Category Archives: Books/Media

I grabbed this one while mining one of those websites that features links to free Kindle books: not just old books in the public domain, but newer ones that publishers and authors will make available for free as part of special deals. Pretty much everything I downloaded sucked except for this, easily one of the most profound military history books I’ve ever read.

If you want to know why the U.S. keeps losing war after war, you need to read Street Without Joy.

The book is a first-hand account of the First Indochina War (1946-1954), France’s attempt to keep its colonies of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam under its thumb, and why they failed to do so. Bernard Fall is no armchair quarterback; he spent an extensive amount of time in Vietnam during the war embedded with several French military platoons, and also exhaustively researched the war with the help of classified French government documents. Originally published in 1961, Street Without Joy was the first book that correctly diagnosed why the French were run out of Southeast Asia with their tails between their legs.

Fall also predicted that America’s efforts in Vietnam would fail for the same reasons, and that the American military leadership wouldn’t learn a single thing from the French defeat.

Put simply, France lost Indochina because the French military, from top to bottom, was completely incapable of fighting counter-insurgent warfare. Like all Western militaries, the French expected to fight in big battles where their superior numbers and equipment would give them the advantage, a la World War II. Instead, the Viet Minh bled the French out over years through hit-and-run tactics, using the Vietnamese jungle and the people to their advantage. France’s generals could not adjust to this new reality, constantly seeking to lure the Viet Minh into a “set-piece battle” that never came.

This desperate search for the set-piece battle became an obsession of the successive French commanders-in-chief in Indochina until the end of the war. But Giap, the Communist commander, had made his mistake once, in 1951, against de Lattre, and he was not going to repeat it. In dozens of different engagements involving units from single regiments to more than two divisions, Giap preferred to sacrifice those parts of his units which were hopelessly trapped rather than let himself be “sucked” into the type of meat-grinder operation which the Americans could carry out so effectively against the “human wave” attacks of North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea.

The set-piece battle had, in fact, become the credo of not only the French who were fighting the Indochina war but of the United States which, after 1952, had become more and more directly involved in its financial and often in its strategic aspects. The now-famous “Navarre Plan,” named after the unlucky French commander-in-chief in Indochina in 1953-54, provided, according to as authoritative a source as the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that the French forces were to break “the organized body of Communist aggression by the end of the 1955 fighting season,” leaving the task of mopping up the remaining (presumably disorganized) guerrilla groups to the progressively stronger national armies of Cambodia, Laos, and Viet-Nam.

America never really got over Vietnam, and as a result, our own war-hawks keep spinning ridiculous theories as to why we got our asses kicked by a bunch of commies swatting mosquitoes in the jungle. “We were stabbed in the back by the liberal media!” “We won every battle!” Doesn’t matter. The purpose of sending troops to that shithole was to keep the Commies from taking over; the fact that the red star is flying over Saigon is all the proof we need to know we failed.

America lost the Vietnam War because we had no clue how to fight it. We lost Iraq and are losing Afghanistan because we’ve learned nothing from Vietnam.

“Street Without Joy” is the English translation of “La Rue Sans Joie,” the French nickname for a stretch of Route 1 in the Quang Tri province in central Vietnam, a vitally important road as it served as the primary land route connecting the northern and southern halves of the country. Because of its significance, the Viet Minh frequently launched surprise attacks on French convoys traveling the road, holing up in various villages along the way.

During the Vietnam War, Quang Tri was the northernmost province of South Vietnam, and Route 1 once again became a major ambush point for the Viet Cong. It was on the Street Without Joy that Bernard Fall was killed in 1967 while embedded with the 4th Marine Regiment. Street Without Joy remains one of the most important history books of the 20th century. If you have any interest in war history, read it.

Click here to buy Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina.

Read Next: The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide by Frost

Great book. Worst subtitle ever.

An odd way to kick off a book review, but when I saw that Mark Zolo (aka the Naughty Nomad) actually gave his debut memoir that bland, forgettable subtitle, I groaned. Everyone loves to think they’re unique and shpecial, and while I’m no stranger to Mark’s blog, my reflex is to gag whenever I see cliches like that.

The only way things could be any worse is if he’d added “no-holds-barred” somewhere in the description.

But get past the subtitle and you’ll realize that Mark’s telling the truth. Hell, the first chapter begins with him stranded on an Antarctic icebreaker vessel, trapped after failing to rescue another ship trapped in the ice. Forget the usual tales of drug abuse, drinking and sex with exotic, foreign women: while Naughty Nomad has them in spades (and they’re damned interesting), the defining parts of the book are Mark’s constant flirtations with death.

And by “flirtations,” I mean “full-on dirty dancing and Frenching on the dance floor.”

I shit you not when I say that over the course of the book, Mark manages to survive the following:

• Getting run over by a car and having his arm dislocated.
• Sneaking across international borders, evading AK-toting soldiers.
• Smuggling drugs through multiple countries.
• Being aggressively seduced by an African woman with HIV.

And more, way more. By all rights, Mark should be lying in a shallow grave somewhere in the jungles of central Africa, or the other places he’s been to. Yet through quick thinking and plain luck, he and his off-and-on traveling buddies (the perennial fuck-up Paddy and the boundlessly energetic Danny) escape unscathed, with fun memories of smoking pot and hooking up with hot girls.

Bottom line: if you’re looking for another travel story that goes beyond the usual tales of fucking and boozing (way, way beyond), Naughty Nomad is an absolute must-buy.

Words weren’t needed—we spoke the language of lust. I got out  of the shower to find Nia dancing naked in front of the mirror. The way she moved her hips and ass was so sexy.

Boing! My dick shot up like a Looney Tune.

I laid her down on the bed and started kissing her, savouring every  inch of her dark, soft flesh. I’d never been with a woman so slim,  tanned, and confident about her body—it was like a breath of pure, fresh air.

After nearly an hour of foreplay, I finally slipped my cock inside her weeping little pussy. She was so tight. I didn’t have a condom, but  that was the last thing on my mind. The missionary position with a freshly stitched dislocated arm was a bitch.

