The dialogue is interestingly keyed for the theater. For example, the Midget says, "Shucks! It's always hopeless, isn't it? All we can do is love." If this were a film, "Shucks!" would be "Aw!" and "we" would be "you".

I highly recommend this slender volume to anyone interested in discussions of contemporary American literature. Be warned, though: This is not dry, academic discourse. William Joyce, for all of his erudition, is a bloody, passionate thinker and a living man. In other words, he's the perfect sort of fellow to write criticism of Bukowski, Miller and B. Traven.

Henry Miller is the outdoor writer for my hometown newspaper, the Salem, Oregon, Statesman Journal. His columns are invariably well-written, humorous, and reflect an in-depth knowledge of his subject matter. His favorite subject is fishing.

This book is a collection of some of Henry's primo columns, and is certainly worth the price. It is a dandy little book.

I recommend it, and Henry, to you.

Joseph Pierre

The key point in Miller's argument is that imposing excessive regulatory costs on American pharmaceutical firms forces them to experience corporate mergers, reduced competition, and higher prices. In the long run, this leads companies to focus on shorter-term, lower-risk research and development intended for larger patient populations. Thus, smaller groups of patients in need of new medical innovations that require long-term study at higher per-capita costs suffer the most from delays in approving new products.

Miller addresses the myth that there must be a tradeoff between promoting more efficient drug research and improving drug safety. Efficiency and safety can both be improved simultaneously by introducing competition where regulatory oversight has become excessive and changing the FDA's role in the process. Rather than evaluating data itself, it should allow other organizations to evaluate clinical testing and focus on monitoring their efforts instead.

A key problem that many drug manufacturers face is that regulations are not static. When new rules are enacted, regulators generally adopt narrow interpretations of them, but broaden those interpretations as time goes on. Because of this, regulators must be viewed as a special interest group - expanding their turf by skirting congressional oversight and gradually inflating burdens for manufacturers underneath the radar screen.

These problems lead many companies to alter their research priorities. Instead of focusing solely on prospective benefits for consumers when choosing which products to develop, firms must account for potential regulatory costs as well. The high costs of getting drugs approved reduces the diversity of products being prepared - leading many companies to devote more energy to dealing with the regulatory apparatus. Innovation suffers as a result.

The biggest problem with the FDA's current system, though, is its lack of accountability to the public. Consumers cannot participate in its product-review process and cannot obtain judicial review of its decisions. In addition, seldom is information about delayed or rejected drugs and medical devices made available to the media. Thus, the nature of the evaluation process itself reduces consumers' freedom of choice and individual autonomy. It leads many frustrated consumers to travel abroad to obtain safe drugs and services not available here in the U.S.

Fortunately, Miller offers a solution to the problem: allow independent, non-profit drug certifying bodies - instead of the FDA - to review test results from companies. Then allow the FDA to monitor the technical, scientific, and managerial expertise of these bodies to ensure they perform proper reviews. This would be similar to OSHA's accreditation process for testing laboratories. It would also introduce much needed competition, innovation, and efficiency into the oversight process and help alleviate many of the perverse incentives regulators face when interpreting new standards.

Overall, America's drug review procedure is in need of reform. Excessive regulations that lead to increased suffering or death among consumers should be repealed. In addition, when the regulatory process itself delays new technologies or innovations that can reduce suffering or death among the public, the procedure itself should be closely examined. Miller's book sheds new light on a frequently-ignored cost of overregulation: how preventing the adoption of new products or services that save lives can be just as costly as overlooking those that cost lives. His arguments should be given careful consideration by anyone who is concerned about the state of health care in the United States.

Henry Miller is a bum (it must be admitted) living among the idle intellectuals in the seedier neighborhoods of Paris (might he have bumped into Hemingway?). He's not always unemployed; he takes temporary jobs like a proofreader at a newspaper and an English instructor at a Lycee in Dijon, and he always has a place to live, albeit filthy. Most of the time he's cavorting with friends, making new ephemeral acquaintances, visiting brothels, and engaging in the kind of promiscuity of which such a life avails itself, despite the fact that he has a wife back in America. He doesn't shy away from any of the disgusting details of living and loving -- in the novel's opening scene, he is shaving his roommate's armpit hair for lice, and believe me, it only gets worse -- but Miller thrives in the squalor and wouldn't have it any other way. Compared to his native New York, which he considers impersonal, cold, and hollow, Paris is warm and intimate, brimming with life and beauty.

"Tropic of Cancer" is very similar to two popular books that followed it by a quarter of a century: Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" in content (run-on anecdotes about outrageous activities with his friends, pulsating with waves of existentialist rambling, the main difference being that Miller is a much better writer than Kerouac), and William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch" in style (stream-of-consciousness narration using striking imagery in random juxtaposition). Miller possessed the spirit, if not the seed, of the Beat Generation -- his existence can be summarized in his self-description as "spiritually dead, physically alive, morally free."

This is also perhaps the book's greatest fault -- its influence outstrips its literary quality. It may not be a great novel, but it at least it's worthy of its reputation, which is more than can be said for a lot of popular books.

Miller is trying to do something radically different in this book ' to create a new art form. It isn't even a book, according to him; it is 'a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art'' It is ultimately a song, he says. There is no plot, no linear story'there aren't even chapters ' just anecdotes and opinions of Miller's life in Paris ejaculated all over the pages. He wants to give priority to all the things that other novels pretend don't exist: sex, going to the bathroom, uncleanness ' watching a whore use a bidet before sex. To Miller, these carnal aspects of life are the realities and should be the subject of art ' not love, romance, or war. He tries to give an accurate portrait of what it was like to be a peasant in Paris in the early 20th century ' the cold reality of the fantasy of Moulin Rouge!

