reviews Book Reviews 401 search libraries have earned the Ph.D. Under “employment–positions–jobs,” the studies revealed that catalogers have been studied more than other LIS speci­ alities. Various changes (e.g., new catalog­ ing rules and the implementation of online catalogs) are obvious reasons why catalogers have received so much atten­ tion. Generally, these studies found that positive changes in the profession include heightened job interest, better use of in­ dividual abilities, increased understand­ ing between technical and public service areas, and the development of a greater flexibility among librarians when coping with emergencies. Negative trends in­ clude fragmentation of time, lack of con­ sistency in cataloging, problems with training, and difficulties in developing expertise in multiple areas. Under “attitudes and behaviors,” li­ brarians are described as having very positive attitudes toward the technology they use in searching. Special librarians appear most interested in studying their image. The results of some studies found special librarians to be risk-taking, intro­ spective, and judgment oriented. Aca­ demic librarians focus mostly on faculty status issues whereas public librarians concentrate on personalities, programs, and the professional skills of children’s librarians. Unquestionably, librarians are concerned about the lack of effective com­ munication between librarians and tech­ nologists. The author is to be commended for the historical sketch of the changing role of the librarian from late 1800s to the current time. Under “institutions,” the author in­ cluded viewpoints (extracted from the studies) about the different types of librar­ ians (principally, academic, school, spe­ cial, and public). There are essentially no data on how librarians in one type of library perceive their counterparts in other types of librar­ ies. This is an area that warrants addi­ tional research. Three areas were not touched on at all in the journal studies, yet they illustrate interesting research questions. They are: (1) What are the in­ formation-seeking habits of librarians? (2) How frequently do librarians use librar­ ies for nonjob needs? and (3) How differ­ ent or similar are librarian library users from other library users? This work contains 165 carefully se­ lected resources on the description of li­ brarians. If one is interested in conduct­ ing research on librarians, the bibliogra­ phy would be an excellent starting point. Notwithstanding the fact that this pub­ lication includes findings on librarians from all types of libraries, there are sev­ eral good reasons why academic librarians should consult this well-organized, easy- to-read work. Not least among them is that academic librarians will learn basic con­ cepts that will enable them to better un­ derstand themselves. Moreover, this occa­ sional paper is essential reading for any­ one planning to conduct research on the image and roles of librarians. —Sha Li Zhang, Wichita State University. Willinsky, John. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Min­ neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Pr., 1998. 304p. $22.95, alk. paper, cloth (ISBN 0­ 8166-3076-3); paper (0-8166-3077-1). LC 97-43232. As South Africa moved from apartheid to liberation, it was fashionable to say that the past should be forgotten and a line drawn across the nation’s history. Now that the inevitable and predictable conti­ nuities have reasserted themselves, such comments are rarely heard. They are made to look all the more unrealistic in the light of writing, such as Willinsky’s, that traces the extent to which the impe­ rial way of knowing the world has sur­ vived within educational systems follow­ ing the demise of empire. Imperialists subscribed to the doc­ trine, familiar to librarians, that knowl­ edge represents power. Indeed, their de­ sire to know, coupled with economic and political interests (labeled tellingly by the author as “intellectual mercantilism”), caused them to behave in ways charac­ teristic of librarianship—cataloguing, classifying, ordering, and creating what 402 College & Research Libraries Willinsky aptly describes as the “Impe­ rial archive.” In such fashion, the West took possession of the world, contextualizing it in terms of identity and difference, center and periphery, civi­ lized and primitive. Empires were founded on information collected on the basis of perceived scientific objectivity but were so thoroughly grounded in a desire for power that the acquisition of knowledge frequently involved repres­ sion. Even at its most benign, informa­ tion was used to divide colonizer from colonized. At its most bizarre, imperial­ ism treated the world as a blank sheet, relabeling virtually every geographical feature and thereby proclaiming sover­ eignty. The documentation and exhibition of information gave rise to those monu­ ments of imperialism—the museum and the botanical garden. They tended to mea­ sure the otherness of their exhibits, if only subconsciously, against a Western norm. This was particularly true in the case of ethnology, the focus of massively at­ tended exhibitions and fairs. By the late nineteenth century, exploration had be­ come an event stage-managed by the press in celebration of empire. The non- European world had been turned into a spectacle in its own right, a process ac­ centuated by one of imperialism’s less savory intellectual pursuits, race science/ eugenics. Willinsky is particularly interested in the residual nature and influence of colo­ nial education, which he characterizes as alienating, weighted with contradictions but not without altruism. He describes T. B. Macaulay’s project to educate Indians to be English in taste, opinions, morals, and intellect as “chilling,” without ad­ vancing a comprehensive reason why or considering in detail that the bureaucrat class brought up in this way contained powerful potential leaders of indepen­ dence movements. However, he does con­ cede that female teachers of the empire challenged traditional attitudes toward women in indigenous societies. July 1999 The second half of Willinsky’s book considers the extent to which imperial concepts of the “other” pervade modern educational texts in history, geography, language, and literature. In the chapter on geography, for instance, he identifies the extent to which the subject has served imperial ends, especially in its division and characterization of the world for the purpose of economic exploitation. An in­ teresting example of geography as a “dis­ course of difference” is the equation of the tropics with degeneration. Willinsky is particularly critical of the National Geo­ graphic. Its crude anthropology, framed in Western terms he describes as “the edu­ cational fantasy of colonialism,” whose very ideology is the celebration of differ­ ence, the otherness that pervaded impe­ rial education. Legions of colonial chil­ dren grew up more familiar with the ge­ ography of the imperial powers than their own backyards, and this was reinforced by the smothering nature of Mother Country literature. The author’s main thesis is that impe­ rialism lingers as a “trace element” in educational systems. Even though em­ pires disappeared within the space of a generation, they continue to shape the ways in which the world is viewed. He offers considerable contemporary, empiri­ cal evidence to show that this is indeed so, but the reader is left with the feeling that many words have been used in this book to put across a few relatively straightforward ideas. For instance, it could have been a far more interesting publication had he investigated the extent to which imperial education was turned, like sport in some notable cases, against the colonizers in the struggle for libera­ tion. This book has a good-quality index consisting mainly of personal names and a thorough and extensive bibliography. However, the number of typographical errors is surprisingly high for a work pro­ duced by a reputable publisher of long standing. —Christopher Merrett, University of Natal