Although an excellent study if all of this is true, it remains to be seen whether it is in fact true. Herdt admits that the name of the Sambia is a fake name that he gave them to protect their identity. There is therefore no way for other researchers to study this tribe and compare notes. How do we know that this tribe exists at all? All of the other studies of homosexual customs among New Guinea tribesman describe sodomy as their exclusive mode of behaviour. The Sambia are the one and only tribe of this region to practice fellatio. Why is this tribe out of sync with all of the other tribes? It makes me wonder.
I lived in Morocco for 18 months in 1966-67. This novel takes place in Morocco in 1971. Symons worked on it for 15 years, and it was published in 1986. Symons has been called the enfant terrible of Canadian literature. I noticed that none of his books has been reviewed on this website, and almost all of them are out of print. This novel is probably his best work, and it shows how he got his reputation. He knows how to write and the novel is lively and entertaining, but it is also offensive. It is not the Morocco that I was familiar with. It is a sex tourist fantasy in which Morocco is supposedly crawling with youths, always black ones, who are sexually available to frustrated… Read more
This is a fine biography, almost the only one, of a Victorian eccentric who was once quite famous. Baronet Anstruther of that ilk, a Scot who has written other books about the Victorians, has waded through a mountain, nay, an Everest of correspondence in search of the truth. This is a balanced biography which touches upon all sides of Browning's life, which normally is a good thing, but one could wish that Anstruther, who is likely to be the only person to wade through the archive, could have enlarged the book by fifty or a hundred pages and devoted much more space to the details of Browning's interest in boys. In the long run, Browning will be remembered only as a pederast, an example… Read more