I was screaming inside.

Click here to buy Naughty Nomad: Not Your Typical Backpacker Story.

Read Next: The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

Roosh is back at it with a trio of new travel guides, focusing on the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Even better, for today only, he’s selling all three of them in a bundle for just $3. Whether you’re planning a vacation to eastern Europe or you just like Roosh’s writing, read on to see what I think of these new books.

Don’t Bang Latvia: How to Sleep with Latvian Women in Latvia Without Getting Scammed by Roosh V

Unlike Don’t Bang Denmark, which was a comedic skewering of everything about that country, Don’t Bang Latvia is a more serious warning to stay the hell away. The skinny is that while Latvia was once a paradise of beautiful, loose women, hordes of sleazy sex tourists and annoying British stag parties over the years have turned it into an apocalyptic wasteland. The most attractive Latvian women want nothing to do with foreigners, while the middling-to-cute ones are soulless scammers hell bent on taking your money and leaving you dick in hand.

If you’re in a club where there are a lot of foreign guys, I guarantee there are tons of scammer chicks present. There are several signs to look for: they hang out in pairs at tourist clubs; they always dress sexy; they never buy their own drinks (it would reduce their profit margin); they make regular eye contact with foreign guys; they’re under 30 years old; and they aren’t in the club with a guy friend (they don’t want to scare away the male clientele). I like to think that my people-reading skills are advanced and that I can pick out acting better than the average guy, but there were three scam attempts done on me that I didn’t see coming. These girls are amazing actresses and will deceive you even if you’re experienced. As long as you keep the counterstrategies in mind, you’ll be straight.

Bang Estonia: How to Sleep with Estonian Women in Estonia by Roosh V

The second Baltic country Roosh visited, it’s a huge step up from Latvia. The women are hotter and more feminine than Latvians and there are no scammers to be found.

The bad news I’ve already hinted at is that it used to be much better. In Tartu I met an American guy named Stan who had lived in the country for five years. He said it was poosy paradise when he first arrived. He was approached so often by girls who wanted sex that he had to tell them to go away. I’m sure the quality wasn’t always high, but the fact that it was happening could only mean good fortune for men who were in Estonia during that time. He also knew a guy who would regularly take a girl to a hotel room to bang and then return to the bar to find another one to take back.

Bang Lithuania: How to Sleep with Lithuanian Women in Lithuania by Roosh V

The last country Roosh visited, it has the most attractive women in the Baltics, but they’re also the hardest to lay. Again, there aren’t any scammers.

I went inside and was stunned to find that it was packed with more women than men. The bar had narrow walkways with people standing up. The music wasn’t too loud. Was I in a bar in America? The logistics were perfect, the first time I had encountered such an American-style venue in Eastern Europe. All that was missing were the fat American girls in flip-flops singing along to Bon Jovi. My mood immediately brightened. I ordered a drink and leaned against the bar. I couldn’t believe I had found a spot that was tailor-made for me.

The biggest problem with all three guides is that they’re rather thin compared to Roosh’s previous ones, due to the fact that he spent little time in each country (a month in each) and due to the fact that the countries themselves are pretty small. Still, the low, low price (all three books for just $3!) makes them worth buying.

Click here to buy Don’t Bang Latvia, Bang Estonia and Bang Lithuania.

Read Next: Around the World in 80 Girls: The Epic 3 Year Trip of a Backpacking Casanova by Neil Skywalker

Colin Flaherty’s been getting praise for his recent book White Girl Bleed a Lot, on the spate of racially motivated black-on-white hate crimes in recent years, but Redwood to Deadwood is his previous book, on a hitchhiking trip he took a couple of years ago. Naturally, this meant I had to buy it. How is it?

B-O-R-I-N-G.

I don’t know how he did it, but Flaherty managed to take a topic as inherently interesting and captivating as cross-continental hitchhiking and make it as sleep-inducing as watching a school board meeting. Redwood isn’t that long, but reading it made me want to chew my fingers off from its sheer dullness. I can barely remember a single thing about the book reading it front to back.

In Flaherty’s defense, Redwood’s pedestrian nature isn’t entirely his fault. Flaherty’s a middle-aged man (53 at the time of his trip; he did it mainly because he hitchhiked when he was a kid and he wanted to see if it could still be done), and I don’t expect a guy with kids to be having the same wild and crazy adventures that a twenty-year old would have. Even still, he manages to kill Redwood with his dry, analytical writing style. Flaherty writes like a disinterested observer being dictated to by someone else, instead of an active participant in the events happening around him. Even when he talks about his older brother who was killed in Vietnam, I couldn’t dredge up any sympathy for the guy.

If the guys in those parts are eager to escape the ennui of their life on the plains, so are the girls. And their first choice is going after guys that are 5 years older, starting when they are 13. Both my companions and many of their friends found themselves on the wrong side of a sheriff’s desk answering questions about their romantic escapades with young girls.

Sometimes they did it. Other times they did not. Telling your parents about imaginary romantic encounters with the local ill-shaven hoods is also a popular pastime on the plains.

Redwood has some redeeming value as things pick up in the second half, and from a hitchhiker’s perspective, there’s some useful practical information in there. For example, I chuckled during the portion where Flaherty was refused entry into Canada for similar reasons as me. Otherwise, feel free to skip this book.

Click here to buy Redwood to Deadwood: Hitchhiking America Today.

Read Next: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on March 28, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

I read a lot of books, around four to six a month, but I usually don’t blog about them because most of them simply aren’t worth the effort. They don’t inspire me, they don’t make me mad, they just go onto my bookshelf where I forget about them. The last time I attempted to write a book review was last summer, when I had just finished Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and was bitterly disappointed, especially since I used to be a fan of Shteyngart’s. Six paragraphs in and I realized I was blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Super Sad True Love Story is an awful novel, but it’s awfulness is entirely ordinary; the self-licking ice cream cone of modern publishing that Mencius Moldbug once expounded about. A book has to be extraordinarily good or bad to inspire me to write about it.

