Barnet like a bird’s nest? No problem – with L’Oreal Professional’s innovative X-Tenso in-salon service, you can have a smooth hair day every day.

 

L’Oreal Professionnel’s X-Tenso service will quite literally straighten out these problems with two positive results: firstly, you’ll have better looking and more manageable hair and secondly, no one will ever mistake you for Brian May again. Other great way to make you hair stronger is to massage coconut oil in hair.

WHAT IS X-TENSO?

X-Tenso is an in-salon hair-smoothing service that straightens out kinks and curls, reduces volume and also disciplines unruly hair. Since your hair will be straighter after X-Tenso, it’ll also require less effort on your part to get it looking half-decent. It’ll also open up a whole new world in terms of the styles you can try, giving you more control over the way you look and allowing you the opportunity to keep up with the latest trends.

 

HOW IT WORKS

Unlike traditional hair-straightening products, X-Tenso simply smoothes the hair rather than completely relaxing it, so it remains softer, more supple and more natural-looking. It works by altering the protein bonds which give hair its texture so that it becomes straighter and smoother. The results are instant and will last for up to 60 days.

WHAT IT INVOLVES

If you think having your hair straightened is a complicated process, you couldn’t be more wrong. X-Tenso is quicker, simpler and much more man-friendly than most hair treatments. The whole process can take as little as 45 minutes, making it the kind of thing you can easily fit into a lunch-hour. What’s more, you won’t have to sit under huge hairdryers, be wrapped in tinfoil for hours or wear one of those weird-looking plastic caps! It couldn’t be simpler – or less embarrassing.

 

WHERE TO GET IT

If you fancy trying the X-Tenso smoothing service and getting a 15% discount as well, contact your nearest TONI&GUY hair salon and check availability of this special deal. Please mention this offer when booking and simply present this issue of Men’s Health when you turn up for your appointment (special offer valid until August 2004). To find your nearest salon, call us on 0800 072 6699.

 

BACK ON THE MAINLAND, a crowd scene was playing as a cast of thou­sands inched up U. S. 1, like sticks of alder on the conveyor belt to Havilah Haw­kins’s stove. Some drop into the hoppers of south coast resorts, pricey ones like Kenne­bunkport or Ogunquit or like Old Orchard Beach, chockablock with frame houses and raffish charm. Many will bypass Portland on their way north to the rockbound resorts.

 

Portland, early May. The sky is porcelain blue, the sun warm, the breeze cool. It is a day of visible statistic: Portland has more hours of sunshine than 95 percent of the Northeast. In spring it is a city of ladders; everywhere buildings are being cleaned, painted, patched, gutted for restoration.

Because the city occupies a lobed penin­sula, the inevitable freeway was put across the neck, not along the waterfront. Down­town is built on a saddle that rises to the resi­dential neighborhoods of Eastern and West­ern Promenade. Many fine buildings have been razed, but the city escaped the worst of bulldoze-it-all renewal. What remains is a sampler of 19th-century styles: federal, Greek and Gothic Revival, Italianate, Ro­manesque, and native frame and brick.

 

All this has not escaped notice. Portland may not yet rank in the top trendy, but it has been discovered by many who would mix urbanity with easy access to coast and coun­tryside. The Yuppies are coming.

 

DOWN THE COAST (that’s up the coast to people “from away”) town character changes abruptly. On Pe­nobscot Bay, Rockland is as different from Rockport as fish processing is from yachts at anchor. Camden has nine schooners, crowds, and open-air Shakespeare; Belfast has frozen potato skins, industrial ambition, and one schooner, the Sylvina W. Beal. Searsport features flea markets and an­tiques; Bucksport houses a giant paper mill.

 

Down in Stonington, lobstermen were hurting. Demand was off. Canadians had dumped large catches on the Boston market. The dock price was a low $2.53 per pound.

 

As manager of the Stonington Lobster Co­op, Skip Greenlaw deals with the squeeze daily. A woman came in the door. She need­ed money for her husband’s doctor bills and got it right then on her word. That was an expression of the unbroken code that fisher­men always help other fishermen in need. If you need money quickly, you can apply for online payday loan.

 

Europe

ATLAS OF EUROPEAN BIRDS. By K. H. Voous. 355 plates. 419 maps. 284 pp. Nelson. £3 10s.

