Greg Villepique

In England, Bowie was a big enough star to serve this purpose for everyone. The sharpest spearhead of glam rock, he catalyzed the British punk revolution of 1976 — legend has it that one or two future Sex Pistols made off with the P.A. system Bowie used at his last Ziggy Stardust show, in 1973, which is too useful an anecdote to doubt. On this side of the Atlantic, Bowie hardly flopped, but in ’70s American culture he remained a cult figure. Unequivocal worldwide superstardom didn’t come to him until the calculated-to-be-a-smash-hit album “Let’s Dance,” in 1983, three years after the last in a decade-long string of records that, it seems surprisingly safe to say, forms the most consistently challenging and unpredictable oeuvre of any performer in rock music. He’s easily the most influential rock star of the post-Beatles era, given the number of whole pop movements, from British punk to Britpop, goth to hair metal, industrial to electronica, that owe him enormous and obvious debts.

Many rock purists wish it weren’t so, because much of that influence is nonmusical. Bowie’s main contribution to the rock vernacular was a disregard for the rock vernacular. He was an actor who impersonated a pop star, singing through unlikely characters and skewed narrative stances, never resorting to that generically American accent that used to define international rock, always creating an image rather than revealing himself. When Bowie is described as a chameleon — as he invariably is — it’s a description not just of his musical style-hopping, but of his personality, for in his prime, each in his procession of public personas tended to be at odds with the last, and if the Bowie presented on an album was ever voicing the “real” Bowie’s sentiments, you had to guess at where.

Bowie plucked ideas from everyone, but he was never a mere copyist. He married Jean Genet to the Yardbirds, Bertolt Brecht to Jacques Brel; he latched himself onto Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and absorbed their refusal to compromise with the mainstream. He crafted irresistible sing-alongs about despair, and mustered his most passionate love song about the Iron Curtain. In Bowie’s world, nothing was safe or simple, and by refusing to stay put, standing for nothing but change, he allowed his creativity and his mystique to feed off each other and flourish.

Bowie was born David Jones in 1947 and grew up in a bleak suburb of postwar London. About his youth, the most salient fact is that a friend once punched him in the eye, permanently dilating one pupil and thereafter giving his eyes the inimitably cool appearance of being two different colors. Between 1964, when he made his first record with an R&B combo called the King Bees, and 1969, when he hit the pop charts, he made decreasingly futile stabs at mod pop, music-hall whimsy, Kinks-derived satire and Dylanesque hippie balladeering. Alarmingly, he also practiced mime on the side.

It was in his hippie guise that he emitted the watershed 1969 single “Space Oddity,” which tells the story of an astronaut, Major Tom, who blasts off into space and decides not to return to Earth. As both writer and singer, the shorthand with which Bowie alternates the voices of “Ground Control” and Major Tom is masterful: “‘Tell my wife I love her very much’/'She knows.’” Out of the blue, Bowie seized on the themes of alienation, distance and outer space as a metaphor for inner space that have recurred in his writing ever since. But “Space Oddity” was his only song to make the grade for another two years. His odd 1970 album of lumbering hard rock and Nietzschean pomposity, “The Man Who Sold the World,” is notable mostly for its endearing cover, on which Bowie posed as a reclining odalisque in a silk dress, his extravagantly long curls nearly brushing his bony cleavage.

Bowie got married in 1970 to a flamboyant London scenester named Angela Barnet, and the couple had a son, Zowie, the next year while Bowie put together “Hunky Dory.” Seemingly all at once, he developed both a sense of humor and a consistently accessible pop sense. About half the album is either obscurantist or cutesy, but there are enough gems to make it the first indispensable Bowie album. “Changes” is his theme song by default, and it’s pretty brash for someone who’d had only moderate success in the past: “Oh look out, all you rock ‘n’ rollers!” “Oh! You Pretty Things” was a warm-up for the next and boldest step of Bowie’s career, proclaiming a common bond between conquering aliens and the antsy teenagers of the world. And Bowie’s Velvet Underground tribute, “Queen Bitch,” sounded the first blast of the raunched-up, homoerotic bubble-gum tease that was about to change his fortunes.

