Category Archives: Books/Media

What do you call a book that’s laced with copious amounts of bullshit but is still worth reading?

From Da to Yes, as its name implies, is a guide to the nations of eastern Europe excluding Russia, which is covered in Yale Richmond’s companion book From Nyet to Da. Richmond himself, so far as I can tell, is one of those weedy little neoliberal twerps who went to eastern Europe in the nineties to facilitate in the region’s “democratic” and “capitalist” transitions (read: help Westerners steal everything that wasn’t nailed down). Indeed, the book is dedicated to the Americans “who are giving so generously of their time to assist in the democratic transition in eastern Europe.”

We’re in for some rough sledding, folks.

Still, From Da to Yes is an interesting and informative cultural guidebook, provided you can read between the lines and decipher Richmond’s squid-like prose. He’s clearly an academic, as evidenced by his clinical, dry writing style and unwillingness to make any kind of judgment about the peoples he’s writing about. For example, here’s a section from one of the first chapters, on Poland:

Poles have two codes of behavior, one public and the other private. In public, they can be pushy, demanding, distant, abrupt, and rude. In private, they are warm, generous, hospitable, and loquacious. Conversations are lengthy, and goodbyes never seem to end. As the Poles say, “The English leave without saying goodbye. The Poles say goodbye but do not leave.”

Read: the Poles are a bunch of blabbermouths.

Or check this section from the chapter on the Czechs and Slovaks:

Poles, as we have seen, were always prepared to rise up and fight for their independence and freedom. Czechs have consistently chosen a more cautious course and, they might argue, with similar results.

Read: the Czechs are a bunch of shameless suckups. Mark Ames made the exact same claims in The Exile, only he didn’t pussyfoot around the facts.

Still, From Da to Yes is nothing if not comprehensive. The book is short on practical information for tourists such as cost of living and sights to see, so don’t buy it if you’re looking for a Lonely Planet substitute (though given that the book was published in 1995, it wouldn’t be useful for that purpose anymore anyway). Richmond is squarely focused on describing the cultural and historical attributes of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and more. Additionally, if you’re of eastern European descent and interested in tracing your ancestry, the book has an interesting appendix full of resources and advice.

You just need to wade through a lot of pointlessness to get there.

As I mentioned already, Richmond’s academic perspective prevents him from calling bullshit where appropriate. Many of the chapters drag on due to him repeating information that was already pretty well-stated in the introduction. For example, he keeps making a point to delineate each culture’s hospitality to outsiders, oblivious to the fact that it’s virtually identical from country to country. Additionally, Richmond lacks the balls to just admit that a lot of peoples in eastern Europe, such as the Macedonians and Moldovans, simply aren’t that noteworthy.

Contrast to Roosh’s Bang Poland, where he flat-out says in the intro that Polish culture is pretty boring and uninteresting, a product of the country being sandwiched between Germany and Russia, two great powers.

This would be somewhat forgivable if From Da to Yes applied the same level of detail to all of the cultures it discusses, but it doesn’t. The section on Belarus is embarrassingly skimpy, for example, and all the nations of Yugoslavia are cramped into a single chapter. Additionally, Richmond spends an odd amount of time on information that should merit a footnote at best. For example, he spends multiple paragraphs discussing how each nationality treated Jews in World War II.

What saves From Da to Yes is its historical information. Richmond gives you a bird’s eye look at the pasts of Poland, Albania, Bulgaria and more, useful if you’re a history buff or looking to augment your knowledge if you’re planning to make a trip to the country in question. If you keep your BS detector on, From Da to Yes is a solid resource if you’re interested in and/or traveling to eastern Europe and want to know what to expect.

Click here to buy From Da to Yes: Understanding the East Europeans.

Read Next: Bang Poland: How to Make Love to Polish Women in Poland by Roosh V

As I’ve written before, a book consisting solely of articles you’ve already published on your blog is a tough sell. Since the book’s content is already online for free, you will get considerably fewer takers than a book full of original content. Additionally, because essay collections lack narrative coherence, there’s less motivation to read through them then with a regular book.

Even still, if you’re a long-time blogger, it’s worth putting your best posts into paperback format.

Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf is the first in a promised series of best-of collections from Aaron Clarey, he of Enjoy the Decline and Worthless. And at over four hundred pages, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth with this book. Despite its glaring and frankly avoidable flaws, I recommend Top Shelf as an entertaining and informative collection of Clarey’s work.

Like with other essay collections, the top two reasons to buy Top Shelf are convenience and permanency. Like Roosh, Clarey has been blogging for close to a decade and has written thousands of articles in that time. Searching through them will take you hours, if not days. If you’ve got infinite amounts of free time to burn, then yeah, maybe you should pass on this book. For the rest of us though, we have real lives and things to do:

My boss explained to me that we are here to challenge the students, but not too much. That my test was unfair and I should consider tailoring it more to their skill level. Of course with hindsight I now see what the charlatan of a dean was telling me; “Dumb it down because we’re fleecing these kids for their money for a worthless degree and if you rock the boat we’ll lose some of them.” But he couldn’t come outright and say that, ergo why he was feeding me a line of bull.

Additionally, as Clarey himself points out in the introduction, Top Shelf is worth owning just because. Websites are a lot more fragile than you think, and years of sweat and labor can be blinked out of existence in an eye. Having a collection of Clarey’s (or Roosh’s, or my own) best work ensures that you won’t be left in the lurch should Google or the PC commissars descend upon our minimalist Minnesotan hero.

Despite Top Shelf’s length, Clarey’s conversational writing style and cheerful tone makes the book fly by smoothly. He broaches just about every topic you could think, though the bulk of the articles revolve around game, women and economics. The highlight of the book are Clarey’s personal stories, my favorite being “Degree Mills,” about his time teaching at a for-profit outhouse of a college, and “The Goldman Sachs Story,” about his interview for a job with the vampire squid itself:

So, after 1 hour of summarily defeating the best U of Penn Clarion had to offer (and getting some odd looks that nobody could recognize me or remember me), I hit the showers (which was my original purpose in the first place) cleaned up, hopped back into the Gutless Cutlass and headed out.