PROFESSOR Voous is Deputy Director of the Zoo­logical Museum at Amsterdam University and Professor of Zoogeography at the Free Univer­sity, Amsterdam. Introducing him in a short pre­face, Sir A. Landsborough Thompson (until recently President of the Ornithologists’ Union and of the London Zoological Society) remarks on his international renown as an ornithologist, and on his ‘valuable presentation of data’ in this atlas. This applies specially to the maps, one for each species of bird native to Europe, ‘showing its breeding range, not only within the continent but extra-limitally as well’. The text, as he says, gives, ‘species by species, information supple­menting that shown on the maps; it is all from a geographical point of view, but it is noteworthy how much of the bird’s biology that brings in.’ The plan of the atlas is to put text and plates side by side, followed by a group of world maps indicating with tinted areas the range of the species described and photographed. Story, picture and map each contribute to the revela­tion, which includes facts, such as the ‘faunal type’ to which species belong, the climatic zones that limit breeding range, habitat and adaptation of species, food and nesting requirements and habits, and migration. The underlying causes of changes in distribution patterns, and the ecology of the species within the distribution range are also considered.

The reader has to realize, first, that the purpose of the distribution maps is exclusively to provide an insight into the zoogeographical problems con­nected with the different species. They must be used in conjunction with the text which they are intended to complement. Secondly, that the text does not supply encyclopaedic data. ‘It is rather directed towards the comparison of one species with another and towards the general aim of the work—insight into the problems surrounding the various species and the position of each within its range.’ Thirdly, that the photographs are not for the purpose of recognition of species nor merely for aesthetic decoration. ‘Where possible they show each species in its characteristic haunts.’ Nevertheless they are remarkable for excellence in photography and reproduction and for the natural, lively—and often lovely—appearance of individual birds.

The format and arrangement of this large, scholarly work are in themselves inviting. One is the more eagerly lured to study the private lives of these common and uncommon Europeans.

 

Asia

TO THE EAST A PHOENIX. By Nigel

Cameron. 30 illustrations from photographs by

Brian Brake. 4 maps. 207 pp. Hutchinson. 30s. MR CAMERON’S first book, The Chinese Smile, was acclaimed and this, his second, is likely to be equally fortunate. Geographically it covers much more ground, starting at the Hadhramaut, and leading on to Kashmir, Ceylon, Singapore and Malaya, Hong Kong and Fiji. To enjoy it fully one must not be put off by a somewhat mannered style and a trick that strikes one at first as rather tiresome: the creation of an alter ego, an `imaginary traveller’, who ‘remained a sort of ambulant lay figure’, with whom throughout the journey described he argued to purge his mind and clear his impressions. Those impressions are, it is true, reproduced with admirable clarity, so that he keeps one in step with him, in sympathy and anticipation. The power to do this is a valu­able ingredient in any travel book.

The world that so excited him as he came new to it is one frequently visited by travellers and as frequently the subject of their books. Mr Cameron’s account of it is distinguished by originality and individuality. The Hadhramaut for him was an exclusively male sphere: it takes a woman to penetrate purdah restrictions and find the true balance by getting into people’s homes. He conveys the feeling of the place, the heat and the hardships, the role of air communication and transport in revolutionizing a way of life and the personality of rulers and ruled. He was fascinated by the Bedouin and their camels; blue-black men, `their naturally dark skin smeared with a mixture of indigo and sesame oil so that when you shake hands with them or rub past them you are stained too.’ He saw the son of a sheikh making use of an ‘Arab’s chair’: a circular woven band which he placed round the back of his shoulders and behind his knees so that he could lean back, supported. In Kashmir he despised the mountains—`there is probably nothing more boring in the world than the prolonged contemplation of mountains. Especially those which are snow-capped’—but the lakes, gardens and houseboats delighted him. Ceylon he already knew well and his return was `like coming to the house of friends’. He revisited ruins and tea estates and dwelt on the old glories of Kandy and the sacred relics of Buddhism. At all stages as he travelled on he gathered honey.

Mr Brake’s photographs, grouped at the end, are excellent, expertly composed and faithful to the text. The book is exceptionally well produced and printed. The Sea

A BIOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. By Richard Carrington. Illustrated. 286 pp. Chatto & Windus. 30s.

How comfortably wise Mr Carrington makes one feel! He handles here fundamental facts, so far as they are known, about the sea as the cradle of life, and he does so in such a WhENthat he glues

one to his pages. The lucidity of his manner and the marshalling of his matter give clarity to quite abstruse theories on the origin and development of sun, moon, and earth, land-forms and sea mechanism. His explanations of the seasonal effect of the moon on tides, of the cause and motion ohowaves and similar phenomena could be understood by a child.

Records published in recent years by under­water explorers who have described and photo­graphed what they found have to a certain degree familiarized us with life in deep seas and on the ocean bed. That familiarity is taken several stages further by Mr Carrington’s survey of causal factors and conditions, which, as he hoped it would, increases our wonder at ‘the principles that govern the great drama of ocean life’. As he proceeds from chemical rudiments to the teeming plant and animal life to which they gave rise, he constantrefers to his sources of information. Incideno see among them The Ocean, that early Victorian book by Philip Gosse whose son Edmund immortalized him in Father and Son.Zeiss.