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss is such a book. I first found out about Ferriss a few months ago, when I was winding down at my old job and researching the burgeoning, pretentiously-named field of “lifestyle design,” the art of living a life that isn’t confined by a 9 to 5 work existence. I began reading Ferriss’ blog, figured he knew what he was talking about, and eventually went to Barnes & Noble looking for his book. When I first got my mitts on a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek, I was so enthralled I spent a good half-hour reading through it before I even bothered heading up to the cash register. I found it that compelling.

And what I found compelling about The 4-Hour Workweek is its underlying philosophy, which is so subversive I can’t believe Ferriss actually got the book published. The book is ostensibly about how to join the ranks of the “New Rich,” a class of entrepreneurs who spend most of their time traveling the world, having fun and goofing off and still make more money than you, but here’s the less PC summation of Ferriss’ beliefs:

The only way to survive and make money is to rebel against the system, even if you end up screwing over your fellow man in the process.

Now, Ferriss doesn’t advocate breaking the law or doing anything illegal. He’s not stupid. But most of his advice is based around cutting corners and bending rules to your advantage and everyone else’s disadvantage. For example, in the second chapter, Ferriss details how he won the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships in 1999 by exploiting two of the competition’s rules:

1. Since the weigh-in was the day before the competition, Ferriss used the time between the weigh-in and the championship to hyper-hydrate his body above the max weight limit after hyper-dehydrating to meet it.
2. His principal tactic when fighting was to try to push his opponent off of the elevated platform, as any fighter who fell off three times in a round lost by default.

Nothing Tim did was against the rules, but no one with a sense of fair play would dare argue that he was behaving in an ethical fashion. He didn’t train harder, he didn’t fight better, he didn’t go beyond his sciolistic understanding of the sport he was competing in. He was the equivalent of those annoying brats who, when we were kids, would invade our personal space to annoy us. When we told them to stop touching us, they’d start waving their hands an inch in front of our heads and holler, “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” And in Ferriss’ case, “not touching” his opponents won him the gold:

The result? I won all my matches by technical knock-out (TKO) and went home national champion, something 99% of those with 5-10 years of experience had been unable to do.

He then goes on to brag about how his methods have become standard tactics for kickboxers competing in the CKNC. The lesson? Being aggressively passive-aggressive gets you what you want.

Virtually all of The 4-Hour Workweek’s practical money-making advice follows this formula: read the fine print, identify the loopholes and jump through them on the road to riches and glory. The very first chapter of the “A is for Automation” section is devoted to the wonders of virtual assistants, outsourcing all your busywork to a drone in India so you can free up time for yourself on the cheap. Ferriss even relays the personal story of one New Rich sadsack who used his virtual assistant to settle a dispute with his wife:

I can’t tell you what a thrill I got from sending that note. It’s pretty hard to get much more passive-aggressive than bickering with your wife via an e-mail from a subcontinent halfway around the world.

What a pussy.

This ethos of subtly ripping people off continues right down to Ferriss’ ideas of starting new businesses. For example, one of his suggestions is to create an info product (like an instructional DVD) by stealing paraphrasing information from other, authoritative sources. If that isn’t the definition of a con, the word has no meaning. But never fear, the rationalizations are here, as Tim explains why masquerading as an expert on a topic is no big deal:

First, “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best – just better than a small target number of your prospective customers…

…Second, expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators. It’s important to learn how the PR pros phrase resume points and position their clients…

Sorry all you folks who’ve spent years becoming experts on particular topics the old-fashioned way, any yahoo with an Internet connection and a copy of Microsoft Office can do what you’ve done in the span of a month. I can’t help but think that most of the seduction community hucksters hocking overpriced, bogus PUA advice followed this method to the letter.

The really sad thing about The 4-Hour Workweek is not that it could get published by a major company, or praised by anyone of importance (like Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the Soul, a quote from whom is proudly featured on the inside of the book jacket), it’s that there’s very little to disagree with in its philosophy of living. Oh sure, there’s plenty to nitpick with its practical advice. During the chapter about virtual assistants, I was rolling my eyes every other paragraph: outsourcing tasks to a half-literate foreigner on the other side of the world is a really stupid move if you care about getting things right. But no one who has descended into the rabbit hole of this part of the blogosphere can disagree with Ferriss’ core beliefs.

Over a year and a half ago, I wrote this explaining why I christened this site In Mala Fide:

When the pseudonymous Asia Times Online columnist Spengler unmasked himself last April, he stated his reason for choosing that nom de plume was as a joke – the name of the German scholar who wrote The Decline of the West appropriated for a column in an Asian newspaper. A bad joke, but it has a point. The name of this blog, In Mala Fide, can be thought of as a jab in that vein. The moral configuration of Western society, as chronicled on this blog and others, requires its best citizens to rebel, to go against the grain, to behave in mala fide in order to secure their own fortunes.

That’s the central point of The 4-Hour Workweek: screw conventional wisdom and ethics to get rich. Leverage go-fuck-yourself Calvinist capitalism for your own benefit. Plagiarize other peoples’ work and pass it off as your own. Outsource your work to India like a good little free marketeer. Then spend all your newfound free time on vacation instead of raising a family, creating a useful invention, or otherwise contributing to society in any way. Be a parasite, a tick burrowed in the hairy ass of Western civilization, getting fat from sucking blood and giving nothing but Lyme disease in return.

You can argue that Tim Ferriss is a degenerate whose advice would bring the country down if enough people followed it, and you’d be right. But at the same time, he’s got the freedom to go tango dancing in Buenos Aires, scuba diving in Panama, or anything else he wants, whenever he wants. You, on the other hand, are working eighty-hour weeks doing a monkey’s job, with a dictatorial boss pulling on your nuts and IT weirdos reading your emails, all for a comparative pittance. He broke the rules and he’s happy and enjoying life, while you followed them and are a miserable sack of shit. Whose lifestyle sounds more appealing?

