nov08c.indd George M. Eberhart N e w P u b l i c a t i o n s Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remark­ able Adventures of the King and I Governess, by Susan Morgan (274 pages, July 2008), re- constructs the life of Anna Leonow- ens (1831–1915), the British woman who worked as an English teach- er for the wives and children of King Mongkut of Siam in the 1860s. She became fa- mous from the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein mu- sical The King and I, which was based on Margaret Landon’s novel Anna and the King of Siam. Morgan’s biographical task was dif- ficult, as Anna masked her origins and em- bellished her role in infl uencing Mongkut to adopt Western customs. The picture of the real Anna that emerges from the myth is of a well-traveled woman who was the sole foreigner to have spent time inside the royal harem of Siam. $24.95. University of California. 978-0-520-25226-4. Another Thai travelogue is A Traveler in Siam in the Year 1655: Extracts from the Journal of Gijsbert Heeck, translated and in- troduced by Barend Jan Terweil (124 pages, May 2008), which records the observations of a medical practitioner with the Dutch East India Company who visited Ayutthaya, Siam, for two months in 1655 while the ship he was working on, De Walvisch, loaded goods destined for Batavia. Heeck describes the ship’s confrontation with a Portuguese vessel, the occupations and ethnicity of vil- lagers in the region, geographic details of the Chao Phraya river, and the impact that the Dutch had on the indigenous popula- George M. Eberhart is senior editor of American Libraries, e-mail: geberhart@ala.org tion. $35.00. Silkworm Books; distributed by the University of Washington. 978-974-9511- 35-0. Chronologies of Modern Terrorism, by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin (405 pages, January 2008), offers eight timelines of world terrorist acts and counterterrorism through 2006. Often undervalued because of a supposed lack of depth, chronologies such as this are actually quite valuable in charting historical trends and placing events in context, whereas analytical history can sometimes submerge time sequences in a wealth of detail. The Rubins arrange social revolutionary and nationalist terrorist events by region; two chapters cover radical Is- lamist terrorism and post–9/11 global jihad. Discussions of major trends and a glossary are included. $99.95. M. E. Sharpe. 978-0- 7656-2047-7. Dr. Henry R. Porter: The Surgeon Who Sur­ vived Little Bighorn, by L. G. Walker Jr. (221 pages, April 2008), tells the life story of the 7th Cavalry’s assistant surgeon who narrowly escaped death at the 1876 battle after Chief Surgeon George E. Lord insisted on person- ally accompanying Custer’s detachment. Porter’s story is also important for the part he played in frontier medical history and the development of Bismarck, North Dakota. He was also an inveterate world wanderer who wrote detailed travelogues for the papers back home right up to his death in India in 1903. $35.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-3171-1. Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror, by Eileen Reeves (231 pages, January 2008), examines the gap between the tele- scope’s invention in the Dutch Republic in 1608 and the Tuscan astronomer’s adoption and improvement of it the following year. Reeves reviews early modern claims that telescopes had been invented both in an- tiquity as an observational tool for the Great C&RL News November 2008 644 mailto:geberhart@ala.org Lighthouse of Alexandria, as well as in the 16th century as a “glass for far seeing.” She suggests, based on passages in his Starry Messenger, that Galileo had already invented a far inferior lens-and-mirror astronomical instrument when he heard about the Dutch invention. $21.95. Harvard University. 978- 0-674-02667-4. The Library as Place in California, by Stacy Shotsberger Rosso (254 pages, July 2008), is the author’s assessment of the physical sur- roundings of 32 academic and public librar- ies in California. Her analysis, though per- sonal, could serve as a useful comparison for libraries wishing to upgrade their ambi- ence. For example, Rosso provides a his- tory of the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University in Orange, along with the town setting, a history of the university, and a de- scription of the exterior grounds, the rotun- da, predictable spaces, art, its performance portico, branch libraries, and the Holocaust Memorial Library on the fourth fl oor. $45.00. McFarland. 978-0-7864-3194-6. Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas, by Henry John Drewal (227 pages, August 2008), explores the ar- tistic depictions of the West and Central African and Caribbean female water spirit, Mami Wata, who most commonly manifests as a mermaid or snake charmer. Produced to accompany an exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, this volume explores Mami Wata’s multiple origins as a primordial river spirit, the mermaid figurehead on European sail- ing ships, the Yoruba sea goddess Olokun, various Hindu deities, and a chromolitho- graph poster made for German circus master Carl Hagenbeck by the Adolph Friedländer Company in the 1880s showing a southeast Asian snake charmer named Maladamatjaute whose abundant hair is parted down the middle. This last image was widely copied throughout the 20th century from Senegal to Cameroon and the West Indies and is still a common depiction today. Generally acknowledged as an African deity with over- seas origins, Mami Wata is n o n e t h e l e s s considered a powerful image in the animist, Afro-Catholic, and Vodoun p a n t h e o n s . $25.00. Fowler Museum; dis- tributed by University of Washington. 978- 0-9748729-9-5. Postcards from the Russian Revolution, with an introduction by Andrew Roberts (95 pages, June 2008), presents 45 remarkable postcard images from the 1905 and 1917 up- heavals that u l t i m a t e l y brought the Bolsheviks to power. Each has an explanation of the photo or art- work shown on the card, as well as translations of the text and any message written by the sender. Some of the pictures are striking: demonstrators in St. Petersburg shown on a card sent just days after the Bloody Sun- day massacre of 1905; the haunted faces of the children of Czar Nicholas a few years before their murder in Ekaterinburg; pa- triotic poster images seeking to mobilize the homefront to support the war against Germany; White Russian Cossacks riding through Talinn in 1917; the American Ex- peditionary Force landing in Vladivostok in August 1918 in order to rescue the Czecho- slovak Legion held up by Bolshevik forces along the Trans-Siberian Railway; and a photo of H. G. Wells chatting with Lenin in his study in the Kremlin in October 1920. $20.00. Bodleian Library. 978-1-85124-386- 0. A companion volume, Postcards from the Trenches (111 pages), features 53 ex- traordinary cards from World War I. $20.00. 978-1-85124-391-4. November 2008 645 C&RL News