Isham Cook
Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy
Joanna Angel,Annie Sprinkle,+58 more
Brave, somewhat haphazard book of interviews with proud and unashamed porn stars, primarily interesting for their travails of coming out to their families, rather than the actual porn business.
As entertaining as French's book is, it's built on sheer fictionalization and gothic embellishments; read Graeme Sheppard's A Death in Peking for a debunking.
One of the first books of philosophy I discovered, at the age of 18; Schopenhauer's dour pessimism is paradoxically entertaining and elevating, due to his beautifully logical style.
Grof is one of the big names in LSD research, and this book is his attempt to help people try to recreate some of the psychedelic experience through deep breathing who don't have access to the drug itself.
One of the early, amusing time-travel novels, a satire on both the medieval era and 19th c. America.
Well-written literary novel set in different periods in China, up through contemporary Beijing; the narrative did not wholly cohere for me and was awkwardly constructed.
I've now read all the plays (many multiple times) except for King John and Henry VI (1-3) & VIII, which I'll get around to at some point. My views on Shakespeare (garnered after years of teaching him as well) are summed up in my concise essay “A Shakespeare sex-and-violence starter kit” (https://ishamcook.com/2012/01/29/shakespeare-sex-and-violence-starter-kit/). I had David Bevington, the editor, as my teacher in several courses at the University of Chicago back in the '80s. Now, for sheer ability to create worlds through speech and dialogue alone (the Elizabethan stage largely lacked props and scenery), Shakespeare is the gold standard for all fiction and drama writers. I say this as a skeptic of the timeworn piety that “Shakespeare” the writer and Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were the same person. Who really wrote Shakespeare's plays is the greatest literary mystery of all time. No, it's neither Edward de Vere nor any of the other long trotted-out usual suspects. We just don't know (a good place to start is Diana Price's “Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography”).
This history of the Taiping Civil War in China (1850-64) has to be one of the most harrowing accounts of warfare I've ever read. The U.S. Civil War was child's play by comparison. Augustus Lindley was an ex-British naval officer who joined the Taiping cause, lived in Taiping-controlled Nanjing, and fought on their side. His 2-volume, 800-page magnum opus alternates between shocking, cliffhanger adventures and battles and outraged polemics against the British Government, which intervened on behalf of the Qing Imperial forces (allegedly to protect British business and trade interests), thus turning the tide against the Taiping with superior weaponry that the Qing forces lacked. According to Lindley's own estimates (meticulously gathered from numerous contemporary accounts), as a result of this intervention alone in the final 2 years of the war, the combined British (and French) and Imperial forces were responsible for directly slaughtering 372,550 Taiping and non-combatant civilians; another 2,500,000 civilians were starved to death by deliberately blocking their access to food (total casualties for the war range between 20-30 million, overwhelmingly civilians). In walled city after city in the Yangzte River delta region, the Brits set up their heavy guns (cannons and howitzers) and bombarded everything inside - mostly non-combatants, women, and children whose only crime was happening to live there - fully aware they were killing many thousands. Any remaining survivors were driven out into an execution grounds for decapitation and dismemberment by Qing forces.
Alternative and more persuasive account than Paul French's Midnight in Peking of the Pamela Werner murder. I've read both accounts of the Pamela Werner murder–Paul French's Midnight in Peking and now Sheppard's book. Both offer radically different accounts, and I have to say I am far more convinced by Sheppard's. This isn't the space to go into much detail, except to say French's account gets off to a bad start when he places the location of Pamela's body in a ditch outside the Tartar Wall directly below the Fox Tower. Newspapers at the time of the murder, fed by Peking police reports (e.g. the London Times of Jan. 9, 1937, quoted by Sheppard) noted the body's location in a ditch on the INSIDE of the Tartar Wall and considerably west of the Fox Tower (some 750 meters); the discovery by the Fox Tower seems to be French's invention, in order to sensationalize his story by linking the murder to this legendary haunted tower. However, these conflicting locations are starkly different in terms of their logistical feasibility and the suspects in either case; and it's quite telling as an example of the sensationalism of French's entire book, which though admittedly an engrossing page-turner, has more in common with literary fiction and mystery novels than hard facts. The comment above by the one-star reviewer that French's inaccuracies are “relatively inconsequential” is not true; on the contrary, they are very consequential, as you'll discover by reading first French and then Sheppard.
An invented-language novel in the tradition A Clockwork Orange, just easy enough to read and just difficult enough to put off the impatient.
Radical, incisive vision of liberated sexuality, marred only by the author's constant unnecessary insertions of “trigger warnings.” If readers really needed trigger warnings, they wouldn't have picked the book up in the first place.
Intriguing philosophy by a contemporary Daoist, grounded in traditional Chinese medical practices.
If nothing else, a novel should be instructive. This novel was a trying read but I managed to get through it and learned how NOT to live life. It's a well-regarded novel and is indeed competently written, but it's a dreary story, with the most tediously dull and dreadful characters. Clearly, Williams is spoofing bourgeois academic society here, but the parody is so withering and the trappings so desiccated that there isn't very much to work with. Perhaps it's a perverse sort of test: the reader that succeeds in finishing the book realizes they actually belong in the book and the joke is on them.
First read this when it came out and I was thirteen. I stayed up the whole night to finish it. Revisiting the novel over fifty years later was a completely different yet no less satisfying experience. The author captures the unnamed first-person teenage girl's voice convincingly, and it's fascinating to see how her expressive powers evolve and grow over the course of the narrative a la Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, as she gets involved with, and is profoundly influenced by, a variety of shady, hippie characters introducing her to powerful drug experiences. The book was meant to frighten teenagers away from drugs, but it had the opposite effect on me.