Isham Cook
A thorough, academically grounded, entertainingly narrated investigation of the origin and history of the fallacious idea that magical ointments were the main culprit in the alleged and unfounded claims by the Church and Inquisition that witches murdered babies in their sabbaths. Psychoactive ointments (typically infused with plants of the nightshade variety) have been used around world since time immemorial in vision-inducing and shamanistic ceremonies, but never for the purpose of infanticide. My only complaint is that Hatsis abruptly ends his study without going into more detail about how the plants were efficaciously chosen, extracted and employed in the various ointments, as there are few modern studies or practical recipes for these possibly beneficial substances.
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.
Nothing in David Corn's new book wasn't already known, but he pulls it all together and his history of the GOP makes for an excellent page-turning refresher course. What's indisputably clear is that the Republican Party is and has long been (at least since the 1950s) thoroughly, unremittingly evil, and there's not much hope for the USA as long as it continues to exist. If this sounds rather stark, go back to school and read the book.
From her perch on a sofa in her favorite cafe, reporter Judy Vernon witnesses a man outside on the sidewalk yelling angrily into his cellphone before collapsing with a heart attack. He stares hopelessly at her as he dies, and his shocked gaze haunts her. She investigates. As she learns more about Frank Farrington, she proceeds to do a story on his intriguing life. She soon becomes involved with his family, and the complications of her new social web begin to affect her own life–in a good way.
This odd yet endearing book, which began with hints of a crime novel, turns out to be a species of comedy. Not in the modern sense of gags and humorous situations but in the traditional sense of the opposite of tragedy: instead of all going horribly wrong, it all goes horribly right; couples get matched up with their ideal partners and everything works out a la Shakespearean comedy.
The setting is an unknown location in Any City, USA (or Australia?) with fictionalized restaurants, bars and coffeehouses, surely based on real establishments lovingly known to the author. Atmosphere and texture are provided not by suspense and drama but elaborate descriptions of food and sex; the former almost pornographically described and the latter, well, what saves the narrative from the “erotica” category is its investment in interesting, well-rounded characters and their unfolding relationships, the central focus.
The heroine gets matched up with the handsome, well-to-do Myron. Here's where things get on shaky ground. This fawning, insipid milquetoast of a mate challenges our patience and we wonder why he doesn't challenge Judy's. We're waiting for her to grow bored with him so she can get on with her budding lesbian infatuation with the hot Ali she met in Frank's familial network; we fear she's seduced only by his money. Thankfully, however, events are wrapped up in the end not wholly as predicted.
From what I understand of William Leonard Pickard's background, he was trained as a chemist (after an aborted first semester at Princeton as an undergraduate) and spent most of his years manufacturing LSD (ultimately in an abandoned nuclear missile silo in Kansas) and moving within that milieu, while dipping into more academic study here and there, including several fruitful years at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His publications are limited to a few scientific and governmental policy articles on drugs and the drug trade. Meanwhile, a good portion of his life (25+ years) was spent in prison for a drug-conspiracy charge. He claims to have written The Rose entirely with pencil and paper during his last period of incarceration and published it in 2016 (he was finally freed in 2020).
Without a background in literary studies, however, either academically or as a literary author with decades of experience in the craft or prior relevant publications, how in the hell then was Pickard able to write a book of such literary accomplishment, lexical breadth and allusiveness, and stylistic assuredness?
The Rose moreover contains innumerable minutely rendered, almost encyclopedic, accounts of scenes in far-flung spots around the world, down to exact descriptions of clothing, decor, flora and landscapes, which he seems to have been able to call up at will in his prison cell. This is beyond the ability of a mere photographic memory, which tends to be indiscriminate in its cataloging of detail. But the Rose records precisely those details demanded by his narrative. I cannot see how Pickard was able to access all of this information. Federal prisons don't allow unrestricted or unsupervised use of the internet, and he was likely limited to email. Undoubtedly his many friends and contacts would have been mailing some of the information he required, but could not possibly have supplied everything he needed to write this book.
Perhaps, with the vast time on his hands in prison, his mind grew to comparable vastness, enabling and feeding his monumental vision–sweeping hallucinatory landscapes that enact rather than merely mimic the LSD experience, undergirded by profound Buddhist wisdom and all rendered in the most beautiful, inimitable prose–enriched from long acquaintance with entheogens, and he filled in all the requisite details through the powers of imagination alone, even if not everything was accurate and possibly made up out of whole cloth?
While a more skeptically minded person might suspect The Rose was collaboratively written (with a ghostwriter or writers, or an editor so thorough as to blur the line between editorship and authorship), and Pickard was generously allowed to claim sole authorship, nonetheless, I must give him benefit of the doubt and regard him as the sole author of his amazing literary creation. As for specifics about the book, please have a look at other reviews. The book is too large and capacious for me to go into any more detail here without turning this review itself into a book.