My problems with Top Shelf are two. One, the organization is slipshod and incomprehensible. Clarey seemingly throws articles at you with no concern for what the subject matter is or how it relates to what you just read. You’ll finish reading an article about the joys of bachelorhood and the one following it will be about saving for retirement, with absolutely nothing to connect the two. It would have been far better to organize the book into thematic chapters instead.

Secondly, the editing in the book is awful.

Clarey states in the introduction that he deliberately avoided cleaning up the posts in order to “remain true” to the original work, but the problem is that on a technical level, Aaron Clarey is not a good writer. His prose is full of typos, malaprops, punctuation mistakes, grammar errors and just about every mistake a writer could make. It’s a testament to his talent as a storyteller and his knowledge as a man that the book remains not only readable but enjoyable.

Look Aaron, I get it. You think English is a useless subject to major in. So do I, and I actually studied it. You also hate copyediting. So do I. That’s why we have Elance, a website where you can hire someone to fix all the typos for you, with absolutely no effort or work required on your part. It’s not free, but the extra step ensures that your product looks more professional.

Finally, this is unrelated to the book’s quality, but for some reason, the Kindle and paperback editions of Top Shelf are not linked on Amazon (i.e. you can’t go to the Kindle version from the paperback version’s page and vice versa). This wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the fact that at least once a month, Clarey complains about people emailing him asking whether there’s a Kindle version (only the paperback version is linked from his blog). I’ve tried explaining to him how he can fix this (as I’ve had this problem myself in the past), but here it is again, because he clearly didn’t listen to me the first couple of times:

1. Go to your KDP dashboard.
2. Select “Contact Us” in the lower-right corner.
3. Select “Product Page.”
4. Fill out the form telling Amazon that you want the Kindle and paperback versions of Top Shelf linked.

And there you go, Aaron. Amazon will do it for you automatically. Thirty seconds of work on your part will save you from being besieged with people asking you “Is there a Kindle version of Top Shelf? Is there? IS THERE?”

Despite all these issues, Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf is a worthy book and a must-own if you’re a fan of Aaron’s writings.

Click here to buy Captain Capitalism: Top Shelf for Kindle. Click here for the paperback edition.

Read Next: Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey

Alternate history, like sci-fi and fantasy, is one of those genres that is nearly unreadable due to its infestation with goons and dorks. Much in the same way that science fiction and fantasy novels are larded up with extraneous detail about the world the story takes place in, alternate history writers are obsessed with vomiting out useless information about their books’ settings, destroying any possibility of character development or an interesting plot. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is about the only enjoyable alternate history novel I’ve ever read, mainly because its setting—a world in which the Nazis won World War II—is believable and it doesn’t drown you in an avalanche of superfluous information.

With The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, I can add another book to that list.

The only reason I bought this book—or even heard of it—was because I’m a huge fan of the Coen brothers and had read that they were planning to do a film adaptation. After reading it, I can definitely understand why the Coens were attracted to it: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is an enthralling blend of hardboiled crime novels, dry humor and history. While at times it’s more pastiche than original, it comes together to create a story more than the sum of its parts.

The premise of Policemen’s Union begins with the Slattery Report. In 1940, Interior Undersecretary Henry Slattery recommended that the U.S. allow Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in Alaska, which would serve the dual purpose of getting the Jews out of harm’s way while developing Alaska’s vast natural resources. Despite support from other members of Roosevelt’s cabinet, the plan was killed before it could be brought to a vote before Congress. In Michael Chabon’s story, however, the untimely death of Alaska Territory delegate Anthony Dimond results in the Slattery Report being passed into law:

Not quite two years later, Hertz Shemets, his mother, and his kid sister, Freydl, arrived on Baranof Island, Alaska, with the first wave of Galitzer settlers. He came on the notorious Diamond, a World War I– era troop transport that Secretary Ickes ordered taken out of mothballs and rechristened as a left-handed memorial, or so legend has it, to the late Anthony Dimond, the Alaska Territory’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives. (Until the fatal intervention on a Washington, D.C., street corner of a drunken, taxi-driving schlemiel named Denny Lanning—eternal hero of the Sitka Jews—Delegate Dimond had been on the verge of getting the Alaskan Settlement Act killed in committee.) Thin, pale, bewildered, Hertz Shemets stepped from the Diamond, from the dark and the reek of soup and rusty puddles, to the clean cold spice of Sitka pine. With his family and his people he was numbered, inoculated, deloused, tagged like a migrant bird by the stipulations of the Alaskan Settlement Act of 1940. In a cardboard pocketbook he carried an “Ickes passport,” a special emergency visa printed on special flimsy paper with special smeary ink.

As a result, only a fraction of Europe’s Jews are killed in the Holocaust, and while Zionists do succeed in setting up an independent Israel in 1948, it is conquered and wiped out mere months later due to a lack of manpower to fight the surrounding Arab states. Policemen’s Union is set sixty years after World War II in Sitka, which has become a massive, sprawling metropolis on the brink of extermination. It’s the eve of Reversion, when Alaska will return to gentile control, meaning all the Jews will have to emigrate.

The beautiful thing about Chabon’s premise is that this is where he leaves it. While he mentions other aspects of history in passing, he doesn’t belabor the novel’s backstory, instead depicting the lives of Sitka’s Jewish residents though subtlety and omission. The defining theme of Policemen’s Union is alienation, a common trope in Jewish literature but explored here in a way that is original and refreshing. Sitka’s residents primarily speak Yiddish, cutting them off not only from gentiles but from their fellow American Jews; they are restricted from traveling to other parts of the U.S.; their society is anachronistic, preserving aspects of European Jewish culture long after the rest of the world has moved on:

“I’m willing to venture that on occasion he played chess,” Landsman says. One of the three books in the room is a creased and broken-backed paperback edition of Three Hundred Chess Games by Siegbert Tarrasch. It has a manila pocket pasted to its inside back cover, with a return card that shows it was last borrowed from the central branch of the Sitka Public Library in July 1986. Landsman can’t help thinking that he first made love to his future ex-wife in July 1986. Bina was twenty at the time, and Landsman was twenty-three, and it was the height of the northern summer. July 1986 is the date stamped onto the card in the pocket of Landsman’s illusions. The other two books are cheap Yiddish thrillers. “Beyond that I know goat shit.”

