Many of Wilson's books have been accused of being mere fodder for his personal philosophy, incorporating the same jokes and the same sermons into a barely recognizable plot. That is not true, but much of what attracts people to his books is the way that he makes people see things in different perspectives.

This book has essays on physics, Sade, and Joyce. Both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are explained in ways that actually make a person want to read the books, while the Marquis de Sade is given his due as the master of disturbing literature.

What makes this book worthwhile for me is the essay on Tennessee Williams comparing him to Sade. I don't remember the play that he is discussing, nor does American Theatre for that matter, but what stands out is a praise for Williams as a true artist - "An artist must put out questions and let the audience figure it out for themselves. An artist is not there to provide the answers. Arthur Miller is not an artist because he spoonfeeds the answers to you. In every play Miller is running for elected office."

I am paraphrasing but in that one argument, I managed to crystalize and express all my doubts about political art - including agitprop, "identity art" and sermons disguised as plays. I knew that I hated these types of artistic expressions, but I always felt like I should like them especially when they agreed with my political philosophy. For that alone, this book is worth buying. You have a 90% chance of finding something in this work that states a constantly debated point so clearly that you wonder why it wasn't said this way to begin with.

This book has something lacking in most Wilson books, namely a linear plotline and fairly believable characters who aren't merely stand-ins for the author's philosophy. Granted three of the characters are real people but that's besides the point.

An amateur Kabalist who is related to the Hagbard Celine of the original Illuminatus trilogy (and the other Celine of the Historical Illuminatus trilogy) finds himself driven mad by the machinations of Aleister Crowley. On a train he runs into Albert Einstein - the scientist who approached science as if it were art - and James Joyce - the artist who approached art as if it were a science. As he retells his story, Einstein and Joyce slowly unravel the trail of deceit and mindgames sponsored by Crowley.

It's fairly obvious by the second chapter that not only is this not much of a thriller, but Robert Anton Wilson is a major Aleister Crowley fan. Much of this book is a homage to Wilson's favorite historical figures with "Uncle Al" as the star of the show. That may take away from the whole mystery aspect of the book, but you find yourself cheering on Crowley soon as well.

This is not only a great book but a nice controlled storyline. The only complaint is that it doesn't have much to do with the world of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, and the word Illuminatus seems to be tacked on in order to sell this book to fans of that series. However, in many ways this later work surpasses the original trilogy.

I only read about half of this book and when I put it down I reevaluated my affection for everything written by Robert Anton Wilson who recommends it so highly.

Basically the main point of the book is that repressed sexual energy causes violence and wars. The solution is to have more orgasms. Written in impossible prose, you feel like a fool for wading through it long enough to figure out what Reich is talking about. Any college freshman will tell you that people go to war because they don't have enough sex.

It's almost more believable when Reich says it, but not much. Interesting footnote from the post-Freudian days of psychology and definitely better than Jung, but not much to offer in this text. I haven't read the other Reich texts, so I can't speak for everything that Reich has written.

Richard Bach's main trick when he was writing was to confuse Jesus with Buddha and vice versa. That way Jonathan Livingston Seagull can return from the dead to teach and let people make up their own minds - as opposed to Jesus who returned from the dead in order to convince people to worship him.

This offering has less pictures than Bach's more popular work, but just as much superficiality. The plot concerns a guy who meets a Christ-figure that spouts Buddhist hippie philosophy. One particular instance has the Christ-figure character espousing that Christ was telling people to be creative. Of course, couldn't that just have been written in the Gospels instead of that stuff about sin atonement? Follow me or burn? If you don't know that I am the Messiah, then that just proves your ignorance?

The book carries on in that vein until a bunch of people get together to kill this guy. It isn't really clear why he's getting killed but since he's a Christ figure that's kind of expected.

What Richard Bach fails to realize is that there is more to spirituality, enlightenment, or religion than a bunch of neat sayings for college kids. Bach's Christ-figure says a few nice thing but conscientiously avoids all the more "disturbing" elements of Christ.

This is a nice book. A harmless book, a tame book. It is a book for people who have decided that their old spirituality that once satisfied no longer satisfies. But it's certainly not a deep book or a book that is going to change your life, and you should run away from anyone who tells you that Richard Bach is deep.

