Isham Cook
Everything dystopian you think is happening – in both China and the rest of the world including the US – is happening. One of the many striking facts in this new book is that almost all of the companies involved in developing the apparatuses for digital control of people's lives in China were initially created in the US. American companies aggressively marketed their products and services to Chinese technology developers and police agencies, which the Chinese have now perfected. Cellphones and surveillance cameras (facial recognition) now control people's lives in China to an extent still unthinkable in the West, but I fear we're slowly moving in that direction. The only issue the authors neglect to discuss is the way China's only social media app, WeChat, used exclusively by almost the entire population, has become a tool of the state, when it temporarily freezes or permanently blocks users who merely forward politically sensitive posts or news articles. This can seriously disrupt a person's life as the app is used for all sorts of communications, business and activities (the Alipay app can take over some of these but it's not a social media app used for communicating). WeChat repression has been going on for some years now so it's unclear why the authors left it out. My guess is that they themselves rely on WeChat for their many China contacts and any direct criticism of the company might cause their own accounts to be blocked or shut down.
A minor classic since its release in 1995 - just as the digital book revolution was getting underway and undermining the long realm of the printed book. Personally, I do not share the madness of bibliophiles, who as Basbanes notes so often display indifference to reading and the ideas of the books they hoard in favor of the obsession of collecting for its own sake. Bibliophiles must absolutely hate the Kindle and other e-reading devices. I love the Kindle, because it's the ideas, language and content of books that's key, and who cares in what format the content is delivered? This does not mean that I don't also enjoy a printed book in my hands; I've spent most of my life with printed books and still read them, still have them on my shelves. Brisbane is a fine writer and it is a great story, though, the history of bibliophilia, one that ironically can be fully enjoyed on a Kindle.
A completely unexpected introduction to Buddhism by an American with many years under his belt as a monk in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Walking combines the discipline of Theravada-style meditation with “Red” (sexual) Tantra and calibrated use of intoxicants like MDMA and LSD to aid in achieving peak experiences (there is nothing written in stone anywhere forbidding any of these tools and techniques).
It's noteworthy that the Dakini-like female masters of Red Tantra aren't just employed as sexual objects but the lovemaking is mutual and the “Samadhi absorption” in a Red Tantra practitioner requires and typically results in “full-body orgasms complete with massive ejaculations of up to a half liter (two cups) or more of clear fluid, often repeatedly”! Walking stresses that female ejaculation “is not a myth. It's a signpost of connection, both inner and outer, for a woman. For some, it's natural, while for others, it's a learned response. A woman who has established this connection inside of herself is said to be ‘sexually awakened'. That doesn't necessarily mean spiritually attuned, but physically attuned as a prerequisite in this case. Not all orgasmic ejaculations are a sign of accessing concentrative absorption.”
Walking's prose has an episodic style and a tendency to meander. The final section of the book consists of a grab-bag of rather (deceptively) banal meditation tips, which probably only count as wisdom once one has achieved a certain level of expertise. I would have preferred a tighter narrative with more of the autobiographical, where the author is at his most colorful.
Along with Rätsch's Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, this is pretty comprehensive and there is no other work that can compare with it. A brief tour through the book reveals that aphrodisiacs work in all different ways, whether by stimulating blood vessels in the genitals, lowering inhibitions or enhancing the senses. The book's claim of the single most effective aphrodisiac may surprise you – plentifully available in countries where it is legal.
A straightforward account of the medicinal and potentially poisonous entheogens, lacking the style and panache of Daniel Schulke's Veneficium but filling in necessary gaps with detailed instructions for making potions, salves, tinctures, and other concoctions. The book lacks clear organization and jumps around from the practical (botanical descriptions and recipes) to the theoretical (New Agey incantations and glyphs), yet adds to the alchemical library.
Jammed-packed with lore about all the disparaged scientists working on the intricate, sophisticated and fascinating world of plant life and plant powers over the past centuries. The gaping hole in this book is the utter lack of anything about plant medicines and entheogens - the real gold standard of plant intelligence.
Dense compendium of poison-path lore by an expert and practitioner, veering between the poetic and the academic in style. I'll confine my review to a few amazing quotes:
“Poison is the point of first beginnings from which all must arise; it is power, both in its raw state, and in all its potentials for transmutation.”
“In its exaltation, Fear is the simultaneous knowledge and respect of those powers which can annihilate us. Its irrational axis, manifest in action, is cowardice and impulse; its flowering is courage and prudence.”
“The ability to attach with ferocious passion, and detach as readily [is] a holistic recognition that each encounter with the unfamiliar may be a source of great power to the adept.”