The novel’s protagonist is Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic, divorced, middle-aged homicide detective assigned to investigate the murder of Mendel Shpilman, believed by many of Sitka’s residents to be the messiah. Landsman’s sad-sack yet determined personality calls to mind Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; he is consistently bossed around by his superior and ex-wife Bina and relies on his partner, the half-Indian Berko Shemets, to pull his feet out of the fire every time he gets in a jam. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from Landsman’s Sam Spade fantasies constantly colliding with reality:

“Who said anything about needing?” Landsman says, fumbling with the button fly of some worn twill trousers. Cotton work shirt, laceless canvas sneaks. They want to dress him like a wino, or a beach bum, or some other kind of loser who turns up naked at your intake desk, homeless, no visible means of support. The shoes are too big, but otherwise, everything’s a perfect fit.

The other clever aspect of Policemen’s Union comes from Chabon’s use of Yiddish. He claims his inspiration for the novel came from an old translation guide he found in a bookstore called Say it in Yiddish; his dialogue is peppered with various Yiddish phrases both authentic and original, giving the book a flavor all its own. For example, snitches are known as “shtinkers,” while hitmen are referred to as “shlossers” (literally “mechanic”).

While the main plot of Policemen’s Union follows a somewhat predictable path for detective novels, the story remains engrossing due to Chabon’s tight dialogue and the book’s unique setting. Chabon’s prose is economical and only dives into repetitious overwriting on a couple of occasions. Additionally, the plot ties into contemporary American culture in a pretty creative way. I won’t spoil it, other than to say that if you know how Jewish and Christian relations work in the U.S., it won’t surprise you much at all.

I would love to see what the Coen brothers make of this book.

My one complaint with Policemen’s Union, or at least with the Kindle edition, is the way the book’s glossary is organized. Chabon helpfully provides an index of all the Yiddish slang used in the novel, but the Kindle version lacks hyperlinks to it, meaning you need to stop reading and manually flip over to the glossary every time you come across a new word. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s a little annoying. The book would have been improved had Chabon used footnotes instead.

Otherwise, if you enjoy detective fiction and alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a great entry for both genres and is absolutely worth your time.

Click here to buy The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

Read Next: Another Day in Paradise by Eddie Little

I watched Irreversible a couple weeks back on Zampano’s recommendation, and I wasn’t really impressed with it the first time around. If you’ve heard of the movie, you probably know it for its climactic scene, where Monica Bellucci gets graphically raped in a Parisian pedestrian tunnel. A couple feminists claimed to have been triggered by my using a still from the movie as an image for my podcast interview with Zampano, which the two of us found amusing; I only picked the still because it’s the image that Zampano uses for his Gravatar and Twitter account.

Honestly, call me heartless or sociopathic, but the rape scene in Irreversible really didn’t move me all that much.

Part of the overreaction to Irreversible is in part due to feminists brainwashing everyone in believing that rape is the WORST! THING! EVER!, creating a Pavlovian response where people automatically describe rape as “brutal” or “sickening” regardless of the facts of the matter, like devout Christians going into apoplectic rage when they’re confronted with “sin.” See: Lee Stranahan getting raked over the coals for suggesting that the Steubenville rape wasn’t “brutal.”

The other problem is that objectively, Irreversible doesn’t give the audience any reason to care about what happens to Bellucci’s character. The film’s big schtick is that the scenes are played in reverse order, so all the crucial character development isn’t shown until after we’ve seen the rape. Not only that, director Gaspar Noé absolutely drowns the audience in graphic violence for the first half of the film, to the point where it gets boring. By the time Bellucci’s character gets raped, we’ve not only seen what she looks like afterwards, but we’ve also watched a man get his arm broken by a gay rapist, another man get his skull smashed in with a fire extinguisher, a tranny hooker get brutalized at knifepoint, a cab driver get beaten and maced, and more. I found the rape scene in Blue Velvet to be far more disturbing, mainly because that movie actually gives us a reason to care about its characters.

Also interesting that in both movies, the character who gets raped is played by an Italian model better known for her looks than her acting chops.

It doesn’t help that Irreversible’s story is on the level of I Spit on Your Grave. It’s about a woman named Alex (Bellucci) who gets raped and her boyfriend (Vincent Cassel) and his friend’s (Albert Dupontel) attempt to get revenge on her assailant. Really. That’s as deep as it gets. Showing the film’s scenes in reverse chronological order allows for some interesting developments (such as the revelation that Marcel and Pierre end up killing the wrong guy), but as I mentioned already, throwing all the character development at the end makes it impossible to get emotionally invested in the story. In fact, I was so bored by the end that not even a naked Monica Bellucci could keep me from falling asleep.

On the surface, Irreversible seemed like another one of those poorly written “art films” that SWPLs gush over.

When I commented to this effect on Twitter, Chip Smith pointed me to Michael Blowhard’s (Ray Sawhill’s) thoughts on the movie. Sawhill sees the movie as a metaphor for the decline of France, and to a lesser extent Europe and the West in general, making its point through subtleties in presentation and tone rather than beating you over the head with it. With this in mind, I decided to give Irreversible another shot, and found a lot of merit in Sawhill’s analysis.

I don’t know if I’d ever call Irreversible a good movie, but it’s worth watching at least once.