So fascinating you don't notice the 900 pages. Tidbits from the section on the Puritans in 17th-c. New England: It was illegal to be single. Tithingmen regularly barged in and inspected every family. Bachelors were rounded up and forced to live with a family. Teenage males could be executed for not obeying their parents.
Courting couples were allowed to spend the night together in their parent's house, but the girl was fitted into a tight bag called a bundling stocking up to the hips so that the boy had no access to her groin but she was allowed to be naked from the waist up. Masturbation was punishable by death (more of a warning; it was rarely carried out). If someone was accused of bestiality, and you were observed joking or making light of it, just for that you could be permanently banished from the town.
Children were kicked out of the house (“sent out”) when they became prepubescent or adolescent since with so many family members (avg. 8-10 children) the likelihood of incest increased. The sent-out children were usually put with a smaller family (where they would also be taught manners).
The Puritans didn't have churches but rather “meeting halls.” Sunday service was compulsory and sermons lasted 5-6 hours. In winter they were deliberately unheated inside, on the excuse that stoves might set off the munitions and explosives regularly stored there!
Some males were given bizarre first names at birth like “Notwithstanding”, “Maybe”, and “Increase”. Know how they got them? One of the parents would put their finger on a random word in the Bible.
Brilliant account, equally scientific and emotional, of the Pompeii tragedy, with parallels drawn to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (the physics of the WTC downblasts resembled a mini volcanic eruption). Some will complain Pellegrino goes on far too many religious and other digressions, though some of these serve to contextualize and get into the heads of those living in 1st century Italy; the spiritual philosophizing also follows from the author's own harrowing coincidences relevant to the story. Without the digressions, the tome would be halved in length and considerably more concise, but Pellegrino is such a fine writer that it all sort of comes together in a worthwhile way.
Miller's vulgarity fetish and absence of coherent narrative are welded into a solid and memorable whole by his relentlessly inventive and gorgeous English. And you can see how Jack Kerouac picked up where Miller left off.
This is hardcore Hallidayan linguistics, but it is valuable for writers and readers of fiction in one important sense - how conversational dialogue actually works, as opposed to how novelists think it works (of course, it's impossible to represent wholly naturalistic dialogue in fiction anyway).
Apart from the book's scandalous content, it's remarkable for its perfect fusion of form and content, as the chapters and episodes grow increasingly shorter and atomized as the captives' bodies are physically dismembered by the sadists-murderers lording over the mountaintop castle. As depraved as it is, one mustn't forget that it's only fiction, and it's a measure of a society's intellectual freedom that such infamous historical works are allowed to be published and preserved.
Entertaining narrative on Timothy Leary's adventures up through his Millbrook commune.
Merged review:
Entertaining narrative on Timothy Leary's adventures up through his Millbrook commune.
Finally got around to reading this biography years after I bought it, on one of the most intense intellectuals in the world of psychology, long personally involved with Freud until Reich's Marxism sparked irremediable tensions.
Stylistic masterpiece, the prose mimicking the slow, strange and uncannily beautiful crystallization of the entire physical world, trapping the protagonist in a labyrinth of glass and color.
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't steal Hoffman's book, but I sure didn't pay the absurdly high Kindle price now listed when I bought it years ago. Can't steal the Kindle anyway.
One of the most controversial books ever - on the one hand repulsively sexist and cynical, on the other a masterpiece of publishing originality.
Highly readable, important text far ahead of its time on the perversion of the family and the strangulation of sexuality under patriarchal monogamy and capitalism; even more important than Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
I remember an unlikely friend of my parents sheepishly showing me this book when I was 15 and then saying, “I probably shouldn't have let you see this.”
This startling book which came out in 1989 (the Robert Mapplethorpe era) with its shocking photographs of torture artists would test any government's censorship guidelines.
I was prepared to go along with, even endorse, Laurie Penny's contention that white male entitlement is almost exclusively to blame for our society's burden of sexism and sexual violence because, well, if we are honest about it, there's much truth to it, and if her thesis is rather simplistically and brutally prosecuted for rhetorical purposes, then again so is male violence. But one passage in this otherwise cogently argued book, fiery polemics aside, stuck out like a jagged edge, so unbelievable are its implications. Penny is careful to differentiate between the worst of male offenders and the rest of the male population, the majority of whom after all do not offend. Yet when she queried her male friends “what exactly it was that stopped them going down that road” and “manage to retain their grip on human decency,” as if the only thing holding them back was their triumphant self-control, the reasons they gave are nonetheless unwittingly shocking:
“It was my mother, one man wrote. She raised me to respect women. It was my father, said another. I saw how he treated my mother and sisters. I swore to be different. I escaped an oppressive Evangelist background, another man told me, and that led me to question everything. It was the love of Jesus, said another. My college girlfriend was patient with me. My wife had had enough. I have a daughter. I am a son. It was the girls in my online gaming group. It was my karate teacher. I got sober. I got dumped. I got better.”
