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438 letters in canada 1999 taboos, says Leckie, in that it stressed the inevitable tragic consequences. In these novels, as in the divorce court, the focus was primarily on female adultery. As Leckie points out, part of the public's fascination with divorce court stories derived from fears that female sexuality could not be controlled and that female sexual transgression would not be adequately punished. Another part of the fascination was doubtless due to the reminder that betrayal was always made easier by the trust of the innocent betrayed. Thanks to lessons provided by divorce court proceedings reported in newspapers, in English fiction, says Leckie, `the watchful spouse, more and more frequently, becomes the canny recorder of her or his partner's wrongdoing.' This book, extensively researched and carefully thought out, deserved more attention in the editing stage than it received. The case of Madeleine Smith, an unmarried woman who murdered her lover, is allowed to stand as an example of adulterous behaviour apparently because the Saturday Review mistakenly interpreted it as such. Other small, annoying errors (Richard Feveral; The Portrait of the Lady) detract from the overall impression. Nonetheless, it is well worth the time of any Victorianist. (JUDITH KNELMAN) Douglas Cole. Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858B1906 Douglas and McIntyre/University of Washington Press. viii, 360. $45.00 Twenty years ago, historian Douglas Cole began to write a biography of Franz Boas, a North American intellectual of German descent who is commonly referred to as the father of modern North American anthropology . Cole's ambition was to write a historical biography based on the extensive but neglected collection of Boas's family and professional papers housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. His original plan was to write a two-volume biography which would offer readers a detailed and meticulous account of Boas's life, beginning with his birth in 1858 in Midden, Westphalia. Unfortunately, this project was never fully realized. While making revisions to the final draft of the first volume, Cole died suddenly and the manuscript was posthumously edited by two of his colleagues, Ira Chikin and Alex Long. This volume, then, is not only a historian's labour of love, but also an incomplete project. Cole's technique in this work is to `let the facts' speak for themselves, and the narrative voice of the historian largely takes a back seat to the archival materials. The author scrupulously follows the chronological development of Boas's life, beginning with his early family life in Germany, up through his educational formation, his marriage and move to America, his struggles to land various editorial and academic positions, and his tumultuous relationship with the American Museum and Columbia University. In the two final chapters, Cole effectively weaves in humanities 439 Boas's cultural politics and some of his seminal intellectual contributions (for example, his thoughts on racial determination, his departure from scientific positivism, and his efforts to develop a sound ethnographic methodology). In spite of the fact, however, that Cole's second instalment will not be forthcoming, this is a valuable and intriguing read. The details of Boas's life in and of themselves are fascinating, and Cole's work effectively makes Boas a much more `human' figure than he is typically portrayed as in other biographies or analyses. Rather than simply being a man who moved from one great intellectual idea to the next in the context of early twentiethcentury America, Cole's Boas is a man who profoundly struggled to find recognition (and a job) within a world of debt, family responsibilities, capricious patrons, and intellectual cliques. But perhaps more usefully, Cole is not only able to pull his readers into Boas's complex and sometimes mundane life B falling in love, constant salary negotiations, sick children, and obstinate employers B but also to think critically about the world which actually generated and shaped ethnology. Boas certainly had his fair share of academic estrangements and betrayals, and was clearly victimized by a unique kind of museum factionalism. Yet he also became a main progenitor of these kind of divisive ethnological politics. Against this backdrop, then, we see Boas's work, his ethnographic research and writings, in...

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