Having presented sea organisms, including microbes, reptiles, mammals and birds, in their proper classification of habitat and family rela­tionships, Mr Carrington turns to man’s dis­covery of the oceans in the days of the early navi­gators and since. He quotes William Beebe as a pioneer among those who used diving contrap­tions purely for observation and describes recent progress made in this form of marine research, which is becoming increasingly important. The latest and, it seems, the greatest modern inven­tion is the completely free-ranging bathyscaphe.

General

 

 

THE FIRST OF TREES. By Robert Standish. Decorations by Raymond Piper. 108 pp. Phoenix House. 12s. 6d.

WHEN the author, a novelist, discovered how little certainty there is about the origins of the cultivated olive tree, he decided to investigate and this charming little book is the result.

He can do no more than speculate on the olive’s ‘dim beginnings’ but he does so resource­fully. He is inclined to attribute to the Semitic peoples ‘the honour of having brought this primate of trees from the wild to the cultivated state’, and his reasons for so doing are elaborately stated. Another unresolved question which he develops with equal ingenuity—though he cannot positively answer it—is: are olives good for you? The trail of thought he follows leads him into numerous Mediterranean byways, where he moves leisurely through olive orchards and other such scenes of enchantment, weaving his theories, amusing on the benefits and the poetry that this first of trees has brought to those who have come to know and love it.

 

EARLY MAPS OF THE BRITISH ISLES. A.D. 1000 A.D. 1579. Introduction and Notes by G. R. Crone. Royal Geographical Society. 35s.

THE world, or at least a little bit of it, is shown here not in a book but in maps. From time to time the Royal Geographical Society issues sets of maps on separate sheets contained in a large folder and accompanied by a paper-bound set of notes. The reproduction of the maps—in them­selves very decorative—and the printing of the notes are of the highest standard: encouraging factors for students who have no chance to study the original work of cartographers. The twenty maps in the present set, the seventh to appear, have been chosen, as Lord Nathan explains in a foreword, ‘to show the development of the maps of the British Isles from early times to the Tudor age’. Mr Crone, Librarian and Map Curator to the R.G.S., introducing them, says they ‘are of interest not only for the history of British map­ping, but for that of cartography in general’. He runs through the main stages of evolution during the period covered and in so doing gives the maps perspective and significance, describing and explaining the originals and their history and the points covered in the choice of reproductions. A turning point in the cartography of Britain, he points out, was reached in the 13th century when the maps of Matthew Paris became ‘the first to embody direct observation by the cartographer or draughtsman’. In the 14th century further progress is apparent in the Gough map, famous for its ‘remarkably detailed and accurate repre­sentation of the contemporary road system in England and Wales’. The next major develop­ment is the introduction of marine charts `founded on the technique introduced by the navigators of the Mediterranean merchant cities and to the use of the mariner’s compass’. As he follows these developments and their representa­tion on the maps, he also throws some light on the cartographers, the circumstances in which they worked and the weight of their achieve­ment.

 

A HUNDRED YEARS OF GEOGRAPHY.

By T. W. Freeman. 335 pp. Duckworth. 30s. THIS contribution to the popular Hundred Years series published by Duckworth was made, the author tells us, in response to an unexpected invitation. ‘Never’, he says, ‘was a task more happily accepted, for it offered an opportunity of reading much that was written in the nine­teenth century and of observing the steady growth of geographical work in a rapidly chang­ing world.’ Mr ‘Freeman is Reader in Geography at Manchester University and he acknowledges the help he received from being able to use the book as a lecture course for a small Honours class in Manchester, who ‘listened patiently’. He gives them a ‘word of gratitude’ and is em­boldened to hope it may help students of today and graduates of an earlier time ‘to see that there is no binding orthodoxy of view, no one geo­grapher who was always right, but rather a number of faithful workers and thinkers’.

Though primarily intended for students of advanced geography, the book may nonetheless who come to geography through travel and turn to maps without having realized the immense contribution they can make to our understanding of the world around us, its face, form, physical features, natural and political divisions.

Starting with a chronological survey of the changes that have revolutionized geography in the past hundred years, the author outlines various forms and developments, physical and regional, social and political. In describing advances in cartography he gives examples of maps from different sources and describes their scope and use, with brief reference to the study of map projection, which, as he says, ‘has been a source of fascination to many people’. His last chapter is concerned with individual geographers and with the tremendous effect upon their work of the great epoch of exploration, followed as it was by the growth of trade and the founding of colonies. He describes the swing towards more specialization and concentration on ‘particular topics within the field of economic and social geography’. A trend which, incidentally, some of our most eminent geographers regret insofar as it detracts from mathematical geography, now apt to be neglected, which they regard as fundamental.