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As a one line review, If one wants to read a book on India , among so many in the market, this one can be given a miss.
But broadly, it is somewhat a different take on new India, and yet again by an "outsider". This book is larg...
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Juha
is currently reading:
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Raja
by
Riikka Pulkkinen
recommended to Juha by:
Suvi
recommended for:
people who read Finnish or Dutch. :)
read in February, 2012
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The Finnish word ‘raja’ can be translated either as ‘border’ or ‘boundary’ or ‘limit.’ This novel, Riikka Pulkkinen’s first book, was published in 2006 when she was just 26 years old. It received considerable publicity and prizes in Finland. It was p...moreThe Finnish word ‘raja’ can be translated either as ‘border’ or ‘boundary’ or ‘limit.’ This novel, Riikka Pulkkinen’s first book, was published in 2006 when she was just 26 years old. It received considerable publicity and prizes in Finland. It was passed on to me by a friend last summer when I visited the ‘old country’ – if I only read one book in Finnish, this should be it, she suggested – but it took me months to get to it. I’m glad I eventually did.
The novel explores the ‘raja’ in many senses – between what is and is not appropriate, between love and hate, between what is legal and what is morally right, between life and death – through the lives of people and families whose lives intersect. It is told through the perspectives of four of the protagonists. Anja is a 53-year old university professor whose beloved architect husband of 30 years becomes victim of a rapidly advancing Alzheimer’s at a far too early age. As his mind deteriorates, the husband makes a hard request to his wife who loves him deeply: kill me when I don’t anymore know. This demand weighs heavily on Anja who considers ending her own life instead. In the process she falls into the arms – and bed – of a much younger man, a colleague from the university, whom she meets at the hospital where her husband and his mother are chronic patients. Mari is a talented and sensitive high school student who cuts herself to feel real. The 16-year-old ends up having a passionate sexual affair with her literature teacher, 29 year old Julian (who is also writing his doctoral thesis under Anja’s supervision). Julian who is married and has two small daughters tries to end the affair but is too infatuated with the girl to be able to break away. Is this indeed love? The fourth protagonist in the novel is Anni, Julian’s 6-year old daughter, who observes her parents and sees, without understanding what is happening, her father’s relationship with the “girl with the beautiful eyes.” Anni is not sure and ponders whether the beautiful girl is an adult or still a child – another ‘raja.’ Anni’s perspective also reveals the cruelty and power games amongst children, even sweet little girls.
Needless to say, with these ingredients tensions arise and the reader lives with an increasing foreboding of impending disaster. Riikka Pulkkinen creates intensive scenes with strong and – mostly – credible emotions. Death is constantly present, even in the dead hedgehog that Anni and her friend find. The numerous sex scenes – between Anja and her husband and her lover, Julian and Mari and his wife – are detailed and graphic, but the depiction is erotic rather than pornographic. The descriptions of changing seasons are beautiful – Helsinki and its suburbs have lots of nature – with walks in the woods, the seagulls in the port, the melting snow and ice in the river, the song of nightingale in the spring. This is a complex, thought provoking and beautifully written novel, which the young author holds together and brings to a controlled and satisfactory ending.(less)
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As Japan is again continuing its whaling in the Antarctic waters against international law and the world's public opinion, this book describing the winter 2005-2006 campaign by Sea Shepherd is very timely. On January 9th under cover of darkness, thre...moreAs Japan is again continuing its whaling in the Antarctic waters against international law and the world's public opinion, this book describing the winter 2005-2006 campaign by Sea Shepherd is very timely. On January 9th under cover of darkness, three Australian Sea Shepherd activists managed to board the Japanese harpoon ship Shonan Maru No. 2 when it was just 26 km off the Australian west coast. The Japanese proceeded to arrest the environmentalists and took them to Tokyo, where a court released them without charges. The reason for the prompt release was probably that Japan does not want to draw undue attention to its controversial whaling activities.