Around the time Bowie was making “Hunky Dory,” England was seduced by Marc Bolan, aka T. Rex. Having started as an airy folkie prattling about magical lands, Bolan went electric, put a little makeup on, exchanged goofiness for outright lyrical delirium (“You’re built like a car, you’ve got a hubcap diamond star halo”) and almost single-handedly brought simple three-chord fun and sex back to a British music scene mired in so-called progressive rock, blues jams and earnestness. As Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray spelled out in their fabulous 1981 book “Bowie: An Illustrated Record,” “glam rock” depended on several post-Wildean propositions: among them, that aesthetics are more important than politics; that a performer should put on a performance, not just show up stoned in a macrami vest and sandals; that earnestness equals lack of imagination; that art is artificiality. Woodstock-era rockers were hippies just like their audience, but glam rockers reveled in the trappings of stardom. (Todd Haynes’ surreal film “Velvet Goldmine,” which rewrote history blatantly and was foolishly disparaged by critics for its inaccuracy, conveyed — and embodied — the spirit of glam brilliantly.) Bowie was already no stranger to self-reinvention, and he recognized his historical moment.

So, at the beginning of 1972, he got a short, spiky haircut, donned a spacey cat suit and platform boots, let slip to an interviewer that he was bisexual, recorded the sublime single “Starman” and became Ziggy Stardust, the beloved and doomed ultimate rock star. Real life and fiction merged on “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars,” released barely six months after “Hunky Dory.” The album’s vague plot goes approximately thus: In a doomed world — “News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in” — young Ziggy listens to the radio and hears a “starman” delivering the cosmic gospel, “Let all the children boogie.” He takes heed and decides, “I could make a transformation as a rock ‘n’ roll star.” (After all, he muses, “I could do with the money/I’m so wiped out with things as they are.”) Though we’re told elliptically of Ziggy’s success, flameout (“Ziggy sucked up into his mind”) and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” Bowie jumbles up the points of view and star metaphors until we can’t tell the difference between alien and human, performer and fan, future and present, Ziggy and Bowie. It’s not only a winning batch of songs with echoes of Bolan, the Beatles and Reed, but also a smart pop-art statement about itself and one of the few “concept albums” truly worthy of the term.

At the start of the Ziggy experiment, Bowie began traveling around in limos with an ever-present bodyguard, assuming the prerogatives of stardom before he’d earned them. In the middle of the hype, he found time to co-produce Reed’s “Transformer” album and remix the Stooges’ “Raw Power,” side projects that cemented his affiliation with the addled royalty of outsider rock. (His resuscitation of Iggy Pop as a solo act a few years later helped, too.) And he donated one of his best songs, the anthemic smash “All the Young Dudes,” to Mott the Hoople, producing their album as well, which ensured his primacy over the glam field.

In the year following the release of “Ziggy Stardust,” Bowie’s look got weirder and weirder: The casual blond spikes became a lurid scarlet nimbus, the layers of pancake multiplied until he looked like a zombie, fake hands grew out of his cat suit to clutch at his nipples. “The idea was to hit a look somewhere between the Malcolm McDowell thing with the one mascaraed eyelash and insects,” he told an interviewer in 1993. At the same time, he was writing darker songs like “Panic in Detroit,” “Cracked Actor” and “The Jean Genie,” which appeared on the muddy, manic 1973 follow-up, “Aladdin Sane”: Ziggy was becoming the picture of Bowie’s Dorian Gray.

In July 1973, Bowie abruptly retired Ziggy without explanation. He came out with an amusing but unnecessary album of ’60s covers, “Pin-Ups,” then planned to write a stage musical based on “1984,” but George Orwell’s widow withheld the rights. He went ahead anyway with the roughly Orwellian suite that is “Diamond Dogs.” The charging title song and “Rebel Rebel” are among Bowie’s best singles and close off the glam era with decadent aplomb, but elsewhere on the album he delved into the depersonalizing effects of Orwell’s totalitarian society in “We Are the Dead” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me,” whose chorus goes “When you rock ‘n’ roll with me/There’s no one else I’d rather be.” The absence of “with” at the end of that line points toward the icy, unhinged narcissism of Bowie’s next phase.

