I am an avid reader of books about Cambodia. This book, altough not a direct work on Cambodia, made me realize the inter-connectedness of our post-modern world. I had never hear of Brian Fawcett before buying this book. He rekindled my rebellious spirit against where-ever it is that we are headed! His insightfulness about the inter-connectedness of our modern times is witty and disheartening. I would recommend this book to all global thinkers.

Do you have a sense that national governments are just one level above the slave populations they are trying to delude. That there is a hierarchy to all pervasive control. Fawcett writes one of the most important books of our time as we enter into the next phase of on-line/media dominated mania. As humanity, freedom and sanity gradual slip away Fawcett chart the course of our demise.

If you're ever haunted by the countless examples of mans inhumanity to man, please read this book. It explores a writers struggles to become an artist in a worldful of atrocities. Fawcett explores the creative process, the global village, the mass man and Cambodia. He convincingly links the global village to Cambodia: the kamer Rough killed anyone with knowledge of the 20th century world just as the computer chip, albeit more subtley, erradicates the need for memory and ultimately for any kind of genuine human contact....well, anyways that's how I interpret Fawcetts message. His brilliant essay on Cambodia runs through the bottom half of the book, as subtext. I would recomend you read the essay first and then read the short stories which are on the top. This is such an important book it should be required reading at the universities...or at least be stocked in every library. Written in 1985,86, it's short term fate may be oblivion but in the long run it'll find an audience. Lastly, when Orwell wrote of a totalitarian regime in his book 1984 he made it appear too bleak...fawcett shows how that regime can exist at Disney World withn a happy face on it. Once more this book gets my highest praise.

My graduating exercise for seminary (?!) consisted of three meditations, each on one of the three best pieces of 'political poetry' of the last third of the 20th Century: The "Mama n Daddy" song [?] from NASHVILLE; one of Ernesto Cardenal's poems from ZERO HOUR; and one of Brian's poems from this work, CREATURES OF STATE. Brian Fawcett, when at his best, was one of the best-kept secrets in North American poetics. He's become better-known since - frankly, for what seems to me like lesser work. In any case, those who are clearly liking what he's doing now should have access to what he's done before - this book should NOT be out of print! Insofar as the best work in this genre, at least from Blake (if not Dante!) forward, works the common turf of the mystical and the political, no one, with the possible exception of Cardenal, has surpassed Fawcett's agonized balance in this regard. Less well-known than most, Fawcett ranks at least with Gary Snyder among those who've kept on dreaming the Dream deep into the end of the century.

How do the survivors of the sexual revolution deal with their own sexuality in the 90's world of AIDS, STDS and changing gender roles? In this openly honest, sometimes rambling book, Brian Fawcett attempts to speak for the traditionaly silent sexual voice of the heterosexual male, who is trying to cope in a world where the rules of sexual behaviour are ever-changing, confusing and unpredictable.

The text operates on two levels--the black print text follows the sexual misadventures of Fred Ferris which comprise the fictional portion of the book; the red print text Fawcett calls "some conversation" but which is essentially a non-fiction analysis and commentary on the novel's action. While this highly creative structure of two books operating at once makes reading a bit more challenging, the result is nonetheless dramatic and effective. The analysis lends credence to the fiction while the fiction enhances the analysis and further illustrates the arguments Fawcett is presenting. Throughout the text, the wide ranging scope of the analysis is always brought back to the individual reality as depicted through the character of Ferris.

Well researched and intelligent, Fawcett's book sometimes reads like a how-to sex manual (The Sensuous but Confused Man?) while never forgetting that the individual behind (or in front of) the sexual self is a thinking, wondering and worrying human being.

Fawcett's book should inspire other heterosexual males, and indeed heterosexual women as well, to take a look at their own sexuality and open the sexual dialogue between men and women in this post sexual revolution pre-millennium time.