The biggest things that stood out to me on my second viewing was the cinematography and camerawork. One of the reasons why I disliked the film the first time around was because Noé swings the camera around like an autistic kindergartener bombed on Red Bull, never focusing on any one thing for more than a brief moment. This is particularly evident during the scene in the gay BDSM club Rectum, which flashes a different vision of depravity on screen every other second. Combined with the already bleak, dark underground settings of Irreversible’s first half and Noé’s love of low-angle shots, it’s difficult to keep a bead on the action.

Thing is, this doesn’t hold true for the second half, which follows Marcel and Alex’s happy life before the rape. While the camera still switches views frequently, its movement is no longer herky-jerky but smooth and natural, often going above to give us a bird’s eye view of the scene. Indeed, the final scene shows us Bellucci reading a book from overhead. Additionally, the settings of these scenes are colorful and full of life; a posh party, a nice part of the metro, Marcel and Alex’s cheery apartment and the like.

The rape scene is a neat divider between these two styles, as it’s the only part of the movie where the camera is stationary for any length of time.

The other aspect of Irreversible that popped out at me was the contrast between Marcel and Alex’s relationship and the mindless hedonism of the gays at Rectum. The obvious difference between the reproductive nature of normal sex (indeed, we learn near the end of the film that Alex was pregnant) and the sterile nature of gay sex is important, but Noé throws in more red meat for the audience to snack on. One of the early scenes (chronologically) has Marcel, Alex and Pierre talking about orgasming and how couples have a responsibility to pleasure each other; this stands in comparison to the selfish orgies at Rectum, whose depraved patrons see each other purely as a means to get off.

Indeed, the gay characters in Irreversible are its villains, used as a metaphor for soulless self-gratification and psychopathy. Alex is violently sodomized by a gay man for no other reason than because he can get away with it. Another homo tries to do the same thing to Marcel, again for no other reason than because he can.

Not only do the gays lack any concern for straights, they have no loyalty to each other. During the scene in which Pierre beats the homo to death at Rectum, none of the man’s compadres lift a finger to help him, even though they outnumber Pierre thirty to one. Hell, afterwards they joke about how the guy’s face got “fucked up.” Contrast this with Marcel and Pierre’s friendship; Pierre sticks by his friend even as he becomes increasingly irrational and “blood simple,” as Hammett might put it. Indeed, Pierre tried to dissuade Marcel from entering Rectum, yet still rides to his rescue when he gets in a jam.

Not only that, we learn that Pierre had been dating Alex before Marcel “stole” her away, yet Pierre still stands by him.

The commentary is fairly obvious: Noé is making a point about the atomization of French and Western society. Marcel, Alex and Pierre represent the France of old, the France of community, love and belonging; their ruination at the hands of the Rectum gays represents the unmaking of traditional society by hedonism and leftism. There are other subtle clues hinting at this message; for example, the final (chronologically first) scene shows Monica Bellucci reading while accompanied by Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, while the first (chronologically last) scene features obnoxious, degenerate electronic music of the kind you need to be on MDMA to tolerate.

Not only that, Irreversible makes the depressing point that there’s no going back.

The film opens and closes with the same quote, “time destroys everything.” Marcel and Pierre’s sojourn in vigilantism is a complete failure. Not only do they end up murdering the wrong man, Marcel’s arm is broken and Pierre is looking at life in prison. It’s also subtly hinted that Alex might not recover from her injuries. Her rapist will continue to walk free.

Their idyllic lives are gone forever.

Like I said, I don’t know if all this symbolism makes Irreversible a good movie. It’s still a film with a B-movie plot, gratuitous violence and so-so acting. But it’s worth watching to decide for yourself.

Click here to watch Irreversible.

Read Next: 9 Songs: Jerking Off to Jerks

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on April 21, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Black Passenger Yellow Cabs is one of those books where a low price point enables me to look past its numerous flaws. And believe you me, this is an incredibly flawed book. But it only cost me $2.99 (the lowest price you can charge for a Kindle book and still make any money), so these flaws aren’t as huge a deal as they would normally be.

Black Passenger is a reasonably unique book: half tell-all memoir, half sociological study. It chronicles author Stefhen Bryan’s adventures teaching English in Japan, banging a slew of girls along the way, to the point where he gets sick of it and finally gets married. Interspersed between his tales of hedonism, he delves into his abusive childhood growing up in Jamaica, his self-destructive and suicidal behavior in his adopted homeland of America, and his extensive research into the pathologies of Japanese society:

Which begs the question, why do the Japanese work themselves to the grave, or more accurately, to the crematorium? The answer lies in their socialization. Whereas organisms, especially humans and especially Western humans seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, the Japanese from thousands of years of programming seek to do the opposite, cultural tendencies on which businesses and political leaders capitalize.

Bryan amusingly compares Japan to the Jackson family, its leaders a bunch of slave-driving nuts who were determined to make Japan into a first-world country no matter the cost. This aggressive Westernization meshed with Japan’s preexisting infantilized culture to create a shocking number of social problems, from mother-son incest to parricide to abnormally high rates of autism and Asperger’s (salarymen openly picking their noses and eating their snot is apparently a common sight on the subway). If you know any nerdy anime freaks or other Asian supremacists, this book would go a long way towards defusing their delusions about their beloved model minorities.

But I haven’t even gotten to the most bizarre problem Japan suffers from: the men there simply aren’t interested in sex. We all know about herbivore men and how the land of the rising sun leads the world in sexless marriages, but that’s not the worst of it. Many Japanese husbands are so uninterested in fucking their wives that they basically outsource the job to foreign men, which Bryan was all too eager to take advantage of:

Returning to her multi-car warehouse, we continued our consumption of each other’s lips, when the shutter descended far enough so our actions could not be recognized. Mouth still locked, we hurriedly unbuckled each other’s jeans, like teenagers trying to get busy before being caught. Her jeans appeared to have been welded, form-fitted onto her curvy athletic body and after much effort I pried them and her panties from her and began curling her, 52 kilograms and 158 centimeters, onto my north pointing member. It had been five years for her, so my invasion was the source of great pain.