Having relocated to the States and bid farewell to the ambisexual orgies of Ziggy’s heyday, in 1974 Bowie bought a wardrobe full of double-breasted jackets and fat ties and set about becoming the most ersatz soul crooner ever. “Young Americans” is pretty fine as an update of the honored English tradition of appropriating black American music (and Robert Palmer clearly took notes), but it’s no more interesting than any other record featuring Luther Vandross on vocals and David Sanborn on sax — with the exception of the glorious, incomprehensible title song and “Fame,” his first American No. 1 single.

Bowie next remodeled himself into the Thin White Duke, a persona so chilling that he seemed to be faking being human, like the extraterrestrial character he played in his first feature film, Nicholas Roeg’s 1976 “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” Bowie was excellent in the role, but it remains unclear just how much he was acting. The same year, he released one of his finest records, “Station to Station,” which portrays a nearly psychotic emotional disconnection: “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine/I’m thinking that it must be love”; “Should I believe that I’ve been stricken?/Does my face show some kind of glow?” Equivocation marks the gorgeous, unsettling love song “Stay,” and the breathless narrator of “TVC15″ communes only with his TV, telling us an unclear story about how it’s sucked up his girlfriend. The music, slithery funk with overlays of squealing rock guitar and florid piano, is as audacious and peculiar as any rock music before or since. I used to play the hit single, “Golden Years,” over and over, though I doubt many child psychologists would endorse this much coked-up anomie in an 11-year-old’s diet.

Bowie escaped America and transferred his home base to Switzerland in 1976, while in London Johnny Rotten, his hair a ratty imitation of Ziggy Stardust’s, followed the Ziggy blueprint for self-willed stardom. Over the next three years, collaborating with Roxy Music’s former in-house deconstructionist, Brian Eno, Bowie made three consecutive albums, in Berlin and elsewhere in Europe, that avoided the problem of how to follow up a hit by largely disdaining mass sensibilities altogether. “Low” and “‘Heroes’” (both 1977) had emotionally deranged singles; challenging cut-up lyrics (directions: Cut any writing into strips, rearrange and see what happens) and music (directions: Write out a song’s chords on a chalkboard, point at them randomly until band goes mad); and long, experimental instrumentals that put off casual record buyers. The Wallflowers’ clueless 1998 cover of “‘Heroes’” only reinforces the original’s claim to be one of the killer rock singles of all time. “Lodger,” in 1979, eschewed the instrumentals, but the singles “Boys Keep Swinging” and “DJ” were as spiky as that old haircut. In short, Eno shook Bowie out of a solipsism that looked to be driving him around the bend. The trilogy’s use of electronic textures in a pop context (influenced by the German group Kraftwerk) itself directly inspired the great new wave of British electro-pop, just as the doomy atmospherics sketched out a path for Joy Division, the Cure and thousands of black-draped followers.

In 1980, Bowie capped off the part of his career that matters by starring in the Broadway production of “The Elephant Man” and releasing his last landmark album, “Scary Monsters,” on which he belts out the strongest, most actorly vocals of his career, ranging from the howling fury of the opening rant, “It’s No Game,” to the song’s exhausted reprise at the end, sandwiching in between every stance from tortured madness (“Scream Like a Baby”) to haughty ennui (“Fashion”) to the stunning minidrama of “Ashes to Ashes,” which revisits space boy Major Tom, still floating around the ether 11 years after “Space Oddity.”

Bowie’s ’80s were a startling retrenchment, during which he introduced his next persona: Normal David. After finally escaping the financial depredations of a Draconian old management contract, he decided in 1983 to earn himself a nest egg. Bowie gave interviews declaring his history of role-playing and sexual adventuring long past, essentially making sure no quirks remained to put off the buying public. Even his son Zowie was now called Joey. I remember the excitement when “Let’s Dance” came out, the first Bowie album in three years, and how hard it was to get used to the idea that it was really Bowie — that jolly, anti-intellectual party funk blasting from the frat houses. “Let’s Dance” served its commercial purpose, but it was a far cry from past glories.

