From Publishers Weekly
A smoothly guided tour through the history of this often glamorized narcotic, Hodgson's slim volume is handsomely assembled and illustrated with woodcuts, sketches and photographs. It recounts how 19th- and 20th-century writers (among them Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau and Graham Greene) "elevated opium...to the status of a muse"; demonstrates "the box-office draw of drugs" in the era of silent film; describes the "opium clippers," sleek Victorian ships designed to transport the drug from India to China; and surveys the multifarious literature of opium-smoking, from firsthand reports of Hong Kong squalor to prurient pulp fiction. Opium was a popular ingredient in all sorts of Victorian and turn-of-the-century medicines. But since most North America opium smokers were Chinese immigrants, the drug provided an occasion for moral panic and anti-immigrant feeling. Far less ambitious and less didactic than Martin Booth's 1998 Opium: A History, Hodgson's volume excels in its plethora of quotes from Dickens, Sax Rohmer and Arthur Symons (represented by a remarkable sonnet), pictures from obscure yet revealing French painters, Chinese photographers and documentation of crusaders and journalists such as P.B. Doesticks, who visited an opium den in New York City's Chinatown and found "a cube of smoke the size of the apartment, about the consistence [sic] of blancmange." (Sept..
- of blancmange." (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Detour
In the Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch of the West wanted to knock Dorothy, the scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion out of commission, she knew exactly what to do. "Poppies," she said, holding poison over her crystal ball as she cast a spell, "poppies...poppies will put them to sleep." Sure enough, in the next scene, Dorothy and her companions encountered a lush field of the ostensibly harmless flowers, and in no time, all of them-even furry little Toto-were snoozing like babies. The subtext of this episode is not so subtle validation of the seductively soporific effects of the poppy known as papaver somniferum, and its notorious derivative, opium: one of nature's most pleasurable and addictive narcotics. In the richly illustrated Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon, Canadian born author Barbara Hodgson brings this fascinating and frightening substance vividly to life. Long before "heroin chic" made its way into the fashion vernacular, images of smoky dens filled with inert, glazed-eyed, pipe-sucking opium addicts were the stuff of legend. Indeed, from its introduction to the West via China in the 1850's, through literary works such as Thomas De Quincey's 1821 memoir Confessions of an English Opium Eater, to today's eponymous Yves Saint Laurent perfume, opium-whether ingested as morphine, laudanum, heroin, or another of its many incarnations has never gone out of style.
