dezember 2019 – good to read

Guy Omar
In playful homage to Thomas De Quincey’s most infamous work, Confessions of an English DMT-Eater is the author’s personal experience of the many Heavens and Hells of DMT intoxication. A Twenty-First century memoir of his private engagement with nature’s most fascinating, mystifying, and sometimes terrifying psychedelic compound. Confessions of an English DMT-Eater by Guy Omar takes many of the broader structural elements of De Quincey’s classic, with chapters on the «pain» and «pleasure» of, but deals with the phenomenally tricky business of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT). There are also a couple of sections on a cannabis experience and 5-MEO-DMT, which is «unimaginably intense, you are instantly blasted into a realm in which your thought patterns are somehow dissolving into a far larger ocean» The DMT universe, however, is visually ripe for a confessional.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, February 2019

Rachel Maddow 
With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 US election. She demonstrates how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbours, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. Blowout is a call to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers.
Penguin Random House, October 2019

Michael Eric Dyson
JAY-Z: Made in America is the fruit of Michael Eric Dyson’s decade of teaching the work of one of the greatest poets this nation has produced, as gifted a wordsmith as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Rita Dove. But as a rapper, he’s sometimes not given the credit he deserves for just how great an artist he’s been for so long. This book wrestles with the biggest themes of JAY-Z’s career, including hustling, and it recognizes the way that he’s always weaved politics into his music, making important statements about race, criminal justice, black wealth and social injustice. As he enters his fifties, and to mark his thirty years as a recording artist, this is the perfect time to take a look at JAY-Z’s career and his role in making this nation what it is today.
St. Martin’s Press, November 2019

Prince
Prince was a musical genius, one of the most beloved, accomplished, and acclaimed musicians of our time. He was a startlingly original visionary with an imagination deep enough to whip up whole worlds, from the sexy, gritty funk paradise of «Uptown» to the mythical landscape of Purple Rain to the psychedelia of «Paisley Park.» But his most ambitious creative act was turning Prince Rogers Nelson, born in Minnesota, into Prince, one of the greatest pop stars of any era. Prince — a first-person account of a kid absorbing the world around him and then creating a persona, an artistic vision, and a life, before the hits and fame that would come to define him. The book is framed by editor Dan Piepenbring’s introduction about his profound collaboration with Prince in his final months
Penguin Random House, December 2019

Michael Allred, Steve Horton & Laura Allred
Yoko is a leading experimental and avant-garde artist. In Tokyo during the 1950s, she introduced original questions about the concept of art and the art object, breaking down the traditional boundaries between branches of art. She has since been associated with conceptual art, performance, Fluxus, and 1960s happenings — one of the few women to participate in these movements. Through her performances and activism, she created a new kind of relationship with both spectators and fellow artists — including her late husband, John Lennon — by inviting them to play an active part in the creative process. In addition, her influence brings together Eastern and Western cultures, which extend and strengthen each other in continuous innovation.
Hirmer Publishers, December 2019