"Marshall Sahlins centers these essays on islands--Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand--whose histories have intersected with European history. But he is also concerned with the insular thinking in Western scholarship that creates false dichotomies between past and present, between structure and event, between the individual and society. Sahlins's provocative reflections form a powerful critique of Western history and anthropology"--

Three highly illustrated, hilarious stories about a group of kids and their adventures during the fifteen minutes of Little Lunch. At Little Lunch we squeezed between the portable classroom and the fence, Battie fell off the old climbing tree and Melanie counted EVERYTHING. What else can happen in fifteen minutes?

In this work, the author focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media, including photography and video, defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early 20th century to the present. She goes on to analyze gendered and racial constructions and idioms of American identity by examining the powerful and continuing cultural investment in the legacy of the so-called discovery of the North Pole in 1909, and the ongoing celebration of white explorers, such as Robert Peary, as "heroes". Her analysis of the polar expedition opens up contemporary questions in cultural studies about gender, race, male sexuality and social relations of science. Bloom demonstrates how the North Pole's literal emptiness made polar expedition appear in the dominant media as an intrinsically pure field of knowledge, rather than a form of colonial discourse. She portrays the National Geographic Society as a magazine and institution that tied itself to the national image of the United States in the early 20th century and seized the poles and polar expeditions as a metaphor for modernity and progress. By focusing on the development and legitimation of an American national discourse and identity that excludes women and people of colour, "Gender on Ice" offers a significant contribution to current debates on multiculturalism.

This study is largely based on 93 interviews conducted in the 1990s with current or ex-New Zealand Jews of widely differing backgrounds. Ch. 5 (pp. 85-99) discusses antisemitism (as do pp. 15-18, 28-30 in ch. 1). Jews in New Zealand (who in 1991 numbered 3,048 or 0.1% of the total population) generally have kept a low profile. Most of the interviewees view present-day antisemitism as slight, despite some anti-Jewish Christian attitudes. Four types of antisemitism are noted: ignorant, petty (e.g. jokes), political (including anti-Zionist and anti-Israel), and malicious (including vandalism and Holocaust denial). Local Jews have been cautious in responding to antisemitism, though there has been some effort to speak out. While the identities of survivors and their descendants have been strongly affected by the Holocaust, those of other new Zealand Jews have not. Commemoration of the Holocaust has been much more modest than in Australia or in Israel. Some Jews continue to feel that "'it' could happen again, even in New Zealand".