At this juncture, it’s only polite to jump forward a dozen years, during which Bowie released a succession of dull albums that dared little, with the exception of his bar-band experiment, Tin Machine, which dared to be excruciating and got him dropped from his label. He appeared in several movies, including a swell turn as Pontius Pilate in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” but his other films were cult favorites at best (“The Hunger,” “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” “Labyrinth,” etc.). In 1992, he married Iman, which seemed to drop him with a clatter into the Mick Jagger/Rod Stewart bin of old rockers who replace their absconded muses with supermodels.

Even Bowie must have understood how dire things had gotten, for in 1995 he reconnected with Eno, who, since their ’70s work together, had gone on to co-produce some of the most popular and critically lauded records of the ’80s and ’90s, all by U2. The resulting album, “Outside,” was bold and knotty, but also tuneless and thuggishly pretentious. (It’s subtitled “The Nathan Adler Diaries” and further billed as “a non-linear gothic drama hyper-cycle.” If you’re still curious, God bless you.) Bowie told an interviewer that he was delighted with the album’s “big hairy massive balls”; he subsequently toured with one of his musical offspring, Nine Inch Nails, but was regularly crucified by the competition.

He generated far more attention in 1997 by hosting his own enormous 50th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden and by an unprecedented business gambit: He issued “Bowie Bonds” worth $55 million, using future royalties on his back catalog to back them. The bonds were all snapped up immediately by the Prudential Insurance Co., and Bowie’s pockets were suddenly overflowing. It was a conceptual stunt worthy of the old Bowie, just in a new field. (James Brown issued his own bonds last summer, and other celebrities are rumored to be mulling it over.)

Amazingly, after nearly two decades in the aesthetic wilderness, his last two albums, 1997′s “Earthling” and “‘Hours … ‘” from 1999, have been — to me, anyway — his most enticing since “Scary Monsters,” and his portrayal of Andy Warhol was easily the most entertaining element of the 1996 film “Basquiat.” “‘Hours … ‘” has no evident commercial or aesthetic axes to grind, a first for Bowie, and it features lovely, rueful songs of experience sung in a cracking, (apparently) nakedly emotional voice, suggesting that his role-playing days may at last be behind him. It was one of the best albums of 1999.

And Bowie’s current numerous cyber-adventures prove he’s still prodding at the future — still “wiped out with things as they are.” As the overseer of an Internet service provider, BowieNet, he hosts chats for members, alerts them to worldwide cultural happenings and keeps up a sprightly journal that indicates he’s a scarily happy man (a recent sample: “What great fans I’ve got! I had such a lovely time on the mini-tour and it was so good to see you.”); the lyrics for one of the songs on “‘Hours … ‘” were solicited in an online contest. If you want a credit card with his picture on it, he’s also the nominal patron of the online BowieBanc. He’s been seriously painting for many years — his style owes a large debt to Francis Bacon — and uploads his work and others’ to an online gallery. And a few months ago he contributed new music and his likeness (as well as Iman’s) to a video game, Omikron, put out by the company that created Tomb Raider.

In September, Virgin Records rereleased Bowie’s back catalog in revelatory remastered editions that sound more electrifying than ever. At age 53, he’s alone among his contemporaries in retaining a high cool quotient among kids whose parents are old enough to have been teenage fans of Ziggy Stardust: When he appears at a Placebo concert or on the MTV Music Awards, he can still elicit genuine teenybopper swoons. Bowie may never change rock music again, but since he, more than anyone, honed rock’s current cutting edge, few observers would not forgive him, in the end, any of his latter-day trespasses.