Japan's insistence to go ahead with its extensive whaling is somewhat baffling. As Peter Heller demonstrates in his book, the government is forced to heavily subsidize the companies doing the whale hunt. There is very little demand for whale meat in Japan (only a tenth of the population confesses to ever eating it) and it has to be pushed on school lunch menus in some of the coastal areas with a high price to the tax payers. Tons of whale meat are piling up in freezers. Yet, more and more is brought in every year. Why? The officials cite traditional culture, but even that is a suspect argument. While some fishing communities, notably on the island of Shikoku, traditionally did hunt whales, this was limited to their coastal waters. Large scale commercial whaling only started when Japan built up its ocean going fleet after Commodore Perry's 'black ships' forced the opening of Japan to the outside world in 1854. The tradition certainly is not based in the ancient Japanese culture. The most likely explanation to the Japanese incalcitrance is nationalistic defiance against foreigners trying to tell them what to do. Sounds infantile? Well, it is, but it wouldn't be the first time.
Japan is a member of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), set up in 1946 "to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry." IWC is thus not a conservation organization, but works for the long-term sustainability of the industry. So it can hardly be accused of sensationalizing the statistics. Yet, IWC recognizes that many whale species are endangered. On its website (http://iwcoffice.org/), IWC acknowledges that many stocks of the thirteen species of 'great whales' have been depleted through over-exploitation. The authoritative Red List of endangered species compiled by the World Conservation Union (http://www.iucnredlist.org) identifies a number of whales as endangered. These include the Blue Whale, Fin Whale (Japan's self-set quota includes 50 Fin Whales per season), North Atlantic Right Whale and North Pacific Right Whale. In addition, a number of species are identified as threatened or vulnerable. Importantly, there is deficient data for most species to determine their status. Because of this state of affairs and the uncertainty about whale numbers, a moratorium on commercial whaling endorsed by IWC has been in place since 1986 (the UN Conference on Environment and Human Health originally proposed such a moratorium in 1972, but it was voted down by Japan, Russia, Iceland, Norway, South Africa and Panama).
As a response, Japan has circumvented the commercial whaling ban by claiming, quite disingenously, that its whaling program is for research purposes. This lethal research has been criticized by scientists and environmentalists alike. There are now non-lethal research methods that can be used to obtain the same data - and even if there were, the large catch numbers could never be justified by the research argument. In IWC, a coalition led by by the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia has often challenged Japan for its "research" whaling. However, like in the UN, IWC operates on a one nation, one vote basis. Consequently, Japan has been able to purchase the votes of a number of tiny countries by providing them financial support. A number of Caribbean and Pacific Island countries - even the West Africa country of Togo - have voted in line with Japan in IWC following promises of official aid or even just covering travel and expenses of individual government officials. In all fairness, it must be said that there are also other countries that continue to kill whales, including Norway, Iceland, the Danish Faroe Islands and Russia.
When I was on the faculty of the UN University based in Tokyo in the early 1990s, I remember that we were approached by a consultant to the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries who proposed to pay for a study that we would conduct to show that whales were not endangered. During the meeting the gentleman got somewhat carried away and outlined a vision how whales could be domesticated to produce meat and milk for the growing human population. He further accused Western "meat eaters" for an emotional reaction to whaling. When I politely explained that we would gladly consider undertaking such a study, but that we would have to be in control of the study, select the research design and researchers, and that there could be no preagreed conclusions, he got up and promised to get back to us. Needless to say, he never did.
Adventure writer Peter Heller joined Sea Shepherd's ship Farley Mowat on a two-month expedition to the Antarctic in the 2005-2006 season to intercept the Japanese fleet. In 'The Whale Warriors' he provides an interesting and quite balanced account of the challenging trip during which the mostly volunteer crew under the command of Sea Shepherd founder Capt. Paul Watson searches, chases and engages with the Japanese fleet in the Antarctic waters. The book is written in a generally lively manner following the format of Heller's log of the days and weeks at sea, interspersed with information about the history of whaling, the Japanese whaling industry, ecology, the organizations that work against whaling (including Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace), and the international politics surrounding the issues. The format works well overall, but because of the lengthy search for the Japanese whalers and Heller's faithful depiction of the tedium at sea, the book feels a bit long (it could easily have been 50 pages shorter, I think). Even if the author's descriptions of the weather, the sea, the penguins, albatrosses and other sea birds, the icebergs, are beautiful, they also become somewhat repetitive. Finally, it is only on page 215 when the Farley Mowat first finds the location of the Japanese factory boat Nishin Maru and things start speeding up.
