Page 27 - The Gluckman Occasional Number Eleven

Capsule Reviews
“They’re easier to swallow!”
Unbiased analysis of recent media by the Occasional staff

Books

Majorettes and Minarets: A History of the Sultan’s Harem
Marching Band and the Female Janissaries by Dolly Frigo (Ex
Ignis). The author, an investigative reporter for the Sangampur
Gazette, spent three years within the walls of the Topkapi Palace in
the last decade of the Ottoman Empire. How she managed to be
selected for the harem is outlined in her previous book, “Oriental
Beauty Secrets”. Once inside and relegated to the quarters of the
minor wives, she discovered a regiment of women proficient in the
martial arts among the household troops. Owing to her high school
musical training in the sousaphone, she joined the unit’s marching
band and played with them until the outbreak of World War One.
The gossipy nature of this reportage reflects the time the author
spent with eunuchs. The book would have improved with footnotes.

Omphaloskeptics in the Navel of the World by Linton D. Kahler
(Aum). Part travelogue, part dialogue and finally epilogue, ONW
relates the journey of an unnamed seeker to find the true axis mundi
and take spiritual guidance from the ascetics to be found there. As
the world is filled with places claimed to be its center, the seeker
travels to a dozen of them in as many countries, entering into serious
conversation with the believers he finds there. The reader soon
comes to suspect the author is that traveler; further, that whatever
need for fulfillment impelled him originally on his quest, the answers
he receives turn him slowly from a navel-gazer to a different kind of
“skeptic.” Ultimately he accepts that the sphericity of the planetary
surface obviates the possibility of any point upon it being central.
That is the simple acknowledgement that the earth is not flat. He
might just as easily have concluded that our globe’s rotundity permits
a multiplicity of belly buttons; that pantheistic view could have saved
his pilgrimage and resulted in a much different book. But that is a
minor quibble: if your taste runs to the philosophically exotic, don’t
let this reviewer spoil the fun.