“Freud’s theories about castration anxiety and the penis envy of castrated females,” Taylor writes, “can hardly be an accurate description of ‘patriarchy,’ because they misrepresent almost the entire history of castration and almost the entire history of patriarchy.” Psychoanalysis reflects what Taylor calls “the rise of the penis” in Western culture, accompanied by the corresponding “fall of the scrotum”: In our thinking about sex over the past few hundred years, reproduction has steadily ceded the floor to pleasure; the family jewels, which used to be considered a man’s dearest possession, are now just ornaments on the scepter. In one emblematically ridiculous instance, Taylor reports, the copy of Michelangelo’s “David” installed at Caesar’s Palace had to be taken down and fitted with a new porn-star schlong because the original penis-to-scrotum proportions looked so absurd to modern connoisseurs of beefcake.

Until fairly recently, amputation of the penis for either medical or punitive reasons generally caused death from loss of blood. But many cultures established a place in the social and moral hierarchy for eunuchs — who Taylor says were usually castrated in so-called savage societies for sale to so-called civilized ones, so that eunuchs would not have to serve their own mutilators. In Rome they were slaves, but Taylor reminds us that in the Assyrian, Persian, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, not to mention the Far East and Africa, eunuchs sat at the highest levels of the court, responsible for granting or withholding access to the emperor or administering justice in his name. And Abelard (of Abelard-and-Heloise fame), following his castration, was an important figure in the medieval Christian church.

Taylor’s scholarship and eloquence blaze in his discussions of Augustine and other early Christians. Writing in the fourth century, Augustine jumped through hoops to justify Matthew 19:12, in which Jesus speaks well of “eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Augustine — “a rhetorician before he was a saint,” Taylor points out — interpreted this as an allegory for priestly celibacy, much as Paul had eased the gentiles into accepting Christianity, an offshoot of Judaism, by requiring of them only a “circumcision of the heart,” not actual foreskin-hacking.

Taylor proposes that the literal interpretation of Matthew 19:12 is just as likely, given that Jesus’ teaching would have appealed most to eunuch slaves, surely the meekest of the blessed meek. But politically, the church fathers had to distance the new religion from the still-thriving pagan cults involving self-castration, which many early Christians, taking Jesus’ words literally, practiced too. Taylor gleefully ruffles feathers by identifying Jesus’ “radical hostility to heterosexual marriage and reproduction”: Among other things, Christ blessed the barren and specifically promised everlasting life to those who forsook their families for him. So, Taylor argues, according to the Gospels, Jesus actually deplored Christian family values. Did he encourage gruesome self-sterilization?

Taylor subverts your expectations at every turn. I’ve put off mentioning that much of “Castration” revolves around a close analysis of playwright Thomas Middleton’s 1624 tragedy “A Game at Chess,” a deeply weird-sounding political allegory in which a black chess piece (representing a Spanish Catholic) castrates a white chess piece (an English Protestant). I’d never heard of it either, but Taylor knows we haven’t read it. Taking off from the play, he discusses the way eunuchs’ genitals mark them as a race the same way circumcision marks Jews; racially, Middleton and other northern Europeans perceived the Spanish as dark-skinned aliens, just as Augustine and other olive-skinned Romans showed a prejudice against northern Europeans — and eunuchs — for their pallor. The play, which Taylor says is up there with Shakespeare, is the catalyst for an avalanche of absorbing speculations about racism, incest and power relations in sex, religion and politics.

Eunuchs have often been seen as monsters, neither male nor female — especially those castrated before puberty, who become obese and pale and can’t have intercourse, such as the castrati who used to sing in operas (and Catholic choirs). But a eunuch castrated in adulthood is often perfectly capable of sex. Taylor addresses Freud’s boneheaded question “What does woman want?” by discussing vasectomy as a modern update of castration and suggesting that in the overpopulated 21st century — as “abnormal” sexual and gender identities are increasingly accepted and science plunges into cloning and artificial genetic manipulation — a eunuch is exactly what many women want. This insight probably won’t make anybody reach for the pruning shears, but it’s the kind of witty provocation that makes “Castration” an improbable delight.

“Twin totalitarianisms plague the world,” Galeano writes balefully, “the dictatorships of consumer society and obligatory injustice.” Morality and memory have been displaced by misery and the palliative of TV:

Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.

