Tim Lowery of Playboy.com checks out the new offering from James Frey:

No matter what he does, James Frey will always be remembered as that guy who lied, that guy who really duped Oprah.

And Oprah and her legion of best-selling-maker fans probably won’t ever pick up another one of his books after that A Million Little Pieces debacle. Whatever.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times is ready to forgive and forget. "[Fitzgerald] says there are no second acts in American lives. He turns out to be wrong," Maslin writes in her glowing (and damn entertaining) review of Bright Shiny Morning, Frey's novel that hit stores yesterday. Others, meanwhile, aren’t so flattering.

Watch the man himself make his case after the jump...  

 

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Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein has just published Nixonland, a history of the mid and late sixties, roughly from the Johnson landslide of 1964 to the Nixon landslide of 1972. The book is a tremendous read that does justice to that turbulent period. It’s not a feel-good book; one keeps encountering calamitous decisions and catastrophic ends. And yet, for all that, the book is lively and incisive. Perlstein was kind enough to answer some questions:

PLAYBOY: Seen as a figure who governed in a time in between sunny Franklin Roosevelt and sunny Ronald Reagan, it’s amazing that the dark, complex Richard Nixon ever made it to the presidency. How did that happen?
PERLSTEIN: Welllll—to use a favorite Ronald Reagan opener—first let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Reagan wasn’t so sunny! He rose to power, first as governor of California in 1966, then as president in 1980, very much by playing to people’s fears and resentments in a time of social transformation. I very intentionally used a picture in my book of Reagan scowling—as he used to do when he said a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” or, when someone admired the protesting Baby Boomers’ “youthful energy,” that “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” Richard Nixon went to school on Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign—harnessing the majority’s rage at those insolent protesters, and riding it all the way to the White House.

The reason he was so uniquely qualified to do so was because he’d been harnessing the rage and resentments of those around him ever since he won his first election, for student body president at Whittier College. As a youth, he always felt looked-down-upon, despised for being too unpolished, too uncool. So he made people who felt like him his political constituency, which was a smart move, because, after all, those who feel themselves unpolished and uncool are everywhere in the majority. 

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Playboy’s chief of research David Cohen and our research department get prominent play in a new book by Craig Silverman called, Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech.

Dave discusses some of the methods he and his team use to keep mistakes out of the magazine, and the need for cooperation between the research department and the legal department. He also talks about some of the special concerns that come when you’re patrolling Playboy territory.

“We feature comely young women,” Dave correctly points out, and as any young man knows, a comely young woman usually presents her own issues. Way to wave the flag, Dave! 

Nicholson Baker, a clever and inventive novelist, has written a revisionist history of the origins of World War II called Human Smoke. It has an understated style that is quite gripping, and a view of things that is emotionally involving- but ultimately, it’s a manipulative and almost willful account. It is, in its way, a very dangerous book. My friends at The Washington Monthly asked me to review the book; anyone who would like to read that review can find it here.

Friendly neighborhood Spiderman has touched down in a big way at the Library of Congress. Through an anonymous donor, the library has acquired the 24 pages of original artwork from Amazing Fantasy #15, the omnibus Marvel title that brought the wistful web slinger into the world in 1962. Drawn by the elusive, mercurial Steve Ditko and co-created by Stan Lee, visitors to the library will soon be able to study HI RES digital scans of all the pages. This is shaping up to be quite a summer for the press shy Ditko. An illustrated biography, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell, is due out in July from Fantagraphic Books. We’ll be reviewing it and revealing more about Steve Ditko in the coming weeks. 

Yale University’s Charles Barber has just published a book called Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, about the over-prescription and misprescription of antidepressants. Intern Callie Enlow, who found the book "thoughtful and surprisingly entertaining,’’ recently talked to Barber about the societal and marketing forces that made Prozac and its siblings the drug industry’s biggest cash cow.

PLAYBOY: Who did you write this book for?
BARBER: I think the natural audience is the people that have taken the drugs and have had a wide range of experiences on the drugs.  I’ve also been contacted by a large number of their family members.

PLAYBOY: Some people don’t know the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist, not to mention a social worker and a counselor. Might that make it hard for people to seek appropriate treatment?
BARBER: That’s part of what I’m saying in the book. Therapists haven’t done a great job in marketing themselves. Most people who are drawn to the healing arts are not drawn to marketing themselves, and of course there’s not a product to push, like a pill.
 

