If ever my penis were stolen, I'd want Frank Bures to hunt for it.
Bures, a Minneapolis-based travel writer, turns in a reportorial tour de force in this examination of culture, belief and madness.
He roams the remote reaches of China, faces teenage gangsters in Nigeria and prowls the crowded markets of Singapore, tracking down elders who have witnessed mass outbreaks of madness, posing questions to eminent physicians as well as street herb vendors.
The more he learns, the more he wonders: Are we all in the power of an essential human mysticism that's stronger than science — and that we may never fully understand?
As the subtitle suggests, Bures was intrigued by repeated reports of "magical penis theft" around the globe. Men suddenly believed their organ was being stolen away through sorcery. Often, they ran through the streets in a howling panic, yanking desperately on the affected member to keep it from disappearing. The syndrome occasionally appeared in women, who believed their breasts or vaginas were vanishing.
This strange phenomenon launched Bures on a quest that lasted more than a decade and covered thousands of miles. Along the way, he learned about voodoo, juju and gilhari syndrome, whose sufferers believe a lizard is crawling under their skin.
Such maladies aren't limited to what Westerners might think of as primitive cultures. Bures points out that our supposedly scientific, rational civilization has a litany of illnesses rarely seen in other parts of the world: anorexia, premenstrual syndrome and depression, among others.
He plumbs the meaning of his own brother's ecstatic religious conversion, which included speaking in tongues. He cites the case of the elementary students in Springfield, Minn., who succumbed to what appeared to be carbon monoxide poisoning, but turned out to be a mass case of nerves before a school choir concert.