“Modern drug prohibition is driven by fear of gnostic revelation or knowledge arising from bodily ecstasy, and the consequent shattering of state or religion-enforced paradigms....the same fears lie at the root of state repressions of sexual freedom and expression.”
“Amid the reeds a watchful satyr stood, observing him intently. Maintaining his gaze, the silen slowly raised what appeared to be a police radio to his lips and whispered into it: ‘Affirmative. We have one who sees.'”
Classic text by American Taoist expert that goes back to the foundational Taoist texts on health and sexual practices (sometimes too literally) and conveys it all with wry wit yet profound expertise for skeptical Western audiences; the author himself is no mountain hermit but a widely traveled hippie with an encyclopedic knowledge of Eastern cultures and plant medicines to boot.
Italian author Regueiro has spent years in the Amazon jungle working with the Datura, Ayahuasca, and occasionally San Pedro (mescaline) plant medicines in his quest to become a shaman of the “poison path.” His journeys into this underworld are at times remarkably philosophical and reveal such insights as:
“The truth is that, even when we are totally sober, we are always hallucinating: projecting so hard as a matter of fact, that we don't even realize we are tripping on our own drama. The people who insist on judging altered states of consciousness and praise absolute sobriety are clearly unaware that even they are already tripping all the time and putting up their own show on the stage of Life. All spiritual practices are devoted to waking up from this state of amnesia and to living more consciously as a result....The threat is not out there but is the creation of our insane minds: the more we suppress or soothe our fears, the more we project them onto the world and create what we call our reality accordingly....What actually happens is not that the medicine makes us crazy, but that it shows us in vivid detail how insane we already are.”
Meanwhile, the sheer amount of these potent drugs the author is compelled to consume raises many questions he never answers and greatly frustrates the reader. Now, I've known people whose lives have been transformed by a single powerful psychedelic session. In ceremony after ceremony, however, Regueiro repetitively unpeels layer after layer of pain and healing that never seems to accomplish anything but dredge up yet more deeply buried trauma. And what exactly IS the difference between Datura and Ayahuasca, which he regularly mixes together in varying proportions? They are wholly different and unrelated alkaloids, but how exactly is this baneful brew, Datura (and the other nightshades), long the purview of witches and sorcerers, distinct from the medicine the Amazon is more commonly known for, Ayahuasca? Regueiro maddeningly refuses to clarify the one thing we want to know more than anything else until he finally tosses us a few nuggets: Datura is so much more potent than Ayahuasca that the latter serves more as a catalyst or enhancer (in the same way cannabis enhances a psilocybin or acid trip).
Datura is so potent in fact that by the end of the book our author-shaman admits to having “brushed very closely with madness” in his Datura trances and the deep unconscious work the medicine continues to perform on the mind long after consuming it. Another example of the unsettling after-effects of this substance is Reguerio's loopy hermaphroditism, preceded by his somewhat sheepish admission of being gay. And then we're hit with this:
“I move on to the theme of how women hurt, shame, and judge each other: no, it's not only men who hurt women....I go through a long process of becoming aware of and forgiving all the subtle ways in which I have judged, ridiculed, and shamed women simply for being themselves AND women.”
Yes, Reguerio soon admits, so deeply does he empathize with women and their timeworn oppression that it has turned him into a woman. He is, he confesses, actually a woman, and I grow confused. No, wait - I look at his name again and check his author photo. I was right the first time - he's a man. But after his numerous Datura experiences, it appears he's not so sure. By the way, as he himself warns, stay away from Datura unless you know what you're doing. It puts you into a state, lasting up to several days, where you have no awareness of what's happening or memory of the bizarre behavior you may have engaged in during the spell.
Unique autofiction that seemingly recounts the author's disastrous experience in the Marines (there is too much insider detail for it not to be authentic), after a snowballing series of scandals sparked by a fellow Marine's fatal accident Bordell (he uses his own name) was implicated in during seaborne training in stormy weather. Much of the narrative hangs on a dramatic thread as to whether our protagonist is given an honorable or dishonorable discharge—culminating in a frantic escape and run to LAX—and China, where the nonlinear novel opens, and Bordell's Chinese masseuse girlfriend has apparently been killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's all told with panache in a breathless, unstoppable, at once foul-mouthed and poetic stream-of-consciousness outpouring, with echoes of Kerouac:
“We serpentined north, a single segment of a giant, glowing tapeworm, winding its way into the belly of the aging whore—this seductive, mythological temptress, Los Angeles.... Impossible interchanges, a million brake lights. I felt I'd been injected into some infernal creation too big, too wicked and malignant for comprehension. I was a small-town antigen adrift inside an organic monstrosity whose immune response could be awakened by the slightest provocation. This was different from the animal eyes of Oceanside. That was local, confined. This was cosmic. A supernatural pressure cooker inching toward the red, where I was being compelled by a swirling phantom force to commit something diabolical.”