Examples of entrepreneurs going in mala fide to great success abound in our world. For example, take the infamous music video “Friday” that went viral two weeks ago:

Everyone agrees that there’s nothing redeeming about this video. The first time I watched it, I had to stop around the 1:30 mark, Rebecca Black’s droning and the awful lyrics were so grating to my ears. Hell, the part at 2:06 with the strobe light notebook gave me meningitis seizure flashbacks. What sort of moron would give this nauseating wench a microphone, let alone an entire music video?

Turns out that “Friday” was produced by the record label Ark Music Factory, whose business model revolves around bilking the rich parents of snotty suburban brats out of their hard-earned cash. For a mere $2,000, Ark will write a song for your little pumpkin, film a music video starring her, and then Auto-Tune the shit out of her voice to make her sound like a tone-deaf robot. It’s the brainchild of Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jay, the two black guys seen from 0:30 – 1:00 of this video:

I simultaneously want to punch those guys and buy them beers. The punch is for inflicting talentless munchkins like CJ Fam on the world, making my eardrums bleed with their bullfrog-like throat noises masquerading as genuine music. The beers are for discovering a way to make easy money off of wealthy idiots who spoil their lazy kids. I can’t think of a demographic who so richly deserves to be dicked over in the most insulting way possible. And our two captains of conning literally filmed themselves in that video laughing and smiling over their cleverness.

Or take this story that Chic Noir tipped me off to about a American who fled to Canada to avoid having to pay off his onerous student loan debt:

Bottom line – there are many, many people who, like me, feel they have done the right thing all of their lives.  We went to school, studied hard, started at the bottom and worked crap jobs for starvation wages.  We did this all in exchange for the promise of a better life down the road.  Those promises have turned out to be empty.  We now have nothing to show for it but massive amounts of debt with little to no hope of ever repaying.  We don’t even have access to basic, affordable health care!  Since they haven’t held up their end of the bargain, I don’t see why I can’t opt out of holding up mine.

“But but welching on your debts is immoral and unmanly!” Fuck you, wage-slave! Fuck you and your masters with a rusty pitchfork! The student loan scam is highway robbery, and anyone who kicks those assholes in the nads is doing the right thing.

In a corrupt world divided between suckers and those who do the suckering, your only duty is to yourself and your kin. You can choose the sucker’s path, the normal path, the path your parents and friends and co-workers took. Or you can break free, flip the bird to convention and do what YOU want, on your own terms and nobody else’s. Freedom is within your grasp; you just have to reach out and take it.

In the meantime, if you want fuel for your dreams, The 4-Hour Workweek is a must buy.

Click here to buy The 4-Hour Workweek.

Read Next: The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide by Frost

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on November 10, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct. 

One of the Big Problems of our epoch, according to smart people, is how nobody’s reading books anymore. This is horrible, no good, and very bad for the future of Uh-Mare-Eca. Those durned kids spend all their time on Facebook and playing World of WarCraft instead of reading books, and as a result they’re getting dumber and dumber with each passing year, so dumb their tongues hang out of their mouths and they can’t tie their shoelaces or keep score for a bowling game by hand or recite the Gettysburg Address from memory. Y’know, because the best way to ensure someone understands a famous speech is to force them to memorize it and have them repeat it back to you.

Smart people who lament the end of fancy book-learnin’ are not so smart retarded. Yes, it’s true that people don’t read books as much as they used to. But the average schmuck back then wasn’t reading War and Peace, he was thumbing through the likes of The Thin Man, The Long Goodbye, True Grit or any number of mass market paperbacks aimed at the lowest common denominator. No preaching, no philosophizing, no complex themes or symbolism for tenured college professors to force their students to write fifteen-page papers about; just action, adventure, mystery and sex. Even the likes of Horatio Alger or Ayn Rand have had far more impact on American culture than F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Creeley or any of the other unreadable hacks that the lit-crit types gush over.

And yet we’re supposed to pretend that Creeley’s illiterate free verse poems on buying tampons for his girlfriend represent the height of American letters. That’s why nobody reads anymore: the writers you idiots are pushing suck, suck, suck. Take this excursion to Parnassus by Sherman Alexie as an example of the sheer awfulness of modern literature:

On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘
as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. ‘Walden Pond, ‘
the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond? ‘

and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

the city I pretended to call my home. ‘Listen, ‘
I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born

and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born.
I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.’
But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to bring her an orange juice

back from the food car. I respect elders
of every color. All I really did was eat
my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi
and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out

another little piece of her country’s history
while I, as all Indians have done
since this war began, made plans
for what I would do and say the next time

somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

Forget the whiny racial identity politics of the poem and simply concentrate on the structure. Doesn’t this poem seem a bit off to you? There’s just something wrong with it, but you can’t tell exactly what? Here, let me help:

The white woman across the aisle from me says ‘Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ‘ as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill.

‘Walden Pond,’ the woman on the train asks, ‘Did you see Walden Pond?’ and I don’t have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home.

‘Listen,’ I could have told her. ‘I don’t give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden’s grandparents were born and before his grandparents’ grandparents were born. I’m tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that’s redundant. If Don Henley’s brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn’t come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.’

But I didn’t say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country’s history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

That’s right, take away the line breaks and this “poem” becomes a bunch of run-on sentences. Not only does it not rhyme, it doesn’t even have any meter. The number of syllables in each line is completely random. This Alexie guy wrote a few paragraphs, hit the Enter key a few extra times, and tried to pass it off as legitimate verse. And the Beigeists in the publishing world lapped it up and begged for more.

Speaking of which, since this guy loves to sermonize about the evils of the white man and the suffering of “Native Americans,” I’d love to know which Indian language the name “Sherman Alexie” comes from. I’m guessing it’s from the Fullashit tribe, who live on the Ur-Anus Reservation in northern Idaho, but I’m no expert in Indian linguistics, so someone feel free to correct me in the comments.

But “On the Amtrak” is small-time hackery: there are far more sob-squirters, schlockmeisters and all-around frauds out there with completely undeserved fame and critical reputations. But thing is, I can’t really blame them too much. It’s a fact that you can’t spell “stupid” without “U,” and it’s thanks to U that these fools are allowed to run around mass-murdering trees for their banal, bathetic books. Snake oil salesmen can’t ply their trade without credulous dullards to give them their money and praise, and that’s what U’ve been doing.

So, in an effort to help push back the tide of blandness and idiocy (and put my college education to use), I’ve decided to start reviewing books more often. If you scroll up to the top of the site, you’ll see a new page in the header entitled “Book Reviews” under the “Support Us” button. Every time I write up a book, you’ll find it there. Plus, I’ve decided to get with the program and add links to buy each book in each post. If you buy any book I recommend by clicking those links, I get a commission at no extra cost to you, and in the case of Amazon links, I’ll still get a commission even if you end up buying something completely different.

To keep this post from being too long, I’ll start with just one book, but man is it a good one. I’ll pick up with more reviews next week.

The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

This is honestly one of the few books I’ve read that changed my life, and one of the few I make a point to re-read once a year. I’d wager that 100% of the people who poo-poo me for liking Ames and Taibbi haven’t read it. My opinion may be skewed by the fact that I picked it up as a teenager, but even guys like Roosh who’ve had their own share of foreign adventures have been blown away by the eXile.

The book is divided into eight chapters, half by Ames, half by Taibbi. Fans of muckraking will appreciate Taibbi’s contributions, which deal with the unbelievable amount of corruption and fraud in late 90′s Russia. The mainstream narrative about Russia is that Boris Yeltsin was a great capitalist, pro-Western reformer unexpectedly decapitated by the 1998 economic collapse, and that Vladimir Putin is an evil fascist who hates freedom and probably eats cute puppy dogs. The reality is that Yeltsin was a venal bastard who aided and abetted the rape of his own country by capitalist oligarchs (both Western and Russian), and Putin is beloved by the Russian people because he had all the looters murdered, imprisoned or driven into exile (heh). The reason you don’t know about this is because the entire Western press corps in Moscow, with the exception of the eXile, either turned a blind eye to the corruption or actively collaborated with the oligarchs. Hmmm, this all sounds kinda familiar… but nah, it can’t happen here.

To this day, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi are despised by the MSM because of the way they caught them with their pants down. To give just one example of how far ahead of the curve they were, the eXile was one of the only newspapers in the world that predicted the Russian financial meltdown of 1998. Particularly eye-opening is Taibbi’s chapter on Michael Bass, an American crook who symbolized the worst of 90′s expat excess. Bass was a convicted felon who came to Moscow to pimp Slavic nubiles for quick cash while simultaneously trying to present himself as a respectable public figure, writing a society column for a now-defunct expat rag, The Moscow Tribune. After the eXile ran a story on how he sold an aspiring Californian runway model into sex slavery to an Arab sheik, Bass gave Taibbi what may be the most passive-aggressive death threat of all time:

After I got off the phone with Liz, I called Bass right away. I told him that, while I wouldn’t print a retraction, I was willing to publish his side of the Paris story. He hedged, diving straight into his creepy rehab-therapist voice:

“I don’t know, Matt,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do. I mean, I’m really hurt about this. I cried. And you know, the worst thing is that my charity programs are going to suffer. That’s the thing that hurts me the most.”

Was all this really happening to me? Was he serious? “So what are you planning to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know…My roof wanted to kill you right away, but I really don’t know what to do. I mean, what are my options? I can have you killed, or I can pay someone a couple of hundred bucks to have your legs broken, or I can just let it go. And I don’t like any of those options.”

“Michael, I can’t believe you’re threatening me like this. What is this, the Solntsevo gang? You’re talking about having me killed.”

“I’m not threatening you,” he insisted.

“You’re sitting here, saying you don’t know what you want to do, and talking about having me killed as one of your options! That’s a threat from where I sit.”

The tale has a happy ending, with Bass humiliated and exposed for all of Moscow’s expats to jeer at.

All this isn’t to argue that Ames and Taibbi are saints: Ames’ half of the book will dispel that notion pretty quickly. Beginning with his contracting the worst case of scabies ever from a one-night stand in St. Petersburg, Mark Ames takes us from his early years living in a run-down California nursing home with his Czech girlfriend to his first months hustling in Moscow, and his eventually founding the eXile with a pair of proto-SWPL faggots from Seattle. The passage where he fantasizes about their violent deaths at the hands of Chechen gangsters may be some of the most disturbingly funny writing in the history of the English language.

But Ames doesn’t hit his stride until the book’s midway point, with the chapters “Our God is Speed” and “The White God Factor.” “Our God is Speed” details his adventures with drugs and is full of sick, graphic detail (such as his junkie pal Kolya’s “shooting bloodied water from his infected needle across [their friend’s] floor”), but “The White God Factor,” about his experiences with Russian women, is of particular interest to us manospherians. In between recounting his sexual encounters in Russia and Belarus, Ames tears feminism and American women to itty-bitty pieces:

Out in Russia, you gain a little perspective, which can be dangerous. Deep down, as it turns out, even the most emasculated, wire-rimmed glasses, cigar-smoking and martini-drinking American guy fantasizes about living in a world full of…well, I’ll let you guess:

a) self reliant women who are also your friends

b) sluts

Okay, still stuck? I’ll amend it. All men – that’s right, all sane men – fantasize about a world populated with:

a) self-reliant androgynous women who are also your friends

b) young, beautiful sluts

Envelope please… Whoah! This is a shocker, folks! Hold on to your seats! Turns out, when you scrape away the surface implants, every single sane man wants…drum roll, maestro…young, beautiful sluts!

CUT TO: Young, beautiful sluts seated in third row, hands cupped over mouths in shocked surprise…They stand, crying-laughing, hugging each other, then slowly make their way towards the podium, kissed by vigorously applauding men on their way there…

Young, beautiful sluts. It’s a censored fantasy, and best kept that way: After all, in coastal America, reality couldn’t be further away from that fantasy. It exists only in chat rooms, and even there, most of the alleged F18′s are gay 50-year old men with spiked five-inch butt-plugs wedged up their asses.