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If you read Playboy, you’ve read Pat Jordan. And though he’s covered a wide variety of subjects, we often tap the master of the profile to give us the goods on the men in uniform. He’s one of the few writers who hasn’t become a fanboy of these so-called heroes. By digging behind their hype he finds that athletes are real people. Jordan, himself, pitched minor league ball before swapping his split-finger for a pen. To him, Bobby Hurley isn’t a failed NBA star- he is an unrelenting competitor. Steve Garvey wasn’t a multiple Gold Glove winner, he was a man with an unhappy trophy wife.

Those stories and more (including one that graced our pages) are in his new compilation, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan. He talked exalting athletes and writing with us.

PLAYBOY: What do you bring to the table as a former jock?
JORDAN: Certainly not a starry-eyed view of what it means to be an athlete or an actor or whatever else a person does. I don’t equate what people do by what their job is. Some of the obscure people that I’ve written about are much more interesting than the stars that I’ve profiled. Just because Roger Clemens throws 98 miles per hour he is not significant as a person. Carlton Fisk happened to be a great guy who was a great ball player. Bobby Hurley happened to be a great person and was a great college basketball player. When I did Tom Selleck I thought he’d be a good guy. He was a jerk and he’s a very wimpy guy, nothing like his screen persona. I never know who I am going to meet. I am interested in who the person is, not their talent because in many cases their talent is just a gift. With Clemens probably 50% of his talent was a gift and 50% is that he works hard.
 

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Writer Mary Roach's bestsellers Stiff and Spook explored the science of corpses and the afterlife. In her latest book Bonk, the investigator examines the science behind sex -- the how, why and what of getting it on. Not content to sit on the edge of the bed, Roach (with her husband Ed) put herself under the microscope, recording the details as a doctor waved an ultrasound wand over the couple while they had sex. Playboy.com contributor Joel Reese talked to the author about the experience, and what she learned while piecing together the ins and outs of everybody's favorite pastime.

Playboy.com: Have you uncovered the secret to helping the average guy with his sex life?
Roach: There was that amazing study by Masters and Johnson in which they brought in gay people, straight people, long-term partners and basically people who hadn't met each other. They looked at who was having the best sex. It seemed that gay partners were having the best sex by just losing themselves in the moment and being aware of how what they were doing affected their partner, and letting that arouse them. In other words, pleasing the other person is what turned them on. It wasn't like, "Ok, first you do me, then I do you." It's hard to put it into a list of tips, but it's basically being more in-tune with your partner.

Playboy.com: Do you believe that men can be multi-orgasmic?
Roach: Yeah, sure. There was a study done at SUNY-Downstate where they talked to, I think, 21 men. These were all multi-orgasmic men, and some had been this way their whole lives, others had come upon it later in life. Because they kept going on behalf of their partner and -- lo and behold! It was pretty well-documented.
 

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In 1998 a book of poetry came into the office. Self-published, Spinning Succubus: Reflections on the Erotic Dance Entertainment Industry includes more than 100 verses penned by James Allan. His muse is a stripper named Cyndigo:

Sensuous Cyndigo,
You’re my meal on wheels,
My erotic delight.
Let me eat you tonight….

Magical Succubus,
Dance, my fire.
Fuel my burning desire.
Open up my eyes.
Fill me with surprise.

Cyndigo,
Twitch my nose.
Remove my clothes,
One by one,
Slowly become undone.
My delicious luscious fruit
On my tongue I taste your juice.
You’re so hot, so appealing,
It’s sexual healing!

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Our May issue contains a page of Christian kitsch from the collection of Daniel Radosh, whose new book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, is available this week. (Radosh is also a popular blogger whose blog has just been named by Time magazine as one of the internet’s best.) Over the course of a year, Radosh spent time hanging out with Christian comedians, musicians, pulp novelists, Bible marketers, wrestlers, action heroes, creationists, sex educators and retailers. He even took part in a Passion Play, a mystical experience that prompted him to become the lone voice among a crowd of angry Jews to call for Jesus’ release.

Playboy: What got you interested in Christian pop culture?
Radosh: I have written about evangelical culture and politics for Playboy for years and kept coming across pop culture manifestations. But the real trigger was attending a Christian rock festival in Kansas with my sister-in-law, who is born again, and her friends. That brought everything together and I realized how vast this world was. It was simultaneously familiar and disorienting. I’m a secular, liberal Jew, so I approached it as an outsider, just as most Americans are outsiders to this culture, including many Christians.