“I have to cook my husband’s dinner,” she said, as I curled her up and down.  “Already we’ve been gone too long.  Let’s meet next weekend again and go to a hotel.”

Reading Black Passenger went a long way towards making me understand why East Asia is a sexual paradise for white men: Japanese guys are the biggest pussies on the planet. They’d rather work themselves to death (literally, as karoshi, death from overwork, is an epidemic in Japan) then get laid. How can you blame their women for running into the arms of foreign devils? At least foreign guys want to have sex.

Bryan also lays into the numerous problems Japanese girls have: poor dental hygiene, shyness, and an odd unwillingness to use birth control. That last one isn’t as big a deal as you might think, though, as Japanese women have absolutely no reservations about getting those unwanted little shits sucked out at the nearby clinic; Bryan goes through over a dozen abortions during his time there:

Abortion in Japan is an industry, which like all industries here is run by men. According to the Health Labor and Welfare Ministry 289,127 abortions were performed in 2005, the lowest since compiling data began in 1955. This number represents a first for pregnancy terminations to fall bellow the 300,000 mark since 1955. However, experts agree that the actual number may even be three times that amount, given structural incentives for doctors to under-report. Abortion and contraceptives are not covered by insurance, hence doctors are at liberty to set the price. As most – including three for which I paid – are paid for in cash, doctors are able to manipulate the numbers in order to dodge taxes and what’s more, the penalty for total under-reporting is less than the cost of one abortion. Since my arrival here in 2001, there have been at least two reports of authorities finding illegally and improperly discarded fetuses in dumpsters near abortions clinics.

Bryan’s descriptions of his sexual conquests are interesting enough but fall short of leaving an impact. While his ability to come up with metaphors for his penis is legendary (“SCUD” and “hardened negritude” among them), his diction is too wordy and intellectual. This tone works for the sociological portions of the book, but it falls flat during the memoir parts. An honest, introspective work like this needs to pull the reader in and rub his face in the depravity of it all, but I always felt disconnected from the action.

That’s just one problem with Black Passenger. The other two major problems with the book, that would cripple it if it weren’t so cheap, are its length and poor editing. This book drags on twice as long as it needs to, as Bryan’s sexual encounters become increasingly repetitive and dull, and the narrative slowly grinds to a halt instead of coming to a proper conclusion. I suppose you could make an argument that the monotony of the second half drives home Bryan’s increasing weariness of Japanese women, but it was a struggle to get all the way to the end.

And the editing… my God is it terrible. I was shocked to see an editor listed on Black Passenger’s Amazon page, because everything about the book screams “first draft.” Comma splices, run-on sentences, typos and more dot the pages like zits on a weeaboo’s face. Not only that, the Kindle formatting is screwed up, with paragraphs spaced unevenly and a few lacking indents.

Finally, Bryan’s feminist beliefs get annoying after a while. Roosh already brought this up in his review, but Bryan’s kvetching about the Japanese patriarchy is on shaky factual ground and could have come out of a Feministe or Jezebel screed.

Still, the ludicrously low price point makes these flaws less of an issue. Even with its slipshod editing, Black Passenger Yellow Cabs is an intriguing little adventure. If you want to learn more about Japan or if you just want to read another book about sleazy sexcapades, this is worth a look.

Click here to buy Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Of Exile and Excess in Japan.

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

I’m honestly starting to think that Eddie Little’s death was one of the great tragedies of modern American literature. You’ve read my praise for his debut novel Another Day in Paradise, a roman à clef about growing up as a streetwise tough in the seventies, but Steel Toes blows that story out of the water and into orbit.

If there was such a thing as “karma,” James Frey would die a thousand deaths for plagiarizing Little.

Steel Toes is easily one of the best novels of the 21st century so far. It takes the gut-punching prose and hustle of Another Day in Paradise and kicks it up several notches. Little doesn’t simply rehash his first novel, he expands upon his oeuvre, to the point where you’re left wondering what he’d be putting out if he were alive today. Fair warning though: if you haven’t read Paradise, a lot of what makes Steel Toes great will be lost on you.

The novel is a sequel to Another Day in Paradise, picking up where the ending left off. Following the death of his girlfriend Rosie, Bobbie Prine ends up on a botched job and overdoses on smack, landing himself in an Indiana prison, a nightmarish “gladiator school” of ass-rape, murder and racial animosity. Every dirty detail of Prine’s life behind bars is meted out in Little’s typical 100 mph prose:

“Tellin’ ya, boy, a calf is the ticket. Slap your pecker into its mouth and it thinks it’s mama’s tit, starts suckin’ and won’t stop until it gets a gallon. God ain’t made the woman yet that can suck a dick better than a new calf. Shit howdy, don’t got no fuckin’ teeth, just keep on gummin’ at your organ till you’re howlin’ at the sky.”

Bobbie’s penchant for getting into racial brawls lands him a one-way ticket to a supermax prison, which he evades through a last minute escape attempt with his buddies Phil, a cross-eyed peckerwood from near the Kentucky border, and Big George, one of the few blacks in prison he’s on speaking terms with. They flee across the border to a Chicago-area farm run by one of Bobbie’s old associates, and from there the plot spirals into Bobbie’s attempts to reintegrate into civilian life and feed his growing heroin addiction:

Before there’s time to wonder if the drugs are going to fuck this up I am responding to Michelle from all the way inside me. Picking her up and kicking the front door closed and carrying her into my bedroom and watching her undress, large breasts covered with small freckles, tiny waist and fuck-me hips. Kicking my way outta my jeans, coming together, not like enemy ships but like motherfuckin’ poetry in motion. Those brown, orange-amber, gold eyes locked on mine as we draw apart and come together, making something bigger and better than either of the halves.

Steel Toes’ big change is a tonal shift. Another Day in Paradise was very much a coming-of-age novel, albeit a twisted and black one. Bobbie Prine may have been a killer, a junkie and a petty criminal, but he was also a fourteen year old, still full of a certain optimism and naivete about the world. This is all gone in Steel Toes; the death of Rosie plus years in the joint have permanently altered Bobbie’s disposition for the worse.

The other recurring theme of the novel is Bobbie’s complete inability to escape his life.

As I’ve written before, redemption may be a possibility, but most people are too selfish and short-sighted to take it. The two constants in Bobbie’s life are his heroin addiction and his impulsivity in feeding it, and how he’s constantly getting himself into trouble and alienating his friends because of it. He reunites with a number of characters from Paradise, including his surrogate mother Syd and his friend Ben, and manages to drive them all away through his constant poor decision-making. His attempts to blend into high society fail every time his streetwise junkie instincts flare up, such as in one bizarre scene where he meets a wino in Boston and gets loaded on Wild Irish Rose. He meets a nice upper-class Boston girl named Michelle and drags her into the criminal underworld.

And as the book’s climactic, bloody ending shows, nothing short of death will get Bobbie off of the path he’s stuck on.

This is the reality of life: few if any people can escape their own stupidity. The average moron will keep on making the same mistakes again and again until he dies. Magical transformations are nearly impossible to pull off, and anyone who claims to have done one should be looked at with deep skepticism. Eddie Little understood this; he died barely a year after Steel Toes was published.

This is not a happy book or an uplifting book, but it’s a funny, gripping and real one. Steel Toes isn’t just a viciously honest portrayal of drug addiction and the criminal life, it’s a scathing commentary on American society and human nature. If you haven’t read Another Day in Paradise, read it; if you have, Steel Toes should be next on your list.

Click here to buy Steel Toes.

Read Next: Another Day in Paradise by Eddie Little

I believe it was Aaron Clarey who said that people under the age of 30 should not even attempt to write fiction; if I’m wrong on this, someone feel free to correct me in the comments. It’s a sentiment I largely agree with. Not only do young people lack the necessary life experience in order to craft convincing and interesting stories, even if they had said experience, their brains themselves put them at a disadvantage. Neurological research shows that the brain doesn’t finish developing until age 25, part of the reason why you’re not legally allowed to lease a car until you’re that age (among other things). Rare is the young writer who can pull off fiction, and even then it’s usually a glorified retelling of their own lives (Bonjour Tristesse, On the Road).

Is Donlak’s debut novel, written when he was in his twenties, worthy enough to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics? No.

As I’ve said before, it doesn’t bring me any joy to pan a book by anyone in this part of the Internet, but I have to call it like I see it. While it’s far from unreadable, The Refugee is a clunker of a debut, suffocated by its overwrought prose and sickening self-indulgence. The only things that make it worth buying are its low price and because it has enough flashes of brilliance—enough signs of the talent that Donlak would become—to ease the journey.

As long as you view The Refugee as the equivalent of watching sausage being ground up in a factory—watching the growth of Donlak as a man and writer—you won’t be too disappointed.

Mind you, it takes a while before you get to the good stuff. A while. Check out the opening paragraph and you’ll see why:

I was fleeing everything. You name it, I was fleeing it. Escaping it; trying to get away from life as I had come to know it. Life was in its ever flourishing greedy, despicable decrepitude. This was the sick world that surrounded me – no, us – everywhere. What a sad and obnoxious piece of shit society had become, I thought begrudgingly – in that tiny tin box in the sky. I sat jammed in a seat that was too narrow for my skinny ass. Sitting next to me is a fat man; a fat obnoxious business man who refuses to look at my unshaven hoodlum state. You know, because he’s off in his immortal world where the universe is paved in ignorant greedy money roads. His high teacup fantasies, his martinis after work, his second drink of the flight. Well fuck him!

Holy purple prose, Batman! Not even a page in and already my grading hand is twitching to mark everything up in red ink. This has to be one of the most absurdly puffed-up paragraphs I’ve ever read in a published work. Redundancy abounds, from restating “fleeing” in three sentences to stating that the guy sitting next to him is “fat” twice to the whiny dirges about what a “piece of shit society had become.” And “despicable decrepitude?” I couldn’t help but think of Daffy Duck lisping that one out: “You’re despicable!”

The Refugee is a semi-autobiographical novel following Robert (presumably Donlak’s literary surrogate), a young writer who flees his boring inland Canadian town for the excitement of Victoria, where he can pursue his dreams of being an artist. Along the way, he bangs a lot of girls (somehow hiding everything from his live-in girlfriend Lauryn), does a lot of drugs, and eventually goes back home after reality catches up with him.

Okay, we’re on decent footing here. Realistically, ennui and decadence are about the only topics a young novelist can believably tackle; it worked for Jack Kerouac and Françoise Sagan. But here’s the thing; your writing has to have some humility and humor in order to pull this off. The Refugee falls apart mainly because Robert is such a self-absorbed little shit that it’s almost impossible to empathize with him, going on little tirades like this:

Don’t underestimate the power of poetry. Poets have been slain in countries because they are deemed dangerous men. Artists and writers have been banished from their countries because they are sinister towards the consciousness of the masses; they would fill their heads with hope. That’s what they’re afraid of. The poet is the fiercest soldier on the playing field, and we’ve languished behind the fence too long, it will reach someone, I promise – I am living proof to you. Take these words to heart. I too am dying inside.

Oh come off it, you halfwit Holden Caulfield! You’re not the second coming of Solzhenitsyn, you’re an unemployed hipster living in one of the most boring and unremarkable countries in the world. The only thing that could possibly kill you is your bloated ego.

And yet, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, Robert keeps throwing in these little asides trying to show us how convinced he is of the importance of his art. You want to jump in a time machine, slap young Donlak across the face, then strap him down in a Clockwork Orange-helmet and make him watch Barton Fink while force-feeding him LSD. Robert’s entitlement and vanity finally come to a head in one lengthy whine about how “hard” it is to be a poet, with this line in particular setting me off:

…You will take beatings from your family because they think you are taking advantage of them, because you’re lazy, that you won’t get a ‘real’ job and run around with fantasies of poetic muses – to them anyone could do it, only they wouldn’t want to, or no one can do it, cuz they don’t understand…

Hey genius, you do know that most artists/writers/musicians have day jobs, right? Lydia Lunch was a waitress at CBGB. When the Velvet Underground collapsed, Lou Reed was so poor he had to beg his father for a job. Hunter Thompson worked a million shit jobs, from copy boy for Time to low-paid sports writer, before he became famous. If your art doesn’t pay, you have to shut up and wash dishes (or wait tables or whatever) until it does. Frankly, The Refugee reminds me of that godawful Canadian “art” film Vivid. Fuck, they’re even about the same thing; obnoxious, self-important artists who agonize over how awesome they are while leeching off of their girlfriends.

Is there something in the water up in Canada that turns ordinary men into crybaby art fags?

The Refugee’s wonky prose doesn’t help things either. As is typical of first-time writers, Donlak lards up his sentences with adjectives and superfluous detail until they tear themselves apart under their own weight. The novel’s editing is also less than stellar, which combined with the workshop-style prose made it a struggle for me to keep my eyes from glazing over whole paragraphs.

Where the novel is redeemed is in its detailing of Robert’s sexual adventures. Donlak approaches the girls he fucks with an odd detachment that matches the tone of the rest of the book. There are also a number of other passages that made me chuckle in amusement. Additionally, given the Bonjour Tristesse/On the Road-esque themes of The Refugee, you might get more out of the book if you’re a teenager or in your early twenties. A commonality between all these novels of youthful ennui is that they’re unreadable when you get older; I loved On the Road when I was a teenager, but I can barely tolerate it today.

Other than that, The Refugee is a mediocre, clumsy novel interesting not for what it is but who wrote it. If you’re looking for a mildly interesting tale of masculinity and artistry, a milepost showing how far Donlak has come since then, check it out. If you’re looking for a good, stand-alone book, skip it.

Click here to buy The Refugee.

Read Next: Donlak’s Guide to Girls (How to Pick Up) by Robert Donlak

Jesse Myner sent me this book of his, a collection of stories from his South American travels, a while back, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A former futures trader, Jesse wisely cashed out several years ago and now spends his time traveling the globe, getting himself into bizarre and hilarious situations:

I awoke to her glaring at me. She was withdrawn to the far side of the bed. Who was Maria, she said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Who is she? Digame. I don’t know any Maria. Mentiroso. Tell me. Who is she? You talked to her all night in your sleep.

America South covers the gamut from sex (“My Ugly Nigger,” “Maria & Luciana”) to the various touristy sights of Peru, Argentina and other countries (“In Patagonia,” “A Tiny Crystal”) to crime and violence (“Papaya,” “Butch Cassidy”), totalling 25 stories in all. Most are brief enough to read in about a couple minutes, with Jesse’s laconic writing style and hilarious observations ensuring you’ll blow through the whole thing in less than an hour. I particularly enjoyed “Las Chinches,” a digression on the ubiquity of bedbugs in Peru, ending in a… strange encounter with a girl:

Delirious from a blood meal the bed bug goes into seclusion for ten days to digest, molt into its next nymphal stage, and to mate and lay eggs. The mating process is a most peculiar one termed ‘traumatic insemination’ and involves the male bed bug mounting the female and with his hypodermic genitalia piercing her abdomen and ejaculating into her body cavity. Sexual attraction between bed bugs is based primarily upon their size, and it is not uncommon for a male bed bug to attempt to mate with another male, bloated from a recent blood feeding, and will mount and wound him in the abdomen as he ejaculates inside him.

My primary issue with America South is that being a collection of stories, there’s no greater narrative; with the exception of the “La Guajira” series, nothing ties Jesse’s adventures together aside from the fact that they all take place in South America. Still, for the price, America South is an interesting and funny book and a good addition to the travel genre.

Click here to buy America South.

Read Next: A Dead Bat in Paraguay: One Man’s Peculiar Journey Through South America by Roosh V

It always makes me laugh whenever I see “people” (and by “people” I mean “teenage girls who take astrology seriously and listen to Adele”) wag their fingers and tell me that “karma” is going to get me. It’s cute, the idea that good people get rewarded and evil ones get punished. A ten-second look around our world will disabuse you of the notion that our world has any mechanism for dealing with saints and sinners.

Case in point? Eddie Little.

None of you probably know who he is, proving my point for me. I’ll bet most of you know who James Frey is though, he of the phony, Oprah-endorsed drug memoirs A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard. What you don’t know about Frey is that he isn’t just a liar, he’s a plagiarist as well, as virtually all the plot points in both of his books were stolen from Eddie Little’s two (and only) novels, Another Day in Paradise and Steel Toes. The only reason why Frey was never hit with a lawsuit—despite richly deserving one—is because he was smart enough to rob a dead man.

Oh yes, Eddie Little is dead. Barely a month after A Million Little Pieces was published, Little overdosed on heroin in a cheap motel outside of Los Angeles. Even today, nobody knows who he was or that Frey completely ripped him off. And Frey himself is still famous and rich; after being publicly castigated by Oprah, he was given the opportunity to “redeem” himself by writing maudlin novels like Bright Shiny Morning and The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.

So don’t ever fucking try and lecture me about “karma.”

Instead, redeem yourself by reading Another Day in Paradise, one of the finest novels in modern American literature. It’s a slickly written, poignant, funny and frank novel, qualities that are nearly nonexistent in modern culture. Despite being a novel, both Paradise and Steel Toes are heavily rooted in Little’s life growing up on the streets in the seventies, cracking safes, getting in fistfights, shooting smack and getting tossed into juvie hall. Think a more elaborate and bleaker version of The Basketball Diaries:

I release the box which is now stuck under me like I’m stuck under shithead, who’s enthusiastically pounding my kidneys into Jell-O. Grabbing the screwdriver, shoving it into his leg, the only thing I can get at. Now he’s off me and starting to shriek, sounding like a homicidal parrot.