Nearly every Westerner who comes here – male and female – is shocked by the beauty factor. It takes a while for the brain to trust the eyes…Their Eurasian features (pale skin, eyes that are both slanted and large, colored gray or ice-blue, and sleek legs like a gazelle’s) and exaggerated feminine gestures stir things in the expat male’s primordial consciousness. Perhaps it has something to do with the gratuitous fellatio-friendly lipstick jobs girls here wear: bright red paint from nose to chin, which screams: “I am capable of sucking your dick so hard that you’ll have to pull the sheets out of your ass!” In America such women are available only to producers and rock stars. In Russia, they’re everywhere – they’re the norm. And expat men have a leg up on everyone.

And of course, no book on late 90′s Russia is complete without a mention of the Hungry Duck, a Moscow expat bar whose nightly bacchanalia made 120 Days of Sodom look like a church social:

Shortly after, Doug created a special Hungry Duck version of Ladies’ Night that made our champagne bottle seem like bathroom graffiti in comparison. Ladies’ Night is another word for rape camp. On Ladies’ Night, only girls (generally ages 12 through 25) are allowed in, while all men are kept at bay from 7:00 P.M. to 9:00 P.M. The girls are offered free drinks, as much and as fast as they can down them. Not just offered free drinks, but pumped full of free drinks…Russians aren’t known for their moderation when it comes to liquor; your average five-foot-one dyev could put any NFL lineman under the table. The point of Ladies’ Night is to get the girls as drunk as possible in a two-hour period, then to open the floodgates to the guys and let the rape camp festivities begin. It was a brilliant idea to raise the volume of vomit and semen to levels yet unseen even in the Duck.

Ames then relays the story of the time he and Taibbi tended bar during Ladies’ Night, where he “drunkenly slobbered into seven or eight different teenage mouths” and there was a “river of vomit coming out of the stalls” of the women’s bathroom.

When I posted an excerpt of Ames’ in which he bragged about threatening to murder one of his girlfriends if she didn’t get an abortion (and convinced another to have her little bastard vacuumed out) a few months back, commenter PA referred to him as a “piece of shit” and claimed he “ruined” the girls. Ames is a piece of shit, to be sure, but Russian women are as equally vile, as he shatters the fantasies of white knights and mail order bride-site cruising beta schmucks with this passage:

…[Russian women] live it up to the max while they have the upper hand, when nature is good to them. They know that time is working against them. Youth is a dirty word here – most go straight to adulthood by the age of 14. I can count five women I’ve slept with who lost their virginity at age 11; they treat it as dry fact, like when their first teeth grew, and not as a psychology-loaded tragedy. A Russian woman is at the peak of her power from about age 13 to until 20. After that, beauty is subjected to the cruel forces of entropy, which renders them unrecognizable beasts – Division II noseguards – by the age of 30. That’s why most have been married at least once by the time they hit 20 – in the provinces, the age is more like 17.

To hammer home the point, Ames quotes Edward Limonov (another great, underrated writer, and one of Ames’ intellectual inspirations): “Russian women are usually, physically speaking, attractive, but morally – they are repulsive creatures, cripples.” Oh, Spengler’s Universal Law of Gender Parity, you haven’t failed me yet.

One of the nice things about the eXile book is that it comes in a nice big 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, allowing the editors to toss unabridged reprints of eXile articles, cartoons, and covers in the margins. It adds value to an already action-packed title, but you definitely don’t want to read this one in mixed company, unless you want to explain away a picture of a dyevushka with a champagne bottle jammed in her asshole or an prank cover with the headline “NIGGERS! Where Do They Come From… and Why Are They Here?”

When I first read this book a decade ago, it planted a germ in my mind, a desire to see the world beyond my country’s shores. Mark Ames’ Russia no longer exists, as shown by the collapse of the eXile itself three years ago. This is a good thing for both the Russians themselves and for proponents of nationalism across the globe. But the grip of go-fuck-yourself Calvinist conservatism and its hanger-on ideologies is still choking the life out of America and the West at large. Even with the Occupy protesters pushing back against the state religion, I doubt Americans can snap out of their stupor in time to halt the coming collapse. One decade later, I’m closer than ever to breaking out of the asylum.

Some will argue that Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi are bad men, and they’d have a point. But as is the case with so much of human history, it’s not a case of good vs. bad, it’s bad vs. worse. Ames and Taibbi are slime, but they’re far more honest, truthful and talented than their detractors, the defenders of everything that’s wrong with the world. People like them make the world a far more interesting place. If the choice is between them and you amoral, two-faced cocksuckers, I’ll take them.

Click here to buy The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.

Read Next: The Way of Men by Jack Donovan

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on April 11, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

During my first semester at college, I had the misfortune of having an emo for a roommate. Everything about this guy was effeminate and despicable: he talked with a lisp, he wore his hair long with bangs, and all of his friends were girls. We clashed on almost everything, from his habit of making out with his girlfriend underneath the sheets to our fights over the thermostat (he always bitched that it was too hot, even when it was five degrees out). Living with him was like being married. I initially just tried to avoid him, spending most of my non-class time hanging out with my friends or other stuff, only coming home to sleep, but things eventually came to a head and I ended up transferring to a new room.

But despite his general obnoxiousness, Emo Roommate had one thing over me: he got laid. All the time. With reasonably cute girls. During the short time I lived with him, he basically had a rotating harem of three or four girls at any given time, inexplicably drawn to his fey mannerisms and pissy passive-aggressive behavior. In fact, one Sunday morning I came home from a long night of drinking Keystone Light and striking out with the ladies to the sight of his girlfriend making out with a redheaded girl on his bed while he grinned. I suppose it was a violation of the bro code to cockblock him like that, but I couldn’t have cared less at the time; served him right for being an unbearable prick.

As desperate as I was to remake myself, I had my limits. Emo Roommate may have been getting more pussy than I was, but he was something I didn’t want to be. He was a fag.

