in similar ways, exhibiting large changes per added Gln at low repeat lengths and small changes per added Gln at relatively long repeat lengths. Fibril stability also increases with repeat length in a nonlinear fashion.

The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook

The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook

WHALE LUNGES DISSECTED

Returning briefly to the surface for great lungfuls of air, whales' lifestyles had been a complete mystery until a small group of pioneers from various global institutions – including Malene Simon, Mark Johnson and Peter Madsen – began attaching data-logging tags to these enigmatic creatures. Knowing that Jeremy Goldbogen and colleagues had successful tagged blue, fin and humpback whales to reveal how they lunge through giant shoals of krill, Simon and her colleagues headed off to Greenland where they tagged five humpback whales to discover how the animals capture and consume their prey: krill and agile capelin. Attaching individual tags behind the dorsal fin on three of the whales – to record their stroke patterns – and nearer the head on the remaining whales – to better measure head movements – the team successfully recorded depth, acceleration and magnetic orientation data from 479 dives to find out more about the animals' lunge tactics (p. 3786).Analysing the whales' acceleration patterns, Simon saw that as the whales initiated a lunge, they accelerated upward, beating the tail fins (flukes) twice as fast as normal to reach speeds of 3–4 m s−1, which is not much greater than the whales' top cruise speeds. However, while the animals were still beating their flukes, the team saw their speed drop dramatically, although the whales never came to a complete standstill, continuing to glide at 1–1.5 m s−1 even after they stopped beating their flukes. So, when did the whales throw their mouths open during this sequence?Given that the top speed attained by the whales during the early stages of the lunge were similar to the animals' cruising speeds and the fact that the whales were beating their flukes much harder than usual to maintain the speed, the team conclude, ‘The implication is that the mouth must already be open and the buccal [mouth] pouch inflated enough to create a higher drag when the high stroking rates… occur within lunges'. In addition, the team suggests that the whales continue accelerating after opening their mouths in order to use their peak speed to stretch the elastic ventral groove blubber that inflates as they engulf water. Once the buccal pouch is fully inflated, the whales continue beating their flukes after closing their mouths to accelerate the colossal quantity of water, before ceasing movement of their fins and slowing to a new speed of 1–1.5 m s−1. Finally, the animals filter the water and swallow the entrapped fish over a 46 s period before resuming beating their flukes as they launch the next lunge.Considering that humpback whales and other rorquals were thought to grind to a halt after throwing their jaws wide and that reaccelerating their massive bodies from a stationary start was believed to make lunge feeding extortionately expensive, the team's discovery that the animals continue gliding after closing their mouths suggests that lunge feeding may be cheaper than previously thought. However, the team concedes that despite the potential reduction in energy expenditure, lunge feeding is still highly demanding, although they suggest that the high-speed tactic is essential for the massive hunters to engulf their nimble prey.

Tomo: Friendship through Fiction: An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. ed. by H. Thompson

Thompson, Holly (editor). Tomo: Friendship through Fiction: An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2012. Print.Shortly after the Great East Japan Earthquake (and tsunami) of 11 March 2011, Holly Thompson came up with a unique idea to contribute to the recovery. The resulting anthology of prose, verse, and graphic art stories by authors and artists from around the world who share a connection to Japan will generate some financial help to support young people affected by this disaster. More importantly, it will contribute to a deeper understanding of, and connection to, what is still a surprisingly mysterious culture. Despite Japan’s status as one of the largest and most successful world-economies, despite our familiarity with sushi and karaoke and judo and samurai and multitudinous Japanese brand-names, so much of Japanese culture as it is lived on the ground and in people’s minds is a complete mystery even to experienced Japan-hands and Japanese themselves. This anthology, as a whole and above all else, highlights the mysteriousness. While each of the 36 individual stories might evoke a response like, “Really? So that’s what it’s all about” (“ahh, sō desuka”) or “Ah, now I get it!” (“ahh, naru hodo”), the effect of reading them all is more like, “hmm, there is nothing simple about Japan after all. I need to know more.” There is something for everyone, Japanophiles and those with no familiarity whatsoever. More precisely, there is something for everyone in each story. Japanese culture is wildly diverse and complicated when viewed even just through teenage and young adult eyes, as are most stories in this collection. That, I think, is the true value of this collection. It doesn’t boil Japanese-ness down to trite generalizations. It doesn’t play to the notion of a vast, homogenous culture of uniformity and a lack of individuality. It doesn’t leave the reader with a feeling of having it all summed up. If I have one minor and very personal quibble, it is perhaps too many stories with a haafu (half-Japanese) character reflecting on how tough life is when you’re not pure Japanese. Having said that, there is not one single story I could have rejected or would suggest skipping over – they are each individually poignant and insightful. I also recommend following up on the Tomo anthology website with its blog featuring contributor interviews, information about sales proceeds, and soon-to-be-added supplementary educational materials. http://tomoanthology.blogspot.ca. I should mention a few personal connections. I lived in the Tohoku region and have many friends there. Also, an excerpt from my translation of a Japanese poem appears in the anthology and an interview appears on the blog site. Be assured I would not recommend Tomo if I had any hesitations whatsoever. In fact, I was wary when first contacted as I’d just heard of a shady fund-raising scheme capitalizing on the tragedy; contact with Holly Thompson quickly allayed my concerns. My only benefits in reviewing and recommending this book are the satisfaction of increasing awareness of Japan’s fascination, making connections with interesting people, and offering a small support to the people of Tohoku. Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: David SulzDavid is a Public Services Librarian at University of Alberta and liaison librarian to Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. He has university studies in Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics; he formerly taught in schools and museums. His interests include physical activity, music, home improvements, and above all, things Japanese.

Profile of Janet Rossant

Profile of Janet Rossant