This Michelle Yoeh star vehicle is an enjoyable little movie. There's nothing too challenging. The plot isn't very complicated. There's not much flying.

Still, the reputation as the greatest female martial arts movie ever made is troubling. There are a dozen other Hong Kong movies starring women that are much better and Michelle Yoeh is certainly not the greatest of Hong Kong stars. She fights. She emotes, but she's not that fascinating to watch.

Besides that this movie isn't much more than the standard late 70s Hong Kong movies. Hero is great. Hero gets beat up. Hero has to learn better martial arts. Hero goes back to fight again and wins this time out. The martial arts are a little better choreographed and it looks like they can afford a better class of rock quarry these days, but it's not much more than a female version of Snake in Eagle's Shadow.

What is to be said about this movie that hasn't been said better by other reviewers? What is to be said about this play that hasn't been said by other critics?

Harold Bloom in Shakespeare:Invention of the Human dismissed this play as an orgy of gallows humor and said that it should be done by Mel Brooks if it was going to be done properly. A movie critic said that the gratuitous violence distracted from Shakespeare's themes (and my friends were laughing about that one for days) proving that the rush to love Shakespeare has left many Shakespearean plays unread.

As Shakespeare's Reservoir Dogs, this play serves up cannibalism, dismemberment, rape, murder, son killing, adultery, madness and corpses. As Aaron the Moor puts it "if I did one good deed in all my life - I repent of it". Anthony Hopkins is the center of attention as the Roman General so loyal to Rome that he'll kill his own son rather than see the Emporer disgraced. It takes a rare actor who can make this guy likeable, sympathetic even, and Hopkins performs beautifully. He's not so much heartless as he is stupid. The only parallel to Hannibal Lector is that we liked Hannibal Lector even when he was eating people. When he goes nuts he goes all the way and laughing in the face of his son's dismembered heads is one of the high points. (shortly followed by the order to his daughter to bear up his dismembered hand in her mouth.)

Glenn Close begans sympathetic as she bleeds for her son's life but once she's firmly established in the Roman court she begans to show her brutality. By the time she encourages her sons to rape Titus' daughter, you hate this woman but at least you admire her.

Alan Cummings is starting to get typecast as the campy crazy guy but he brings enough angst to the role of Saturnine that it's a brilliant performance nonetheless. He holds his own against Hopkins and Close. Also Aaron the Moor, who is normally a one-note villain, is performed so smoothly that you want him to succeed. SHakespeare would later perfect this villain with Richard III before moving on to more nuanced villains like Iago and Macbeth.

The sets are beautiful. The symbiosis of ancient and modern Rome is brilliant while the goth/punk/glam aesthetic is perfect for Shakespeare. Too often people think that Shakespeare should be British as in stiff upper-lip and people in tights. They neglect the fact that not only is Shakespeare universal because he can appeal to anyone, but that Elizabethan England was a much wilder and compelling context for Shakespeare than the Victorian England role models that have been coming at us in recent decades. Jazz age decadence and punk empires is the stuff of Shakespeare.

Be warned. This is an early Shakespeare play being adapted and it doesn't have the nuance, abivalence, philosophy or subtlety of his later work. This is an exercise in brutality and violence and there really isn't one sympathetic character in the play if you are reading it. It is up to the actors to make us like these people and they are fighting an uphill battle as these guys are horrid. There's also a lack of quotable dialogue that so overpowers Hamlet and later offerings. You won't find Renaissance Festival geeks spouting off dialogue from this thing (which alone makes it worth buying) and you won't make a career out of writing papers on this play. Shakespeare snobs and Bardolators need not apply.

Everyone else, buy this movie. Give it as a gift. Even if you are put off by Shakespeare - ESPECIALLY if you are put off by Shakespeare you need to see this thing.

There is something so sweet and so innocent about the myth of the 60s that you almost forget that these people were just as prone to infighting, backstabbing, selfishness, jealousy, and all the other sins that shows like Survivor capitalize upon.

