BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Introducing Eastern Philosophy (1992) Richard Osborne   Introducing Baudrillard (1996) Chris Horrocks   Introducing Nietzsche (1997) Richard Gane & Richard Appignanesi  Introducing Lacan (2000) Darian Leader & Richard Appignanesi Introducing Existentialism Richard Appignanesi Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995. Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s. The series included graphic accounts of significant modern philosophers and ideas. The original idea be

Human Sacrifice: A Shocking Expose of Ritual Killings Worldwide (2008) Jimmy Lee Shreeve It is always difficult to review a friend's book, especially when it is a signed gift - a bad review might offend and a good review be distrusted. Fortunately, Jimmy Lee Shreeve is one of the least 'precious' of litterateurs, a man who consciously models his style on American 'gonzo' journalism, a man for whom criticism is like water off a duck's back. So it is with some pleasure that I can say that this book really is worth reading, assuming that you have a strong stomach and that you take it for what it is and not for what you might like to be. The book is published by Barricade whose list includes quite a large number of more conventional true crime books that concentrate on one of America's greatest gifts to the world - the 'romance' of organised crime. From this perspective, 'Human Sacrifice' is definitely a bit offbeat because it is look

Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993) Amy Knight   Stalin's Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky (2009) Bernard M. Patenaude Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium, between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives. It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is much more fascinating. The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and that she still cann

The Magical Revival (1972) Kenneth Grant   The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages (2002) Brian Bates   Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009) Owen Davies   The Book Of English Magic (2009) Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate    There is no book quite like Kenneth Grant's Magical Revival . But what exactly is it? In some ways it is a conventional narrative of the 'new' Magical experiment that was introduced by the 'revelation' of Aiwass to Aleister Crowley in 1904. Grant takes us through to the Zos Kia Cultus of Austin Osman Spare who died in 1956. But this general narrative is overshadowed by the book's true purpose which is to do for Magic as a religious narrative what the Early Church Fathers did for Christianity - to express both its cogency and its mystery and so its high and serious purpose as a spiritual tradition, if not necessarily a religion in the formal sense. Nor can the corpus of work be wholly judged on this one wor