BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

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

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 world far int

The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition in Hindu Religion (2005) Gavin Flood    The Tao Te Ching: 81 Verses by Lao Tzu With Introduction and Commentary (400BC original - this edition 2006) Ralph Allan Dale Gavin Flood's The Tantric Body is a fairly dense academic text and not cheap, even if you can get it second hand, as I did, at a store like Treadwells. I am also not entirely convinced by Gavin Flood's almost obsessive thesis of the 'entextualisation' of Tantra in the body although, if accepted in perhaps a less intense form, he offers some deep insights into how the Tantric tradition relates spirit to matter. However, this is a five star text if only because of its value as corrective to the soft core 'namaste' tantric culture that has developed in the West as a form of partner guidance counselling for anxious middle class liberals who clearly have great personal difficulty either in escaping Judaeo-Christian habits of mind or in understanding the r

The Undergrowth of Literature (1967)   Gillian Freeman with an introduction by the psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark   Sex And Spirit: Ecstasy, Ritual And Taboo (1996) Clifford Bishop   Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism (2006) Hugh B. Urban   Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006) Esther Perel     The Undergrowth of Literature is an intriguing bit of history, both because it was written in the mid-1960s when sexual liberty was under discussion openly for the first time in decades and because of the subject matter - the types of pornographic literature available at the time. The inclusion of women's magazines from a feminist perspective and Marvel Comics from a fetishistic perspective make it a true curiousity. It is not a great book. It is of its time. But it is useful to read because it shows how much we have changed since 1967. Intellectuals cannot now be quite so po-faced