I’m from the generation for whom “fag” and “gay” were common taunts, much to the consternation of our teachers and parents. To a bunch of third-graders jostling for social status on the playground, faggotry was like porn: they couldn’t define it, but they knew it when they saw it. Faggotry doesn’t refer specifically to homosexuality, though a lot of homos happen to be fags. Faggot, gay, girly-man, fairy, fruit: these are all terms to describe men who fail at being men. More than that, these men not only don’t care that they’ve failed at being men, they revel in it and demand the world reorient itself to accommodate their failures.

I couldn’t have articulated all this a decade ago, but at a certain instinctual level, I knew it. So did my friends, and so does any man who’s ever used “fag” as an insult. So does society at large, never mind their claims of gender being a social construct. Look at all the mindless “man up” shaming coming from the media today. Implicit in using the phrase “man up” is that there is a fixed definition of “man” that the males of today have failed to meet. More importantly, “man up” implicitly states that manhood is something that males must earn. There’s no equivalent phrase for women, nobody calling on them to “woman up.” The reality that Bill Bennett, Kay Hymowitz and the rest acknowledge but won’t say aloud is that women are born and men are made.

Jack Donovan’s latest book, The Way of Men, is not a self-help guide. Reading it won’t get you laid, make you money or give you bigger abs. The Way of Men is an attempt to answer the questions, “What is masculinity? What does it mean to be a man? What is the essence of manliness?” It’s an articulation of what makes men men, unencumbered by ideology, philosophy or religion, the truth that we all know and have known for millennia but could not find the words for.

This is going to sound like hyperbole or ass-kissing, but The Way of Men is easily one of the best, most valuable books I’ve ever read. Decades from now, when the current dystopia becomes nothing but a bad memory, Donovan’s book will be seen as one of the seminal works of the alt-right/manosphere canon. I hate even using this analogy because it trivializes the sheer impact of Jack’s work, but it’s the only way to make my point: The Way of Men will do for men what The Feminine Mystique did for women.

The Way of Men is important precisely because Jack approaches masculinity from an objective, amoral, almost mathematical standpoint, a perspective that is literally absent in the past few decades’ writing on the subject. The problem with defining masculinity is that every single clique in the world wants to repurpose masculinity and men to serve their own interests. Ask a dozen people what manliness is and you’ll get a dozen different answers:

• To a traditionalist Christian, being masculine entails getting married, having children and going to church every Sunday.
• To a gamer/manospherian, being masculine entails having sex with lots of women.
• To a feminist, being masculine means serving the interests of women every minute of every day.

Donovan dispenses with all this noise and distills manliness down to its core attributes, independent of culture and morality. These are the virtues that define men throughout space and time, whether we’re talking about the samurai of feudal Japan or the knights of medieval Europe:

To understand who men are, what they have in common and why men struggle to prove their worth to each other, reduce male groups to their nucleic form. Sprawling, complex civilizations made up of millions of people are relatively new to men. For most of their time on this planet, men have organized in small survival bands, set against a hostile environment, competing for women and resources with other bands of men. Understanding the way men react to each other demands an understanding of their most basic social unit. Understanding what men want from each other requires an understanding of what men have most often needed from each other, and a sense of how these needs have shaped masculine psychology.

Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive.

The Way of Men is the way of that gang.

This short section should give you an idea what Jack’s writing style is like: direct and unpretentious. This isn’t a dry academic work full of puff words and run-on sentences. Donovan is economical with his words and doesn’t waste your time. Indeed, he actually cut a section out of the book because he felt it was a diversion; he released these chapters for free as No Man’s Land last November.

Jack’s concept of the “gang” being the way of men informs the entire book, specifically his analysis of the central traits of masculinity: strength, courage, mastery and honor. The “gang” is the basic unit of male organization going back to the caveman days. All effective male organizations, from the police to the military to the mafia, are gangs in which the four aforementioned virtues are necessary to survive and advance the group’s interests. Drawing on evolutionary biology, history and philosophers from Aristotle to Hobbes, Donovan breaks it down:

People like to make friends. Being on the defensive all the time is stressful. Most people want to trust other people. Most people want to be able to relax. If you are smart, until you know them,they will remain out there on the other side of the perimeter. Even if you let your guard down to cooperate or trade with them, they may or may not be absorbed into us. As long as other men maintain separate identities, there is always the chance that they will choose to put the interests of their own ahead of your interests. In hard times, agreements between groups fall apart. Competition creates animosity, and men will dehumanize each other to make the tough decisions necessary for their own group to survive.

Donovan also distinguishes between the concept of a being a good man (“good” as in moral) and being good at being a man (being masculine), noting that most people confuse the two:

A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

It goes without saying that certain figures would do well to read that quote carefully.

The second half of The Way of Men is concerned with the state of men today, serving as a great antidote to all the “man up” articles coming out of the media today. Society has gradually crippled mens’ ability to be manly by making the world safe and neutered, yet the Bennetts and Hymowitzes of the world wonder why the Millennial generation has no interest in anything aside from porn and video games. The chapter “The Bonobo Masturbation Society” drives the point home:

If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right— you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.

This is a woman’s world; we men are just visiting.

But it won’t be a woman’s world for much longer. With the slow-motion collapse of the economy and the government’s impotence, it’s only a matter of time before new gangs of men arise to take their place. Donovan is critical of the men’s rights movement’s first principles and pessimistic of their chances of success, though he does praise the work they do. The future of men is the same as their past: the Way of the Gang, good, bad or wretched.

A while back, the author of the Danger & Play blog Tweeted something to the effect of “this is the first generation of males who were not taught how to be men.” Generation Zero is the generation of Sesame Street and Ritalin, a generation raised without any memory or first-hand knowledge of a world in which masculinity was encouraged and celebrated rather than punished. The Way of Men is the first complete roadmap to masculinity ever published, the truth your fathers never told you. For the men of my generation, this book is beyond invaluable.

But even if you aren’t a Millennial, you have to own The Way of Men. There is literally nothing out there like it: a book that describes the fundamentals of manliness without getting bogged down in religion or politics. It is a guiding light out of the darkness.

And whatever you do, don’t be a fag.

Click here to buy The Way of Men.

Read Next: Women Are Just as Socially Retarded as Men

I haven’t read any of Orhan Pamuk’s other novels, so I can’t judge the quality of his work, but Snow is a pretty good excursion into both the emptiness of modern life and the wretchedness of being a beta male. I don’t care for Pamuk’s postmodern trickery (for example, he inserts himself as a character near the end), but Snow is otherwise a tightly written and engaging novel.

The plot concerns Ka, a Turkish poet living in Germany, and his journey to the far eastern Turkish city of Kars to report on a spate of suicides by young women. That turns out to be a cover; Ka is actually pursuing İpek, a former schoolmate of his he crushed on and who recently divorced her husband. Yep, he’s that kind of sap. It’s later revealed that Ka practically lived like an “herbivore man” back in Deutschland; he dwelled in a filthy apartment and his only sexual experiences consisted of masturbating to porn tapes. And of course, it’s later revealed that while Ka was pining over her, İpek was sleeping with Blue, an Islamist terrorist living in hiding from the military.

She had enormous olive-colored eyes with a slight cast to them. Her skin was fair, her legs were long, her lips, which an Ottoman court poet might have likened to cherries, were small but full. She was quite well known. The video section of the World Sex Center was open twenty-four hours a day, but it took me only twenty minutes to locate six films bearing her name. I smuggled these videos back to Istanbul, and only after having watched them did I begin to have some sense of what Ka might have been feeling. Whatever sort of man it was she was kneeling before—he could be the coarsest, ugliest fellow in the world—Melinda always responded to his moans of ecstasy in the same way: Her pale face softened with a compassion unique to mothers. No matter how provocative in costume (whether as an impatient businesswoman, a frolicsome stewardess, or a housewife tired of her ineffectual husband), she was always fragile and vulnerable when naked. As I would later come to see on making my own visit to Kars, there was something of İpek in her manner, her large eyes, and her curvaceous body.

Pamuk originally intended Snow to serve as an explanation of the appeal of radical Islam to Turks both poor and elite, though with 9/11 more than a decade behind us, that theme seems awfully quaint. Still, Snow is an affecting novel well worth reading.

Click here to buy Snow.

Read Next: Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O’Brien

Poetry sucks. Just admit it. Every single one of us hated reading it in school. The older stuff from the Romantic and Victorian periods isn’t so bad, but I’d rather have my fingernails removed then have to read a single line of “free verse” ever again (unless it’s by Stevens or Cummings). Byron is one of the few poets I’ve enjoyed, mostly anyway. Naturally, since Byron is actually worth reading, that means that you’ll never read much of him in the schools and colleges, aside from a couple of his short poems and snippets of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, that self-indulgent mess.

Those of you interested in game or seduction will enjoy Byron in Love, a recent biography focusing on his love life. Byron’s reputation as a womanizer is well-known; it’s from him that we take the term “Byronic hero,” the model for the antihero in just about every decent work of literature in the past hundred years. Byron in Love chronicles the man’s sexual exploits from his early days in school to his “Satanic” life abroad in Italy and Greece. Think of him like a 19th-century Roosh.

Marianna’s nemesis came in the person of another fiery young woman, Margarita Cogni, the Fornarina, wife of a baker, also young, with tantalising black eyes, the Venetian looks and the spirit of a tigress. Murray would be told in gleeful detail of the contretemps between these two women, La Segati and her gossips discovering by the neighing of his horse that he had gone late at night to meet the Fornarina, whence they followed, staging an operatic brawl, screams, curses, the throwing back of veils and in explicit Venetian, the Fornarina telling his amica: ‘You are not his wife, I am not his wife, you are his Donna, I am his Donna’, then stormed off. She then made herself indispensable to him in the running of the Palazzo Mocenigo, former home of the Doges, which he had rented for £200 a year, the Fornarina walking about in hat and feathers and a gown with a tail, intercepting his mail, paying a scribe to write letters for her, and servants continuously ‘redding the fray’ between her and any other feminine persons who visited. Her Medea traits and Venetian ‘pantaloonery’ amused for a time, but when she became ungovernable and he asked her to leave, she refused, wielding a knife, Fletcher had to disarm her. Boatmen carried her out whence she presently threw herself in the canal and was brought back intending to ‘refix’ herself in the place. Byron threatened that if she did not quit the premises then he would, and ultimately she was returned to her irate husband.

Click here to buy Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Read Next: BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara

Most people have forgotten John O’Hara and this book by extension, one of his finest novels. If they do know BUtterfield 8, it’s only because of the movie based on it, and then only because Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar for her role in the film. O’Hara was an immensely talented novelist, referred to by Fran Lebowitz as “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” for his uncompromising, unpretentious depictions of American life during the 1920’s and 30’s. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, is a great read, but BUtterfield 8 is truly his masterpiece, an underrated classic of the American canon.

The novel revolves around the life of Gloria Stannard, a party slut-cum-call girl living a seedy life in Depression-era New York. The novel opens with an account of her death, inspired by a news story O’Hara had read several years prior. While it wouldn’t be hard to slip into a sentimental tone with this kind of subject matter, O’Hara deftly avoids this trap, cross-examining Gloria’s life with a frank and non-judgemental eye:

“—for a decent bathing cap. Jimmy, before we go, I want to tell you again, for the last time you’ve got to stop saying things like that to me. I’m not your mistress, and I’m not a girl off the streets, and I’m not accustomed to being talked to that way. It isn’t funny, and no one else talks that way to me. Do you talk that way to the women on newspapers? Even if you do I’m sure they don’t really like it all the time. You can’t admire my dress without going into details about my figure, and—”

“Why in the name of Christ should I? Isn’t the whole idea of the dress to show off your figure? Why does it look well on you? Because you have nice breasts and everything else. Now God damn it, why shouldn’t I say so?”

Click here to buy BUtterfield 8.

Read Next: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce