“Guerilla Frogger”
by Moira Farr
(pp. 25-27)

To learn more about Brian Kubicki’s work with frogs in Costa Rica, visit his website, where you can also buy his reference books, Leaf-frogs of Costa Rica, and Glass Frogs of Costa Rica.

Like Kubicki, Marty Crump is passionate about amphibians, and for thirty-one years the American biology professor trekked through the rainforests of Central and South America in search of exotic species. Crump’s memoir, In Search of the Golden Frog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) tells of her adventures in the tropical wild – from dining on guinea pig, to drinking banana wine, to stumbling on “over one hundred Day-Glo golden orange toads poised like statues, dazzling jewels against the dark brown mud.”

For those amateur herpetoculturists eager to reproduce Kubicki’s research in their own home, Care and Breeding of Popular Tree Frogs: A Practical Manual for the Serious Hobbyist, by Philippe De Vosjoli, Robert Mailloux, and Drew Ready (Mission Viejo, CA.: Advanced Vivarium Systems, Inc., 1996) will help you set up your vivarium, choose the right food, and encourage your tree frogs to breed.


“The Human Library”
by Chris Koentges
(pp. 27-28)

The Council of Europe sponsors Living Libraries throughout Europe as part of its human- rights education program for youth. They’ve produced Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover! The Living Library Organizer’s Guide (Ronni Abergel, Antje Rothemund, Gavan Titley, and Péter Wootsch; 2005), which can be accessed through the Council’s publishing arm .

This clip from Theo van Gogh and Somali-born former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s short film Submission depicts a Muslim woman speaking to Allah after being forced into an arranged marriage and abused by her husband. Shots of women’s bodies inscribed with verses from the Quran punctuate her narrative. After the release of the film, twenty-six-year-old Dutch Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri shot Van Gogh, slit the filmmaker’s throat, and pinned a letter condemning Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an “infidel fundamentalist” to Van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Hirsi Ali went into hiding, and has recently immigrated to the United States to take up a position at the American Enterprise Institute. She has said that she will produce a sequel to the film.

There are the kind of human books you check out of the Bibliotheek Almelo, then there are the kind created when words are written on the body (see also Peter Greenaway’s 1996 film The Pillow Book, in which the protagonist asks her calligrapher-lover to treat her “like the pages of a book”), and there are the kind with words written in the body—that is, books bound in human flesh. Texts with “anthropodermic binding” can be found at many libraries, including Harvard’s Langdell Law Library, where the final page of a seventeenth-century treatise on Spanish law bears the faint inscription: “The bynding of this book is all that remains of my deare friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632.”