Playboy: The fact that you’re Jewish pops up once in a while in the book, but for the most part you keep theology on the backburner.
Radosh: The bottom line is that evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus will be damned, but I didn’t press anyone on that. I didn’t want to spend my time arguing because, first, I didn’t feel that would be very interesting and, second, you can’t win, especially when someone starts citing Scripture. It’s easy to be insulted by the idea that if you are a non-Christian you are damned. But it also reflects, in a perverse way, a genuine concern. Evangelicals don’t want you to go to hell. In any case, many Christians I met seemed to take the attitude that it’s not their responsibility to save anyone, Jesus will take care of it.
 

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Columnist and historian Eric Alterman—author of an article in our Forum section in May called "Why We Loathe Liberals"—has written a new book entitled  Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, which is being published today. We’re pleased that he’s agreed to answer a few questions.

PLAYBOY: Okay, Eric—why are we liberals?
ALTERMAN: Depends on what you mean by “we,” Kimosabe. On the one hand, those of us who already know we’re liberals are liberals because we believe in the Enlightenment. We having open minds and allowing the truth take us anywhere it leads us, irrespective of what is allegedly commanded by God, the Dialectic of History, the Fatherland, George Bush’s sense of filial outrage, or whatever.  We believe in giving everybody a fair shot at success, prosperity, self-fulfillment, etc, and if necessary, using the power of the government to make sure that everybody gets that chance, regardless of the circumstances of his or her birth.

For everybody else it means, you’re probably already a liberal. You just don’t know it, yet because the word has been so demonized by right-wing lunatics and a compliant, spineless media. But if you look at what you, in all likelihood, believe about protecting the environment, taxing the wealthy, keeping corporations under control, providing health care to everybody, supporting smart science, and only invading countries that actually mean you harm, well then, by today’s standards, you’re a liberal.

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This past weekend I wandered through a flea market on 21st Street, and a familiar woman caught my eye. It was Playboy’s Femlin adorning the cover of a tattered Party Jokes book from 1957. After 30 seconds of obligatory bargaining with the raspy salesman, I bought  the book and began to peruse the yellowed pages.

While a number of the jokes, poems and cartoons have grown stale with age, there remain a bunch that have stood the test of time. Here is one of my favorites:

A drunk and his inebriated friend were sitting at a bar.
“Do you know what time it is?” asked the drunk.
“Sure,” said the friend.
“Thanks,” said the drunk.    

Intern Ben Conniff salutes our friends David and Nic Sheff.

A dark past opened into a bright present this week for contributing editor David Sheff and his son, Nic. The pair just released concurrent memoirs dealing with Nic’s long and harrowing methamphetamine addiction. David’s book, Beautiful Boy , has been selected as Starbucks’s next featured title and both books received great write-ups in the New York Times last Thursday and this Tuesday. Janet Maslin praised the “sturdiness and sense” with which David deals with a crisis that “goes well beyond the horrors of garden-variety substance abuse.” Amazon’s David Callanan called Beautiful Boy “achingly honest,” and Publisher’s Weekly said it’s “a hopeful book, coming at a propitious moment in the meth epidemic.”

The joint publication represents a triumph over Nic’s addiction and over the rift in the relationship between two men, who at one time were not even on speaking terms. As Nic’s book, Tweak, tells it, he spent years virtually homeless, picking meals from the trash while spending every cent getting high. David chronicles his own cycle of denial, anger, and despair as he watched his son lose control. Even after they began writing their books David and Nic hit obstacles that dwarfed your standard writer’s block. Nic relapsed into addiction after 18 months, and David suffered a brain hemorrhage and had to relearn the craft of writing that he mastered decades ago. 

But today the books are finished, Nic has been clean for two and a half years and David is back at the top of his game—he interviewed Garry Kasparov for our March issue and Fareed Zakaria for May.

Congratulations to the Sheffs on their groundbreaking new works, and heartfelt good wishes for the future. 

 

 

 

 

I don’t need a coffee-table book of naked women to find my favorite – it’s always been Cynthia Myers, who appeared in the December 1968 issue under the headline “Holy Toledo!” (The issue is particularly collectible because it’s almost impossible to find one that hasn’t been repeatedly opened, causing the staples to separate from the paper.) Her Centerfold probably got posted on more walls in Vietnam than any other and inspired countless young men to work hard to get home. In Steve Sullivan’s Bombshells, Cynthia recounts her reaction to seeing her Centerfold for the first time: "I didn't realize my breasts were that big! I'd never seen them from that angle. Wow! No wonder people were looking at me that way!" Cyber Club members can check out Cynthia’s home page.