Tom Wolfe takes a rare journalistic travel with some of the original hippies - Ken Kesey's merry pranksters who travel the country on a bus driven by Neal Cassidy in his post-On the Road, pre-dead on a railroad tracks glory while dropping acid and having lots of sex. There are gang bangs, acid laced koolaid, arrests, faked deaths, and the beginning of one of the greatest novels in America.

Written with less journalistic objectivity than most book, you can tell that Tom Wolfe is a fan of these guys even as he doesn't directly participate in their lifestyle as you imagine Hunter S. Thompson would do. Wolfe compiles thousands of interviews and experiences in order to bring people into the heads of these tripped out losers and in the process makes them into legends. The only problem is that sometimes WOlfe goes a little too far off the deep end and in creating dialogue and internal monologues for these characters he's more projecting his own biases. A later book of his (The Right Stuff) takes this method to extremes as he spends a good deal of time writing his narrative from a test monkey's perspective. While there is nothng so extreme in this book, it is more pervasive here.

This is both a classic of the 60s counterculture and a great example of gonzo journalism (which is to real journalism like Herodotus is to history). At very least it is a great insight into the mind and work of Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (partially on acid) and who became a celebrity in his own right.

By the way, if you are going to buy this book you might as well buy One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. You won't be able to resist that book if you read this one.

Most of the time sequels are just rehashes of the originals with a little variation in order to keep people from wondering why they just shouldn't read/watch the original. While this is a safe bet for readers and publishers alike, it is almost too safe. You are bound to like the new work, but not love it.

This book both departs and stays true to the original. Again we are in the turn of the century New York City where corruption reigns, psychology is in its early William James stages, most forensic techniques are "experimental" and the streets are just as dirty and evil as today. It's this refreshing anti-nostalgic view of Victorian America that helped make the first book so great.

The departure is the narrator. Instead of the reporter, the narrative shifts to Stevie Taggert who explains in the first chapter that he's writing this book as a bet. The self-referential irony of "people don't want to read books about boy prostitutes being murdered in grisly ways" is merely cute and it does up the stakes for this book as Taggert claims to have a story that is just as intriguing but not so violent. Mr. Moore, the reporter, takes him on and we are off on another trip through the underside of New York.

Caleb Carr's shift in focus makes this book a great sequel as you see these people through a totally different viewpoint and you realize how unreliable was Mr. Moore's viewpoint from the first book. Some characters are much the same, while others are completely different. Sarah is more forceful. The Isaacson brothers are funnier than the first book. Cyrus and Dr. Kreizler are pretty much the same, although you do learn more about Dr. Kreizler's childhood which is only hinted at in the first book. The main character changes are Stevie, who turns out to be much more resourceful and much more emotional in his own viewpoint than from what Mr. Moore thought and Mr. Moore, the narrator of the first book. In that book he mentioned his drinking and his gambling, but in this book from Stevie's eyes he is a sloppy obnoxious drunk. In the first book you wondered why he and Sarah never hooked up. In this book you wonder why Sarah even has anything to do with him in the first place.

Ok. The story is no longer about a serial killer but is about a woman who kills children and does it deliberately. Fighting against the prevailing Victorian morality that women are "naturally" more caring and nurturing, Dr. Kreizler tracks down the killer in the first 100 pages and then finds himself trying to convince anyone else to take the charges seriously.

The meat of the book happens when Clarence Darrow hits the center stage. Darrow was that much of a forceful personality that no other lawyer has had so many movies or books written about him. He doesn't disappoint in this book either. As the defense counsel he manages to take an airtight case and shred it to pieces. While most depictions of Darrow have him as the hero, he is a lawyer after all and he takes his job seriously enough to defend his client to the best of his ability even if his client isn't a teacher that teaches evolution. In this book Darrow is the "villain" in a sense, but mostly he is just a very good lawyer doing his job and while you don't like him in the context of the story, you cannot help but respect and admire him. The parallels to the O.J. trial are probably intentional.

Unfortunately the courtroom drama of the book stops about 70 pages before the ending and we are off on another chase. It's not that it's a bad chase but it is just a little too much like the first book to be suspenseful. There are also characters that you know are going to die before the end and you almost want to scream at the people around these characters. I know that's the convention of mystery novels, but you really like the soon-to-be-dead characters.

