Page 10 RAIN May 1982 DUCKS From: How to Read Donald Duck How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 1975 (original Chilean edition, 1971), 112 pp., $5.00 ppd. from: International General P.O. Box 350 New York, NY 10013 Many of us have fond childhood memories of our visits to Duckburg. Just ten cents got us 52 pages worth of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and kept us up to date on the latest adventures of Donald, his three nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, his apparently platonic lifetime girlfriend Daisy, his lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, and his skinflint Uncle Scrooge. Looking back past Watergate, Vietnam and the assorted unpleasantnesses of the past two decades, the denizens of Duckburg seem to stand out in a pleasant wholesome glow. But wait. Can it be that in our childhood innocence we were missing something sinister? Stop and think: do you recall anyone in Duckburg ever producing anything useful? (No. Virtually every character was somehow involved in the service economy and caught up in endless consumption of goods which no one seemed to be producing). Can you remember any Duckburg citizens (other than criminal elements like the Beagle Boys) who suffered from economic hardship? Did it occur to you that nearly everyone in Donald's circle of friends was either clearly powerful or clearly submissive, and no one crossed the line? And was your childhood sense of social justice ever offended by the fact that Donald ACCESS and his nephews were forever embarking on expeditions to exotic countries to lift gold or other treasures from under the noses of the simple-minded natives? During the Allende regime in Chile, Marxist scholars Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart not only noticed such things, but wrote a very serious and very angry analysis of how they believed Disney comics influenced the world view of youth in the developing countries. Apparently they touched a nerve: How to Read Donald Duck was a bestseller in Chile and other Latin American countries. After Allende's downfall, copies of it were burned by his right-wing successors. The book is a fascinating study, but it would have benefited from a more sparing use of political jargon and a considerably lighter touch. Its grim tone has more than a little in common (ironically) with Moral Majority attacks on the "secular humanists" who supposedly work overtime to corrupt America's youth. Nonetheless, Dorfman and Mattelart are frequently perceptive in their analysis of the underlying American attitudes toward power, wealth, class and race which inevitably surface in that quintessen- tially American product, the Disney comic. The authors have an important point to make about the impacts of our talking ducks on Third World children. It's interesting to reflect on how those same ducks may have influenced us. —John Ferrell RESOURCES Human Economy: A Bibliography, Vol. I—Books, compiled and edited by John Applegath, 1981, 77 pp., inquire for price from: The Human Economy Center P.O. Box 551 Amherst, MA 01004 This is one of the best economic bibliographies I've seen, alternative or straight, largely because many of the writers represented in the collection are not professional economists. The subject areas range from Advertising to Education to Housing to Work, and the listings, although few are annotated, make an unusually comprehensive set. In actual usage I encountered only two minor problems. The listings under Science, for some reason, are not up to snuff with the listings in other categories. And a few of the "annotated" listings offer somewhat sterile descriptions. The majority, however, are crisp, perceptive, concise and current, making this a most useful reference tool for researchers, writers, teachers and students. —Mark Roseland POPULATION World Population: Toward the Next Century, by Elaine M. Murphy, 1981,18 pp. $1.00 each, $.75 for two or more copies, from: Population Reference Bureau 1337 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, DC 20036 Books and articles on world population growth frequently bombard our minds with undigestible statistics and our emotions with visions of starving children. As readers, we can be left with little more than a vague sense that population is growing rapidly, that growth is directly equated with increased human misery, and that some drastic remedies must be found. In sharp contrast, this excellent booklet from the Population Reference Bureau cuts to the heart of world population issues and makes the basic facts and figures involved easy to digest and remember. Designed as a teaching module and particularly appropriate for use in high school classes, it describes in clear, concise, question and answer format what world population means in terms of resource use, housing, health care and food supply. It notes various family planning options, emphasizes the population implications of improving the status of women, and briefly describes the widely varying population experiences of China, India, Kenya and Mexico. A series of exercises at the end of the booklet encourages the reader to work through the implications of population growth and to begin thinking about possible strategies for nations to adopt in dealing with population issues. World Population: Toward the Next Century packs more potential value in its 18 pages than most books do in several hundred. —John Ferrell
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