Another Day in Paradise concerns fourteen-year old Bobbie, a streetwise junkie who robs vending machines and steals cars to survive. He’s accompanied by his seventeen-year old girlfriend Rosie, a molestation victim with a masochistic streak. After a hustle ends with Bobbie nearly beaten to death by a security guard, he’s nursed back to life by Mel, a dishonorably discharged army medic turned big-time criminal boss. Together with his neurotic Jewish girlfriend Syd, Mel takes Bobbie and Rosie under his wing and they embark on a career of robbing banks and dealing drugs in Chicago.

Paradise works because unlike Frey’s work, it’s dripping with verisimilitude. Little lived this story when he was a kid, and it shows. His prose rolls off the page street hustler-style, punching you in the gut until you double up on the ground wheezing. The dialogue between Bobbie, Rosie and their partners in crime is fast, funny and as accurate as you can get for seventies hoods:

“The nasty motherfucker had me tied to the bed. They just kept coming, fucking me, using my asshole, fucking my mouth. They stank, there was come all over me, running down my legs and my face. He took pictures, said he’d show ’em to everybody, said I was his whore and he’d kill me if I didn’t work for him, said he’d cut my tits off and pull my eyes out, said he’d fill my pussy with gasoline and light my tongue like a torch.”

There’s also no sentimentality in Paradise. Little is smart enough to know that morals are for churls. His writing depicts the violence and brutality of the criminal life without a drop of the bathos that defines the kinds of books that old lady book clubs love. No matter how many people around him get killed, how many people he has to kill himself, how low he has to go, Bobbie never learns anything. There’s no pot of gold at the end of his rainbow.

Even when his luck finally runs out at the end of the book, Bobbie knows that as long as he’s chasing his addiction, he’ll never escape the criminal life.

You can see why James Frey was so successful in robbing Little’s grave. Another Day in Paradise would never make Oprah’s book club because it doesn’t reaffirm bourgeois prejudices. It doesn’t give the schoolmarms what they want to hear; mawkish racial reconciliation, drugs are bad, mmmkay? preening, and overdramatized death. From encounters with violent neo-Nazis to a run-in with a flamboyantly gay Chicano boss named Jewels, Paradise depicts the criminal underworld in all of its ugliness and ignominy.

For that reason, you owe it to yourself to read Another Day in Paradise. It’s a sick, funny, dark and exhilarating journey through a poorly-understood part of America. An honest portrayal of a world that few survive. An exemplary work by a talented writer who died too young.

Click here to buy Another Day in Paradise.

Read Next: BUtterfield 8 by John O’Hara

This is the classic addiction memoir, a nice antidote to the James Freys and Nikki Sixxs pushing bathetic, crypto-Christian lies about the “evils” of drugs. An edited collection of the diaries Jim Carroll kept when he was a teenager, they detail his life growing up in mid-60’s New York City, shooting heroin, snatching purses and selling his ass to gay guys for drug money. Carroll is anchored by his skills at playing basketball, as an athletic scholarship lifts him out of the slums and into a posh private school, where he continues his hustling and smack-injecting ways:

So I buzz across 42nd to Grant’s for a birchbeer and then just roam around for a good movie. I get to this empty part of 45th St. and near the side door of some theater is this great chick about thirty years old or so, but really foxy. She gives me the hook and I stroll over and see what’s happening. She’s heavy made-up and all but she doesn’t come on like a hustler; she suggests she join me at the movies and then we go over to her place. “I got grass, sweetie, you like grass.” Sure I dig it, and we find a movie, of all things, Born Free. What nonsense, but this chick has led me up into thin air in the balcony and there isn’t another person in the whole section. “This is why I picked this flick,” she says, “privacy.” And with that she lays her hand right across my cock and squeezes. I dig the balcony nooky so I sock my tongue into her mouth and get it on. Everything is humming nice when I reach on up her leg and work my way to her thing when, holy shit, I feel it and realize this freak HAS A COCK. I though I would freak out on the spot so I jump up and make a mad dash down the stairs and take five about six blocks away from the crazy theater, still shaking…

Carroll’s prose style is relentlessly frank and fast, spilling every detail of his hustles, highs and bangs in delicious detail. However, his rapid fire, Kerouac-esque method of writing in huge multi-page paragraphs got on my nerves after a while. Like Kerouac’s On the Road, The Basketball Diaries is intended to be read while you’re still young and searching for a philosophical pier to anchor your boat to. When I first read it as a teenager, I blew through it in a couple of days, thanks to hilarious observations like this:

Today at school we had our annual Thanksgiving fast for the benefit of the poor and hungry blacks we hear of scattered throughout the South. Anyone who sympathizes with the injustice of poverty in the South does not eat his meal as a symbol of this injustice. I’m sure it interests a starving black in Mississippi that I am not eating my lunch today. Frankly, I was too embarrassed to be the only cat in the school to eat his meal so I snuck down to the corner and copped a cheeseburger. Symbolic gestures are certainly self-satisfying but they are not too nourishing for anyone anywhere. Somebody is conning everyone else and themselves with plain dumb ideas as performed here today. What happens to the food they prepared today? All that turkey and mashed potatoes would probably seem pretty dried out if we shipped it down South, even by air mail. It would have been interesting to point out that there are a lot of hungry dudes walking down Columbus Ave. that could have dug a free meal. But some of them might be drug addicts and shit and they’d no doubt make a big mess of the lunch room that all the black cleaning women would have a hard time cleaning up. I suggest that tomorrow somebody symbolically stick a stale drumstick of today’s lunch up the ass of whoever was humane enough to organize this farce.

Additionally, the book doesn’t really end, but trails off into nothingness as Carroll spirals into robbing people at knifepoint to pay for his heroin addiction.

Even with these flaws, though, The Basketball Diaries is a classic of American literature for a reason. If you’re looking for an honest and gritty memoir of teenage alienation and struggle, check this one out.

Click here to buy The Basketball Diaries.

Read Next: The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad