I first ordered this after sniffing around various adult stores and nearly always coming out disappointed. This book is quite helpful if you don't quite know what you want, making it a true guide.

The side panels and the reviews themselves are quite informative and helpful, making the selection process that much easier.

I refer to this book alot as I scope out internet auctions. This book is really a sleeper -- really excellent. It's just a superb guide through the dark forest of adult videos. In fact, I can't think of a better book on the subject and I've seen quite a few. If you're really interested in the significant films of the genre, then this is the book to get. The authors are very objective and very knowledgable. They've interviewed important actors and directors. If they review a movie positively, then it's a great compliment to it and you should get it. I highly recommend this book and appreciate it alot.

The book "Deny all Knowledge" is one my mom bought me for Christmas, I am 14 years old and one of the biggest X-Files fans on the face of the earth. I found this book VERY hard to understand, yet, I finished it. The words are hard to make out and I don't recommend it to anyone under 16 yrs of age.

It is impossible for any urban dweller not to notice the vast array of merchandising that has sprouted from the success of the television show, "The X-Files". That is, of course, the point. Urban dwellers, aged eighteen- to forty-nine comprise a "quality demographic" in the surveys of advertising executives and have therefore become the contemporary focus of television producers, as we are told by Jimmie Reeves in his essay "Rewriting Popularity", one of the collection edited by David Lavery, professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

"Deny all knowledge: Reading the X-Files" is in part an attempt to capture a section of that demographic. However, a swift perusal of other material on offer at your local X-Files vendor (pusher?) reveals that this understated volume might well have been misplaced from its original shelf, nestled between Lacan and Levi-Strauss. There are no photos (save for a semi-abstract 'flying saucer' on the cover), no celebrity interviews, no episode synopses. It seems that this tries, much like the foisting of Gregorian chant on a classically-naïve public, to sneak in some 'highbrow' material on the crest of a wave of immense popularity.

In large part, the cult-nature of the X-Files has been fostered by the presence of an active on-line community, many of whom are academics. It is perhaps to this audience that the volume is aimed. What better way to combine work and play?

The passion of the authors is undeniable and all of the essays display extensive familiarity and understanding of the series. They are not grounded by the need to justify the existence of the X-Files phenomenon, nor are they constrained by the necessity to interweave their subject matter with perceived fan interest.

Leslie Jones' excellent essay on myth and folklore in the X-Files is lightly-tinged with humour while providing a fascinating account of Indo-European mythology. Further gems are found in Reeves, Rogers and Epstein's history lessons on the development of cult-TV, which rationalises the ascent of this media-format in terms of political and economic change. Allison Graham's description of the evolution of conspiracy-theory consciousness and Michele Malach's chronicle of the change in representation of the FBI-man in popular culture both provide historical detail whilst using the X-Files legitimately as subtext. This type of lateral-thinking exercise for the intelligent reader, supported by reasoned argument (and copious footnotes) is both stimulating and informative.

Less enlightening are the often partisan accounts mired in psychoanalytic theory, which can leave the lay-reader reeling from the non-intuitive terminology. A case in point is the piece by Lisa Parks which reads rather like an answer to the examination question: "Discuss Haraway's proposition of female as cyborg with reference to 'The X-Files'".

Since the breadth of material covered and implied by the X-Files as-a-series is large, it is also dismaying to see that over a third of the essays in this volume have gender as subtext. Certainly, the series has been noted for its iconoclastic representation of gender stereotypes, but one well-written overview would have sufficed, instead of four rather specialised arguments. Thankfully, the editors have seen fit to consign most of these pieces to the latter part of the book, where those of a sturdy constitution may see fit to venture. (A remark which would probably be characterised as supportive of the patriarchal Symbolic Order)

Academic essays are not ostensibly intended to entertain. They may provide a corpus of knowledge on which other academics may draw, but this cross-fertilisation is dependent on an assumed understanding of the established language. In spite of this, many of the academics represented here are also good writers; their ability to communicate clearly obviates the need to take refuge in received semiotics. For the rest, their assumptions of knowledge in this volume mirror an aspect of on-line X-philia described by Susan Clerc: "to those who have been around, Frequently Asked Questions can be extremely annoying. They want to discuss the series, not basic questions that have already been compiled and answered by dedicated fans in FAQ files. To newcomers, this attitude reeks of elitism and snobbery." Perhaps Professor Lavery should maintain an FAQ.

Overall, this is an interesting and entertaining volume, but these essays are not for everyone. The essays approach the show from a wide variety of critical angles, which I found quite intriguing. The only major problem I had with the book is that although the writers had 49 episodes to derive material from, they not only chose the same ten episodes to write about, most of them used the same quotes from those episodes. It's almost as if the writers were given these quotes and told to use them in an essay. The best essays in the volume were Leslie Jones's "'Last Week We Had an Omen,'" and Elizabeth Kubek's "'You Only Expose Your Father'"(but perhaps I say that because they were the most helpful for the paper I'm writing), but all of the essays were able to pique my interest at some level.

I hope that someone undertakes a second volume of _X-Files_ criticism soon, as some of the essays in this one are becoming rapidly out-of-date, due to developments in the show.