So this is a great book for everyone who is into mysteries. It is less violent but just as intriguing as the first book. It departs nicely from the first book, but as it became its own book for awhile there, I was disappointed when it started rehashing scenes from the original.

The only caveat to reading this book before the first one is that one of the characters that dies in the first book is alluded to in this book. You might want to read the first one if you don't want that plot twist spoiled for you.

I am not a Christian. I haven't been a Christian since I was 15, nor do I want to return to that mindset. So why am I reading this book?

Vicarious thrills, the Jack T. Chick "you're all going to Hell" fun, reconfirmation as to why I'm not a Christian, and most of all the story is a modern adaption of the Book of Revelations which was always a whacky little book when I was younger.

I don't know if it's worth it. For every decent scene (cars blowing up, people disappearing, the anti-CHrist charming everyone, fire from Heaven, etc.) there are about a half dozen scenes of people sitting around preaching the fundamentalist Gospel, having internal monologues with themselves as to why they never decided to become truly Christian until after everyone disappeared, and waiting for someone else to come along so that they can preach.

If I was a fundamentalist Christian I imagine this all might thrill me like a pep fest thrills football players, but since I am not a Christian (nor much for pep fests, but that's another story) I just try to figure out how much I can skim without missing any important plot elements.

The story is not bad but the filler is deadly dull and if the reviews of the next few books are any indication, it never gets any better.

Other things in the book that irritate me - The SuperMagical formula to make Israel bloom - one character explains that you cna irrigate Israel but then you are just making the sand wet. Desert land is the MOST FERTILE land in the world. Because nothing grows in desert land all the nutrients are in the ground.

religious Jews, NO Orthodox Jews - Get it? Jews who aren't falling all over themselves to become Christian can't be considered religious. I know it's just CHristian chauvanism that declares that it is the only religion and everyone else is a secret Satan worshipper, but it irks me.

Ray Steele - whine whine whine! We got it, you didn't accept Jesus as your personal lord and savior. Boohoo. That's good for a page, maybe two, but not half of the 400 page book.

Hattie Durham and other characters relations to her - I know that she's the only one who isn't "saved" as of book 7, but maybe that's because no one talks to this woman unless they want to save her soul or have sex with her. Besides that she's just the wimpering crying girl.

The "debates" - someone puts up an argument. Someone else gives Christian doctrine. They go on, but it's pointless because you know that the arguing party is just going to agree and go along with it. This is of course the part of the book that the authors want us to read because they think that they are engaging in apologetics of the highest order. They are engaging in dullness of the lowest order.

I recommend borrowing this book or buying it cheap and the skimming it. OTher Christian literature uses Christian ideaology to create something interesting and thought-provoking - Dante, C.S. Lewis, Milton, etc.. However, most Christian literature is an excuse for the author to make that "join my club" appeal over and over and over again. This book is an example of the latter.

(Note = I still plan on reading the next two books because the plot is intriguing enough, but I doubt that they will get any better.)

This is a boring movie. This is a very boring movie. This is why art movies are usually condemned to three showings at a film festival and then straight to the (usually hard-to-find) videostore.

The main character is a geisha who's having sex with her employer. About a half hour into the movie you realize that yes, she really is having sex with him, but there's a real pretention to artistic integrity in this thing, so the couple has to talk just as much as they are having sex. They talk, they have sex, they talk some more and then they have sex while they are talking, but since all they are talking about is sex and since the erotic element has vanished long before the "egg scene", you have to struggle with listening to these guys bore you to death.

This would be a sick twisted little thrill if it didn't take itself so seriously, but since it does take itself seriously, you sit through it waiting for it to get better knowing that it will just plod along until that strangulation/castration scene at the end (and no, I don't care that it is a spoiler since how much of a spoiler can it really be when both characters TALK about strangulation and castration for the half the movie) in which the narrator tells you that it is a true story. I don't know why it should matter by the end that it is a true story. I guess the director is trying to say that it's not his fault that it's so dull or twisted because it happpened in REAL LIFE! Or something like that.