#11: The Alcoholic Monkeys of St. Kitts
by Alex Shoumatoff
Dr. Maurice Dongier, a neuropsychiatrist who studies the causes of alcoholism at McGill University, and I are related by marriage, through an extended family of Rwandese émigrés in Montreal. His son is married to the sister of my wife’s sister’s husband (if you can follow that). At a recent family gathering, Maurice …Read More
#10: A Report for the J.M.Kaplan Fund on the Transborder Effort to Create Marine Protected Areas in the Gulf of Maine
1. The Ocean As The Last Frontier of Planetary Stewardship
In l997 I wrote a proposal for a long magazine piece about the state of the world’s oceans, part of a series on the state of the environment at the turn of the millennium, that never happened. “I will first head for the pool …Read More
#9: The World’s Largest Swamp : Brazil’s Pantanal do Mato Grosso
(A shorter and in some ways better version of this, deftly edited, as usual, by Sheila Glaser, appears in the March, 2003 issue of Travel & Leisure.)
The Pantanal do Mato Grosso, in west-central Brazil, south of the Amazon, is the largest swamp on earth. In the summer rainy season, from October to March, it …Read More
#8: The Prairie Churches of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and North Dakota: A Report for the J.M.Kaplan Fund
(This is the full, the complete, unexpurgated “twenty-three-thousand-plus” Dispatch, more than seven times longer than the report the Kaplan Fund commissioned. But there was so much of interest that I wanted to do it full justice, because few people are aware of the amazing churches in the northern plains of Canada, and they are going …Read More
#7: A Preliminary Report on the Philanthropic Possibilities of Cuba
by Alex Shoumatoff, based on his visit to the island March 19-26, 2001
Cuba is rife with philanthropic possibility on both the architectural and ecological
preservation fronts. The casual visitor is impressed by how well this last bastion of communism seems to work for all its citizens, how despite the embargo there is food and health care …Read More
#6: Journal of the Flamingo
by Alex Shoumatoff
I wrote this for Men’s Journal in l998, was paid, and never heard from them again and forgot about it myself, so I can only speculate on the reasons why it was never published. I am posting it as an interim dispatch, taking a quick breather from my book, because it illustrates the …Read More
#5: What have we done to the weather? A report from Kyoto
Four years after this conference, it is 50 degrees in Montreal in December, which just experienced the warmest October and November on record, like much of eastern North America. Al Gore, the great white hope for the environment, is history at the moment, but he may rise again from the ashes. In any case, we …Read More
#4: E-Postcards from Abroad
By Elizabeth Fisk
These Dispatches could use a voice and a take or two other than my own, particularly since I am really cranking on my Rwanda book and am not traveling and don’t have the time until around March 1st to post anything substantial except for old work myself. Fortuitously, Liz Fisk has gloriously and …Read More
#3: Europe’s African Art Treasures
Twenty years ago, I spent two months traveling around Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Having spent some time in the Amazon, I wanted to see how the world’s second-largest rainforest compared. It was my first trip to Africa, and the unfettered joie de vivre and creativity of the Zairois (who are actually …Read More
#2: A Report on the Wildlife of Eastern Congo
The original version for the United Nations Foundation
For those who want to go more deeply into the situation in eastern Congo, here is the 26,000-word site report I delivered to the United Nations Foundaton in October of last year. It contains the greatest detail on the status of the parks and their wildlife and on …Read More