Joycean puddles of outright confusion add to the mix as the dialogue lurches practically mid-sentence between Marine headquarters and Shanghai, and the reader is left wondering what the hell is going on. Well, it's what happens when an adrenaline-blitzed Marine crashes and burns in a place just as strange as Oceanside, CA—the still flamboyant China of the 2000s before She took over, the China of “two-wheeled phantoms—reapers!—zipping down crowded sidewalks, knocking pedestrians and briefcases and baozi back into the street to be mowed down by speeding black Audis. Out of the way! That noise—an ambulance? VIPs! Big bosses coming through!” Yet I wished more of the narrative had been set in China to give the novel clearer symmetry and flesh out the connections between the two simultaneous locales instead of leaving the reader floundering at times. A second reading will help, but even better would be a sequel.
This easy-to-read scholarly study charts Chinese medical history over the first millennium AD and the extraordinary, delusional fads for consuming toxic minerals such as cinnabar for their alleged life- and sex-enhancing effects - the dark side of Taoist alchemy. The study is on the short side and raises more questions than it answers.
Aesthetically perverse in the way only the Japanese can be, this precision-tooled psychological thriller published in 1929 would have benefitted from more explicit lesbian sexual description, admittedly impossible at the time. The story really boils down to an attempt by a married couple and a hot beauty insinuating herself into their life to work out a polyamorous arrangement which they and Japanese society generally were far from conceptually ready for. The result instead was pretty grim.
It's hard to imagine a celebrated socialite at the center of more storied personages than American Bernadine Szold-Fritz was in 1930s Shanghai. Gravitating to her salons and theatrical extravaganzas (Anglo-Chinese collaborative dramas) were the cream of the International Settlement and French Concession elite - the tycoon Victor Sassoon, writers Harold Acton, Emily Hahn and Vicki Baum, renowned scholars Hu Shih and Lin Yutang, artists Mei Lanfang, Sinmay Zau, and Miguel Covarrubias, the Soong sisters (can't be more connected than them), and passing through from abroad, Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong, Jean Cocteau, and George Bernard Shaw. After fleeing Japanese hostilities in Shanghai, in subsequent decades in the U.S. her salons in LA attracted such luminaries as Gary Cooper, Frank Capra, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and many more. In Blumberg-Kason's hands, we have a sympathetic and compelling portrait which, next to firsthand accounts by Acton, Hahn, and Baum, and recent histories such as Taras Grescoe's Shanghai Grand and Ken Cuthbertson's Nobody Said Not to Go (on Emily Hahn), sits nicely on the Shanghai history bookshelf.
Szold-Fritz's life was exciting and depressing in equal measure. She had a knack for marrying the most unpalatable men, and it's also hard to imagine a more thoroughly unlikable husband than Chester Fritz, her fourth and final marriage, during her Shanghai sojourn. For all his wealth and social charm, he could be miserly with money when it came to his wife, and he was so constitutionally lacking in kindness to those closest to him that he refused to even speak with Bernadine's teenage daughter from a previous marriage, Rosemary Carver, when she came to stay with them in Shanghai. Bernadine was also terrified of revealing to Chester that she was having a mastectomy for fear he'd dump her. (In fairness, I'd like to have a look at his memoir, Ever Westward to the Far East, just to see what he has to say.) Given Blumberg-Kason's own turbulent marriage to an empathy-challenged Chinese national, fascinatingly anatomized her memoir, Good Chinese Wife, I'm guessing the author was drawn to research and write about Szold-Fritz for the many parallels in their domestic lives.
My one criticism of the book is aesthetic. With such a motley and extraordinary cast of characters, and with all the documentary material we have at hand on Szold-Fritz, her family and her social circle, even the most competent biography comes off as a bit dry, when the material could have taken more dramatic form as a dialogue-driven novel, told in turns by the respective protagonists and antagonists. Someone will have to do that down the line.
Classic political novel and satire against the Spanish-controlled Catholic Church that fired the public and was instrumental in sparking the Philippine Revolution (1896-99). Only 26 years old when he wrote it, Rizal's erudition, powers of observation, and sophisticated sense of irony are startling for his age.
Perhaps because the author's surname was the same as my pen name, I picked up this memoir in a secondhand bookshop. I soon discovered the prosaic cover belied its gory contents: a most grim, challenging, and disturbing read, as any good book should be. As far as my experience of memoirs goes, only Susan Blumberg-Kason's Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong (2014), about the tortuous breakdown of a marriage, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007), the New Agey bestseller about an American woman's postmarital redemption in the East, recently come to mind. Cook's memoir, by contrast, was written almost a half century ago in 1981, before the redemption memoir became its own genre. Far from the feel-good sentiments memoir readers seem to demand today, there's not much redemption in this memoir; the unrecounted “second life” of Cook's title follows upon the book's conclusion.