In the end, Miller's works are a triumph of style over substance. For him, the style IS the substance. It's difficult for me to remember anything that actually HAPPENED in the book ' what I remember is the 'piece of lead with wings on it.'

"Tropic of Cancer" is indeed a very good book that any prudish heart, with a sense for good literature, should allow him/herself to be impressed by. It stands alone in its own place in literature, where nobody (including Henry Miller) has been since.

Without fail, the critics of the day singled out Capricorn for its humor and sexual episodes in reviews that even the present edition still quotes from. "The greatest passages are the scenes of lovemaking," declared 'The Nation.' 'Newsweek' added that it was "incomparably the finest comic fantasy by any writer now among the living...the most enthralling and hilarious explosions are the sexual ones, which are many." The New York Times Book Review also praised "the fantasies of fornicating, full of comic bombast."

Which goes to prove, once again, that you should never listen to critics. "Comic fantasy"? In Capricorn, Miller is sometimes darkly sardonic and leeringly sarcastic, but never "hilarious" by any means. With a desperate misanthropy and fornication as its main recurring themes, this is not exactly side-splitting material. If Miller laughs, he reminds us, it is to keep from killing -- himself but more likely everyone around him. As for the sexual passages, what must have seemed quite shocking and daring by 1961 standards comes across as buffoonish porno-mag fare today, the major impediment preventing Capricorn from earning "classic" status. Exactly what did the critics of '61 think was so great about these passages? More importantly, why did Henry think they were so necessary for this otherwise memorable book?

That Miller is a gifted writer is beyond question. He can be strikingly original, wielding an immense vocabulary with extreme precision, constructing intensely imaginative, page-long paragraphs of visceral power. I've read but few authors utilize the English language as masterfully as Miller sometimes does in these pages. Seemingly ordinary, mundane events of everyday life often give way to full-blown surrealistic excesses in his vivid descriptions, full of chaos and disarray. Autobiography merges with fantasy and vice-versa until it becomes impossible to distinguish the two, and Miller eventually convinces us that such distinctions are irrelevant anyway. His rampant cynicism comes across as imminently contemporary and suited for our times. Readers sometimes have to pause to remind themselves that the events described in this book occured in the 1910s and early '20s, and that the book itself was written in 1938. Those conditioned to believe that our world is substantially different from the one that existed 70-80 years ago will get their heads handed to them on a platter here by Miller. Much of what he was writing, observing, and feeling in the '20s and '30s is still relevant today.

But Miller is hardly above criticism. If his perspectives on society seem reflective of postwar sensibilities, his views on women remain hopelessly shackled to his own time. This is Tropic of Capricorn's most serious flaw, so serious that it cannot be overcome by the rest of the book's brilliance. Women -- or, rather, their sex organs -- never leave his mind (or this book) for very long. The problem is that, to Henry, women are little more than two-dimensional objects who exist solely for his sexual satisfaction, nothing more. Far from being the sexually liberating pioneer critics said he was, Miller expresses his obsession with sex in the crudest, most adolescent way (presumably for the sake of "realism" and 1938-style shock value), explicitly relating encounters with an array of interchangable female characters with a crude, locker-room type enthusiasm. None of the poetic imagination he displays on other topics is wasted on his sexual partners. When he finally meets one intellectually stimulating to him (his second wife, June), she is, with equal emotional immaturity, elevated to "goddess" status. Thus, a large portion of the book is mired in brainless sexual posturings with all the literary merit of "Letters to Penthouse." Why, Henry, why?

It pains me to think how good this book could have been. Had Miller curtailed his sexual excesses, Capricorn would have been infinitely better, and Miller's stock as a writer of importance might have far more value than it does. As it currently stands, Capricorn is largely remembered, if at all, for its "banned book" status, a quaint artifact of an earlier time -- rather than the literary classic it should have been.

It was also at about that time I was picked up by the bottoms of my feet and placed on the shoulders of a drunken man who liked to run with the bulls of Pamplona.

Oscillating between manic observations and eloquent prose Miller writes a treatise, dissertation and thesis on the love of living the moment. Nothing passes his eye or mind without inspection and you constantly find your 'normal' life the target of his thoughts.

Your sensibilities enter the ring blind-folded against the whole history of heavyweight contenders ever to vie for a title. He comes at you from so many angles it's impossible to track. Almost disorienting and exhausting you feel benevolently pummeled, and in the end you realize it's an a**-kicking that you truly deserved and needed

Miller is an amazing writer with real vision, insight and madness. The James Joyce of America. The book grabs you and holds you from page one. It's a true masterpiece.

Sexus is an autobiographical novel about his relationship with Mona, his second wife, told from the perspective of many years and a continent away. In fact, this book draws a portrait of one of the great relationships in modern literature -- a crazy, intense relationship, but Miller conveys the sheer joy of falling head-over-heels in love.

Miller's books remind me a bit of de Sade's: graphic sex scenes interspersed with philosophy. But of course there's a lot more to Miller and Sexus, including vivid portraits of fascinating secondary characters, and some great descriptions of New York in the 1920's.

But the main character in Sexus is of course Miller himself. A big part of the appeal is that he comes across not as a born literary genius, but as an ordinary guy who's so unsatisfied with ordinary life that he decides, through force of will, to become a great writer. My only complaint with this edition of the book is its large size format, which is not as convenient as the small Grafton Books editions of Miller's books, which are now out of print.