So that means, if I don't have a good mother, or a good father, I'm more liable to hate and kill women? Or it's only because I “swear” to be “different” from the common killer that prevents me from becoming one? If I don't love Jesus, I will inevitably assault or kill? If my college girlfriend is impatient with me, I will have to kill her? Or only having a child can prevent me from becoming violent? If the females in my gaming group aren't friendly enough, that will cause me to kill them? Alternatively, to prevent myself from becoming a murderer, I can try distracting myself with martial arts? Or stop drinking? Or behave just obnoxiously enough to get dumped so that I don't do anything worse?
Wow. Who the hell are these guys? I suppose I've met a smattering of types over the years who may have expressed such dimwitted sentiments but I don't recall any. Equally bewildering is Penny's implicit assumption that these represent the best of men, her evident admiration for their courage in facing their darkest impulses: “Every answer was different. The common thing was that they all had one. There was a moment, or a number of moments, where they decided to rewrite the story of their own lives. The difference between sexist and non-sexist men is not how depressed they are but how good their skills are for dealing with it.”
If struggling against the implacable inner compulsion toward violence represents some kind of model behavior or skillfulness in handling male despair, I'm not sure where that leaves me, as I, inexplicably, do not feel any such compulsion. Perhaps I must be in some kind of denial and if I were honest with myself I would have to recognize and come to terms with my own killer instinct?
No. I am sorry, but although I am a white male, I am not one of them. The reason I don't assault or kill women is not that something is holding me back. Quite simply, the very idea of hurting another person is repugnant and unimaginable irrespective of the circumstances! And of course it's morally wrong and evil. No other reason is needed. I can no more comprehend the mentality of violent men than any (nonviolent) woman can.
If Penny truly believes it's only men's mastery of their violent tendencies that keeps them from harming women, hers is indeed a grim, dark, pessimistic view of men. It's clear from Penny's account that she does not hate men; she claims to have loved many men in her life. She reminds us that the sexual revolution she believes is presently gathering force can restore male-female sexual relations to a state of equality and consent rather than coercion and fear: “Men who mouth the language of erotic liberation are often secretly terrified of women's sexual agency.” While she does express a nice paradox here, it doesn't ring true for me. I am not at all intimidated by women who boldly declare their desire; it's quite a turn-on in fact. I am sure many men long to see a society where women could display their sexual agency as freely and safely as they themselves can.
I'm afraid men are more complex and the world more complicated than Penny makes it out to be. The problem is not her depiction of awful men, legions of whom unfortunately do exist. It's the absence of any truly positive examples of men that confounds, or not even that, just ordinary men I see around me and deal with on a regular basis who are living constructively and creatively and have better things to do than live lives “predicated on violence.”
Reputedly fearsomely difficult book (it's actually one of Derrida's easiest), marks one as an intellectual for having read it. Basic thesis: the invention of writing was perhaps the most profound invention ever, but we lack the vocabulary to talk objectively about it since the very act is dependent upon writing.
Well-written early manifesto (1996) on the dangers of anti-sex hysteria on American college campuses.
A slim, pithy book in clear, elegant English, but not an easy read, as monogamy itself is not an easy matter, when we delve beneath so many couples' self-congratulatory optimism.
In this YA novel about a Chinese girl's initial coming of age, there is not much of a plot, nothing outright dramatic occurs (apart from the momentous results of a senior high-school entrance exam and the death of a relative), there is no romance or sexual awakening to speak of (as one might expect in a Western YA novel), no troublemaking or law-breaking, even hardly any quarrelling with parents. If this might seem to be a recipe for boredom, what we have instead is a refreshing little novel told in an unexpected way and quite unlike any other expat-authored novel set in China that I have read. The setting is a slightly dated Beijing (turn of the century). We follow the heroine Shuyuan and her lower-income family as she grapples with the most important things in her life, typical of mid-teens all over China at the time (and still today), rather humbler than what Western kids undergo in their own fraught transition to early adulthood, yet no less meaningful (or traumatic): getting through each day making the right decisions, dealing with adversity (family bickering due to lack of money), emergencies (a pet rabbit accidentally left out in the cold). As a 15-year-old, Shuyuan can't be expected to have much of a distinct personality, and she doesn't, but this serves a useful purpose. She functions as a transparent, nonjudgmental, and sympathetic eye through which the reader gets a firsthand, intimate tour of domestic Beijing life, and in Sjoquist's disciplined hands, the focus is always on the here and now, all incidents and events invested with equal meaning and conveyed in clean, spare, unsentimental prose, perfectly suited to the subject matter.