Her first life, covering her first three decades, is a case study and object lesson in modern patriarchal dominance, from her father's sexual fiddling with her as a child to her misdiagnoses by an elite cohort of physicians as a young woman, who repeatedly dismiss her suspicions of grave illness as mere psychosomatic griping (what in an earlier age was known as woman's “hysteria”). Most of the memoir is taken up in hospital rooms. In her stark reality reduced to blank walls and IV lines, like Beckett's sucking stones, all dissolves into pure language, a wry, deadpan, unstoppable voice absorbing every detail around her in disciplined, stylish prose; a female Beckett, a modern Everywoman. It also conjures up those Renaissance paintings of a body dissected before an audience of rapt medical students of the time:
“In the hospital of rare diseases I am still rare enough to be the subject of a number of presentations by aspiring doctors on rotation....Each presentation requires that the resident or intern who is doing it examine me from top to bottom, inside and out.....And sometimes, somehow, these nervous, bright-eyed medical boys inspire in me lubricious fantasies....I climb up onto their tables and lie down, buckling my dumb wig [for hair loss due to chemo] as my head falls back on the fresh, waxy paper, and surrender myself to their probing and poking.”
As her choriocarcinoma (a rare cancer of the placenta) metastasizes throughout her body and she turns gaunt and her flesh discolored, they finally begin to take her symptoms seriously. Yet she is still misdiagnosed and persuaded to undergo a hysterectomy, an oophorectomy, open-heart surgery, and other unnecessary treatments, before they finally hit upon it–cancer!–and she's thrust into multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Amidst all of this, she has an affair with her main doctor, and true to form, holds nothing back in her unflinching account of how sex and medicine mingle inexorably in the very hospital room, exposed genitals and all.
Cook pulls through in the end, only to be thrust into a new domestic crisis, the unraveling of her marriage. Here she wrestles with fundamental questions of self-autonomy upon which the book concludes, if somewhat inconclusively. We want to know more about her stints working as a fashion model and abortion clinic assistant (before her illness) and as a sex therapist and psychologist (after her illness)–experiences that would surely be all of a piece with the rest of the book.
Fifields' The Great Successor picks up where Demick's Nothing to Envy leaves off to lay out all the bizarre developments and shenanigans of the Kim Jong Un regime, from his obsession with amusement parks and nuclear weapons to basketball. The Dennis Rodman affair, the Trump meeting in Singapore, the execution of relatives and top officials with anti-aircraft guns, and the assassination of his brother Kim Jong Nam by having two women smear his face with deadly chemicals in Kuala Lumpur airport (who thought they were participating in a reality show contest), are all laid out in dour and delicious detail.
Reporter Thomas Fowler's fraught love-hate relationship with American spy Alden Pyle during the First Indochina War is wrought into poignant literature by Greene's wise decision to have Fowler tell the story in the first person, as he struggles to relate their tortured love triangle over the beautiful Phuong in detached journalistic reportage.
It's been called one of the greatest Chinese novels of the 20th century, and rightly so, for its literary sophistication, biting comedy of manners, and the tragic implications of social relations in 1930s China. There is no happy or sentimental resolution to the slow-motion collapse of the failed university-lecturer protagonist's failed marriage to a dull woman. Qian's observations are keen and details telling, such as this concise portrait of a woman sitting in a restaurant filing her nails (substitute Chinese woman in Starbucks today fiddling with iPhone): “She raised her head, her face filled with an expression of solemn unapproachability, as though having been wronged by men in a previous life, she was still keeping her guard up in this one. She looked him over a moment, shot her red lips over toward the left, then lowered her head and continued filing away at her nails.”
Compellingly written and just exhaustive enough to flesh out the picture every step of the way without getting too bogged down in extraneous details, Spitz's 1,000-page tome only seems to lose focus and rush things in the final Abbey Road-Let it Be years, as if getting impatient with his book's sheer length. Though I grew up with the Beatles (relying on my mother to pick up their albums starting with “Beatles ‘65”), there's a lot I didn't know, so many curious and bizarre stories behind the songs, such as the title of “A hard day's night” being one of Starr's frequent “Ringoisms” (malapropisms) and the opening of “I am the walrus” depicting a police siren. Another fascinating fact: before they broke out, the Beatles were rejected again and again by radio and record producers for being inept and incompetent, their music simply deemed not good enough; or during their massive concerts during which neither they nor anyone in the audience could hear the music due to the screaming crowds, they were constantly pelted with jellybeans (not out of anger). It becomes fully clear why they quit performing live in 1966.