In the meantime, we meet the dedicated environmentalists from many countries (USA, Canada, Holland, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, France) that make up the crew. These women and men form an interesting bunch, by no means homogenous in their philosophy, but all committed to saving the large, peaceful and highly intelligent animals. Heller observers exchanges that highlight the tensions between unexpected groups, such as between vegans and vegetarians or between conservationists and animal rights activists. His observations are often quite revealing and at best very funny. When the small helicopter onboard returns from a surveillance flight and performs a delicate landing on the deck of the ship rolling in heavy waves, Heller sees how the deck crew took only seconds to secure the landed chopper to the deck. "Pretty good for vegans with advanced degrees," he quips (page 267).
The book also sheds light on the continued rift between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. Paul Watson was one of the founders of Greenpeace and served as its Director from 1972 to 1977 when he left to found Sea Shepherd. He was growing frustrated with what he considered ineffective methods of Greenpeace, believing in a need for more direct action. The quartermaster of Farley Mowat on this trip is Emily Hunter, daughter of the Greenpeace co-founder and first President, the late Robert Hunter. Greenpeace manages to locate the Nishin Maru much before Sea Shepherd, but refuses to release the coordinates. The schism appears to be mostly with the top of the organizations and individual crew members of the Greenpeace ship Esperanza leak updates to Watson. As Farley Mowat finally sails to engage with Nishin Maru, Esperanza crew cheer it on. The trouble with Greenpeace non-confrontational tactics is that they only look on and document as the Japanese proceed to slaughter the whales in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable.
Whether the Sea Shepherd's more direct approach is any more effective is the question. As the Nishin Maru and its harpoon boats see Farley Mowat approaching they escape, only to move to another location to continue their hunt. Both organizations clearly have done much to bring the vicious and criminal activity to the forefront and thus influencing world opinion.
Yet, politics is what it is. Most of Japan's whaling takes place in the areas designated as off limits under the international moratorium and much in the territorial waters of other countries. Heller points out that if the whaling fleets were from less powerful developing countries, countries like Australia would not hesitate to intercept and arrest them in their territorial waters. Indeed, even earlier this week the Australian prime minister Julia Gillard criticized the Sea Shepherd activists for boarding the Shonan Maru, which was engaged in illegal activities in Australian territorial waters.(less)
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You will never eat fish again, but I already knew this. SAVE THE OCEANS
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The book tells two stories in parallel: that of the legendary soldier-cum-explorer Wilfred Thesiger's expedition in Abyssinia in the 1930s and the author's encounters and friendship with the man some half a century later towards the end of his life. ...moreThe book tells two stories in parallel: that of the legendary soldier-cum-explorer Wilfred Thesiger's expedition in Abyssinia in the 1930s and the author's encounters and friendship with the man some half a century later towards the end of his life. In the latter context it tells about the adventurous trip in northern Kenya that the author, with his brother and friend, undertakes at the instigation of Thesiger. Plus there are numerous ramblings as Warwick Cairns frequently digresses as he narrates the stories. Some of the digressions are amusing, albeit barely related to the topic of the book. In the early parts of the book this disturbed me somewhat. But then a theme started to emerge and Cairns' ponderings on human nature, civilization and life in general began to make sense. In the end, this turned out to be a more thoughtful book than I first assumed. And the portrait of Wilfred Thesiger it paints is vivid and warm.(less)
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The Lunatic Express
by
Carl Hoffman (Goodreads Author)
recommended for:
people interested in the world.
read in December, 2011
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This is a travel book focusing on modes of transportation that most travellers would prefer to avoid. Carl Hoffman’s stated desire was to circumnavigate the globe on the cheapest and most dangerous forms of mass transit. For most of humankind, travel...moreThis is a travel book focusing on modes of transportation that most travellers would prefer to avoid. Carl Hoffman’s stated desire was to circumnavigate the globe on the cheapest and most dangerous forms of mass transit. For most of humankind, travel was no pleasurable touring, but a necessary movement from point A to point B often involving terribly long and uncomfortable, not to mention perilous, trips on decrepit buses that would plunge into gorges from the winding mountainside roads that they travelled, on overcrowded, capsizing ferries, unmaintained ancient aircraft, and trains that were so stuffed with people that they just fell off on the tracks. Hoffman’s travels over several months involved all of the above, as he left his home in Washington, DC, and toured around the Andes and Amazon basin in South America, the roads and railroads of East and West Africa, the notorious deathtraps that ferries in Indonesia and Bangladesh were. He had weeks of relative leisure in India before flying to Afghanistan on the national airline Ariana (a.k.a. Scariana). Then returning home by train and gas truck through China, Mongolia and Siberia. Through all these segments of travel he reports on the exotic places he encounters, the hairy situations arising and, most importantly, the various people he meets.
Carl Hoffman is plagued by wanderlust. He is middle-aged, married with three kids, a journalist, but for a long time he has felt compelled to leave the comforts of home behind and travel. This is the other theme of the book: man’s struggle between loneliness and belonging. The book gets quite personal, as Hoffman misses his family while at the same time feels alive only travelling in risky places amongst strange people. At times his descriptions of his own addiction to danger seem slightly too heroic, but at least I personally can very well relate to his contradictory feelings. He observes with some envy people in the poor countries that he visits and interacts with, how they all have strong bonds in their communities and families; at the same time, he knows that he could never live that way, with no privacy or time alone. When he finally is returning home, he notes that he was settling in and getting a little bored on the trip. He concludes that it was time to go home: “Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood” (p. 263).
I found the book to be well worth reading, well written, even quite wise. Although the narrative was generally entertaining, I found there was a certain unevenness to the chapters (probably reflecting the interestingness of the segment and the people Hoffman happened to meet). The cover of my edition touted it as a “Wall Street Journal Book of the Year.” I wouldn’t go that far and the accolade baffled me initially, before I realized that for an average WJS reader the book would cover territory that was strange and likely unsightly. The Lunatic Express certainly serves its purpose as an antidote to seeing travel only through the lens of comfortable business travel or relaxing tourism. Carl Hoffman made a superb effort to experience travel the way the majority of the world’s people experience it. In the process he met numerous interesting and hospitable people whom he recalls frequently with warmth, always with understanding.(less)
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Juha
is now following Carl Hoffman's reviews
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Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music
by
Blair Tindall
recommended for:
people interested in music and nonprofits.
read in November, 2011
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Blair Tindall’s lively book offers a rare inside look into the American classical music scene. Her experience in the field is very wide, having played with the New York Philharmonic and every other major and minor orchestra and chamber music ensembl...moreBlair Tindall’s lively book offers a rare inside look into the American classical music scene. Her experience in the field is very wide, having played with the New York Philharmonic and every other major and minor orchestra and chamber music ensemble in the Tri-State area, as well as an oboe soloist. She also played for years in the pit for Broadway hit musicals, such as Miss Saigon and Les Miserables, and in the studio recording music for Hollywood hit movies as well as jingles. Tindall’s tell-all book tells her own story from a childhood in Vienna and North Carolina to working as a musician in New York until her late-30s when she got increasingly despondent about the limited vistas and even more limited career prospects of an orchestra musician.
Tindall describes the tedium of becoming a musician, the endless hours of solitary practice, which for an oboe player are further aggravated by time spent on crafting and perfecting the reeds that are so critical to the player’s sound (having been a roommate to an oboist long time ago, I can attest to how much time and effort that takes and how annoying it can be for someone trying sleep while the oboist tests his reeds). Another challenge for musicians is having to work almost all evenings in an orchestra pit when other people are eating dinner, socializing or, a few, attending the concerts. This severely limits the social contacts the musicians have. An important part in the book is played by Allendale, a large and decaying building on the Upper West Side bordering to Harlem, which has long been a home for classical musicians and where she herself lived for almost two decades. There she observed with growing alarm the fate of many musicians her senior, who approached an age when normal people would retire, but who couldn’t afford to do so and were forced to continue to scramble for gigs to eke out a modest living. Seeing the others, she became concerned about her own future and her own increasing consumption of cheap wine, which started in the afternoon before whatever concert she had to play.
The competition among classical players is fierce for the relatively few regular orchestra jobs. For instance, in 1980, 1,100 musicians applied for a total of 47 full-time orchestral positions in all of the United States (p. 258). Over several years, Tindall competed for these jobs and participated in auditions for orchestras all over the country. She calculates the thousands of dollars she used for flying to attend the auditions. For most of her career, she subbed for the numerous bands in the New York City area, at times zipping from New Jersey to Poughkeepsie several times in a week. In the beginning of her career, she slept with three of the leading oboists in the city, which initially led to her being a favoured substitute. This later backfired, as the relationships faded and her name dropped down on the list the orchestras would call. This by no means was a reflection on her ability as a professional musician.
The subtitle of the book, ‘Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music’, has probably (hopefully) been added by her publishers; nevertheless, these aspects are closely linked. Despite the clean image classical musicians have among general audiences, Tindall demonstrates how drug and alcohol use among them is as widespread as among rock musicians. The classical music community is also quite promiscuous. Tindall describes orgies that entire orchestras on tour participated in. When AIDS first arrived in the 1980s, it became a major scourge amongst the musicians. The New York City Opera alone lost 75 employees to the disease (p. 111).
She herself goes through a large number of lovers, several of them married: oboists, other musicians, conductors. The main relationship she writes about is with Samuel Sanders, the piano soloist and long-term accompanist of Itzhak Perlman, who over many years moves from a lover to a friend. All in all, Tindall and other female musicians have a hard time finding mates as their lives are limited by the jobs they take. She finally finds love and happiness from outside of the musical community, with a scuba diving instructor she meets during a Caribbean holiday, but this relationship is also doomed to failure.
In the process of telling her own story, Tindall includes interesting and enlightening passages about the rise of classical orchestra music in the US, largely as a consequence of immigration of Jewish and other people from Europe before and after World War II. These Europeans had lived with and loved classical music and many played in amateur orchestras they started in the new country. Since the 1960s, there was a huge boom in the States, as cities and philanthropies supported the music, seeing it as a major cultural duty. Tindall describes the role of organizations, such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Ford Foundation, in promoting classical music and draws conclusions of how such external assistance is unsustainable. The number of orchestras expanded manifold and many smaller towns established full-time orchestras as a symbol of their cultural value. “The rate of growth was breathtaking ... Cultural growth sped ahead with little examination of the arts’ genuine or practical value for the society. Why classical music? Why orchestras? Is the expense worthwhile? Few asked for fear of being labelled barbaric”, she writes (p. 57).
At the same time the highly unionized musicians pushed for longer concert seasons, full-time employment with orchestras and increasing benefits. The audience numbers did not keep up with such rapid expansion and virtually all orchestras and concert halls, starting with the Lincoln Centre, operated at a loss and were highly subsidized with public money or by foundations. The number of orchestras making a major deficit increased rapidly and many, especially outside of the major cities, went outright bankrupt in the 1990s.
The dire conclusions of an exhaustive 1992 study evaluating the financial future of the classical music industry were rejected by the American Symphony Orchestra League that had commissioned it. Instead the League published its own document, Americanizing the American Orchestra, which projected optimism about selling “dead white European men’s music” (p. 207). (For an evaluator like myself, albeit in an entirely different field, this sounds too familiar.) Sure enough, the tech boom and resulting stock market rise temporarily saved the classical music industry that went on a huge spending spree as the endowments suddenly grew. Obviously, this couldn’t last.
From the 1980s on, lucrative studio work was getting scarcer for musicians with the rise of synthesizers that could emulate the sounds of entire orchestras through their MIDI samples of real instruments, thus resulting in savings to the producers. Films like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where Tindall played oboe with a real orchestra in the early-1990s, were getting rarer. At this point of her life, her own definition of ‘real music’ had expanded beyond the narrowly classical and she is quite lyrical about the film score composed and conducted by jazz musician Terence Blanchard.
Even on Broadway, live orchestras were relegated further down in the setting. The pits got deeper and some even played in covered pits so that the audiences could not see them at all, their music piped to the hall through amplifiers. The tedium of playing in such a manner, night after night performing the same pieces hundreds of times per year, was dulling and many musicians were drunk or on drugs to keep up with it (this has been confirmed by my own friends who have played on Broadway). Many musicians had completely unrelated reading materials on their music stands, playing their parts on a routine born from having performed the same piece thousands of times over several years. In 2003, the musicians union negotiated an agreement that would prevent productions from further reducing the number of live musicians on Broadway for the next 10 years.
Tindall puts much blame on the music industry and its various players. The musicians themselves and their union are not innocent either, as they negotiated better and better deals, with ever expanding full-time employment and longer seasons that ran up the supply of music far beyond the demand. The managers of orchestras and halls, most of whom were businessmen rather than musicians, developed marketing schemes that focused more on star soloists and conductors, rather than the music. This created a huge rift between the orchestra musicians and the stars, who would make tens of times more money than the regular players. Conductors, such as New York Philharmonic’s Lorin Maazel, would make millions for working just a few weeks. Similarly, the executives running the orchestras received extremely high salaries. Tindall has found that such non-profits—not only orchestras, but also ballets, museums and the like—have increasingly become places where the leadership gets paid excessively high salaries, while many interested citizens can’t afford to pay for the high ticket prices that are set to cover the escalating costs.
As classical music sales, that had always been just a small percentage of overall record sales, plummeted, the record companies started to market the CDs based on sexy young stars who would pose on the covers in revealing clothing. Tindall well understands why the buying audience with limited knowledge of classical music faced with a large selection of recordings of the same pieces would pick one with Sarah Chang or Midori on the cover, rather than one of the many with stodgy white men posing in a tuxedo. ‘Medieval Baebes’ such as the violinists Vanessa Mae and Linda Lampenius (Linda Brava), the latter a real Playboy Playmate, would boost classical music sales (Lampenius is one of the two Finns getting mentioned in the book, the other being Esa-Pekka Salonen, who as Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director, has contributed to the orchestra’s situation through accessible concert formats).
Overall, Tindall asks why is classical music so strange and dull to the general audiences. When a critic in The New Yorker wrote that, “There may be kids out there who lose their virginity during Brahms’s D Minor Piano Concerto, but they don’t want to tell the story and you don’t want to hear it”, she reflects that she herself had passionately lost her virginity as a 16-year-old with Brahms playing on the record: “I couldn’t imagine what created this invisible barrier between listener and performer, a boundary that cheated new audiences of the sensory thrill of classical music” (p. 274).
She also asks why are there so many recordings of the same old pieces and why does every orchestra record the same works over and over again. No rock musician in his right mind would make a CD of exactly the same pieces as his competitor, she observes and concluded that, “I was in a narcissistic industry that was stuck in the nineteenth century” (p. 247).
She grows increasingly frustrated playing other people’s music night after night (at some point of time she observes a violin section’s synchronized bow movements, which remind her of slaves rowing a ship their oars moving in unison) and observing her friends and neighbours in the Allendale grow older with no prospects for betterment. She starts looking for a way out and embarks on an intensive period of study (with math books on her music stand in the Broadway pit), eventually going back to school. Stanford allows her to change her scene entirely and life on the West Coast brings new motivation for her to clean up her act.
Tindall is very critical of music education that is so narrowly focused that students and later musicians learn no skills beyond music. Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music and other famous institutions are more trade schools than universities. Tindall thinks that a student would be better off majoring in music at a liberal arts college, such as Oberlin, where she gets a broader education that will not close doors from other occupations than just music. Passing a group of students outside of Juilliard, she ponders how only a few of these highly talented musicians will make it as soloists or conductors or even get regular orchestra jobs, while most end up scraping together a living out of temporary gigs or find themselves non-professional office jobs for which their narrow musical education will suffice.
Back in New York, Blair Tindall writes about music for the New York Times and about other topics for other papers. She still plays the oboe and subs in orchestras, but with renewed vigour and enthusiasm as she no longer needs to do it to make ends meet. She ends the entertaining and informative book with some hopeful notions. Although classical music has become peripheral to mainstream life and the number of Americans playing an instrument has shrunk to less than a half between 1992 and 2002, classical music is not in decline: “It’s just that they’re bombarded with an absurdly large increase in the number of performances that enable the glut of full-time musicians, arts administrators, and consultants who resulted from the culture boom’s now-stalled momentum to make a living” (p. 306). Perhaps, the situation has again changed since the book was published in 2005. Orchestras and music do continue to play an important resource for the communities. Hopefully, they will be more accessible to more people.(less)
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The Whale Warriors: On Board a Pirate Ship in the Battle to Save the World's Largest Mammals by Peter Heller
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