BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Emanuel Swedenborg [Graphic Novel] (1982) Christopher Hasler/John Kaczmarczyk The Hell-Fire Friars:Sex Politics and Religion (2002) Gerald Suster   The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003) Ian McCalman  The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008) Evelyn Lord   A vailable at a ridiculously low price from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, a graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg by Hasler and Kaczmarczyk provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the geniuses of early Modern Europe. He is as important in his way as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, someone struggling to make sense of the world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around him would have taken for granted. Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the ...

King Kong Theory (2006)  Virginie Despentes   This is a review of the English Edition, published by Serpent's Tail, rather than the French Edition. Let's get the negatives out of the way quickly because this is an important little book that might have got more praise if its faults had been more sincerely addressed by its Editors. It has three spectacularly interesting chapters on rape, prostitution and pornography that would have made excellent articles in some intelligent monthly. These sit oddly between an equally interesting introduction, in which Virginie Despentes places her book in some context, and an utterly daft rant at the end in which she lets vent to her furies. There are plenty of blank pages between chapters and the print is large so that this reads like a collection of articles or a pamphlet, scarcely a book at all. It is also so 'French' as to make it dangerously close to being dismissed in Anglo-Saxon circles. There are cultural differences ...