BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Eros and Thanatos (1999)   Klaus Bottger Forbidden Erotica (2000) Mark Lee Rotenberg Tom Poulton: The Secret Art of an English Gentleman (2006) Editor - Dian Hanson The ostensible purpose of Eros and Thanatos is to give us the work of Klaus Bottger, a German artist (1942-1992) whose ouevre of erotic prints has been picked up by the Erotic Prints Society in 1999 and padded out with an introduction and two pornographic short stories (by English writers) with a German theme - one set amongst the free love German student community of cliche and the other providing a mock psycho-analytic case study in which a brutal Freikorps soldier learns gemutlichkeit and leaves his bourgeois analyst in something of a disturbed erotic state. Bottger has talent but the work goes nowhere. While the stories have some some interest, they do not have great interest while the Germanic link between sex and death is laboured. It would have been far better to produce a slimmer book of prints with some

Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004) Robert A Segal   Myth is a disappointing introduction to mythology, a rather plodding book that might be termed 'wikipedia plus' - that is, it is a longer general survey with more authority than you might find online. Ultimately it is a mere enumeration of Western intellectual responses to myth, forced into a straitjacket of being reviewed through the prism of the various disciplines created by the West for the West. The whole is partially built around an extremely weak and irritating attempt to test each set of theories against the Adonis myth. It lacks the narrative coherence of, for example, Glyn Daniels' excellent short history of archaeology. The book has one, surely unintended, effect. This is the realisation that many jobsworth if brilliant thinkers, over the last two hundred or so years, have taken the limited material of the past - incomplete and whose precise context has long since been lost - in order to weave e

The World of Sex (1940)  Henry Miller   Men's Adventure Magazines in Post-War America: The Rich Oberg Collection (2004) Taschen Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film (2005) Jimmy McDonough   Miscellany of Sex (2007) Francesca Twinn   Members Only: The Life and Times of Paul Raymond, Soho's Billionaire King of Burlesque (2010) Paul Willetts     Henry Miller wrote the original draft of his long essay The World of Sex in 1940 when he was about to turn 50, somewhat of a turning point for any redblooded male, but the text was substantially revised for a secondary publication in 1957 when he was nearing 70. This is a relevant set of facts. This is not a male view of sex so much as that of a highly sexualised male past his powers and frustrated at a world that had always failed to accept him publicly for what he was. He would not have been alone in that frustration - America 're-moralised' itself in the wake of the Great Depressi

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past (2001) Douwe Draaisma Teach Yourself Jung (2005 ) Ruth Snowden 50 Psychology Classics (2006) Tom Butler-Bowdon 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need To Know (2008)  Adrian Furnham Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older is a set of connected but discrete essays opening up a relatively new area for psychology - autobiographical memory. It should be of great value to creative writers. Draaisma (Professor of the History of Psychology at Groningen Unversity) is not afraid to go beyond science into literature in order to demonstrate a point. It is well worth reading if you are interested in how you see the world yourself and why you might do so. It also respects subjectivity in a way that one hopes others, with equal communications skills, will develop.     Teach Yourself Jung is a good basic introduction to Jung's life and thinking. It can be recommended, although Frieda Fordham's 1953 classic text approved by the ol