Galeano discusses patterns of abuse, not only of the poor by the rich within individual countries but of “developing” countries (in Galeano’s shorthand, the South) by the industrial powers (the North) — the same issue that drew angry thousands into the streets in Seattle and Prague. Although as many economic statistics can be brandished to support globalization as to condemn it, Galeano’s dire analysis of specific large problems is still scarily persuasive.

Take the environment: “Each inhabitant of the North consumes ten times as much energy, nineteen times as much aluminum, fourteen times as much paper, and thirteen times as much iron and steel as someone in the South.” But the United States assumes no responsibility for the environmental disasters wrought by all that consumption. “Explaining why the United States refused to sign the Convention on Biodiversity at the Rio summit in 1992,” Galeano writes, “President George Bush was unequivocal: ‘It is important to protect our rights, our business rights.’” In short, Galeano asserts with fitting exasperation, the chemical companies, oil companies and car companies dictate U.S. environmental policy. Of course, this is a truism that remains too subtle for the American masses, like the notion that wrecking nature is not just an accidental side effect of these industries but central to their interdependent existences.

Galeano makes a similar point about international peacekeeping initiatives and the arms trade:

Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the U.N. Security Council … In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war.

And who are we arming? “The armed forces that most systematically violate human rights, like Colombia’s, are those that receive the most U.S. aid in weapons and technical support.”

“Upside Down” isn’t anti-American per se; what it rails against is hypocrisy, showing by reams of interwoven examples that governments in general, in the first world and the third, are not in the business of ethical integrity. Galeano focuses on corruption, human rights abuses and exploding poverty in Latin America: Police death squads in Brazil and Argentina, for instance, gun down homeless children by the hundreds each year. He makes me feel very, very lucky to live on the fat side of the Rio Grande — not proud but lucky, and profoundly depressed.

Analyzing the global free market by its effects on the global populace, most of whom, Galeano says, keep getting poorer and more desperate (“Every year poverty kills more people than the entire Second World War, which killed quite a few”), the author offers little hope for change, though he does support those who challenge the intolerable status quo, like the Indians of Chiapas, Mexico. He writes as neither oracle nor guide, but as furious witness:

There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that’s the way things are because God or custom prefers it that way.

Mark Fried, the translator of “Upside Down,” has rendered Galeano’s acidly humorous text into exceptionally graceful English, and the accompanying century-old engravings by Mexican artist Josi Guadalupe Posada — lots of shrieking skeletons and bloodthirsty goblins — provide exactly the right macabre ambience. The lesson of this primer? Galeano’s excoriating vision might make the most cynical realpolitiko wonder whether the strength of the dollar is, in the end, worth our racing the world to hell.

Crowley was born in 1875, his father a preacher in an obscure Protestant sect and the heir to a small brewery fortune. He was educated at religious academies and at Cambridge, and in 1898 joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the mystical society whose most prominent member was William Butler Yeats. Two years later Crowley was expelled from the Golden Dawn after he tried to take it over. He published many volumes of bad poetry, lived lavishly, studied yoga in Ceylon, climbed Himalayan mountains and tried to formulate a new spiritual program — mostly, Sutin indicates, so that he would have no bureaucratic superiors to deny his claim to be the Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelations.

On a visit to Egypt in 1904, the Beast produced “The Book of the Law,” a short text purportedly dictated to him by an emissary of some ancient god or other, which sets out the new creed of “Thelema” — a mix of Egyptian, Masonic, cabalistic, Rosicrucian and Golden Dawn symbology on a bed of yoga with the catchy tag line “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” (Not quite; Crowley wrote endlessly about the rules of Thelema.) Followers of Thelema would become conversant with higher planes of existence through “immersion in Chaos itself,” as Sutin nicely boils it down. In practice this meant vaguely delineated rituals involving lots of drugs and sex; in Crowley’s case with both men and women. Contrary to such public image as he has, he was neither Satan nor a Satanist; he saw good and evil as conceptual obstacles to the discovery of one’s true will.

Though he proselytized constantly, went broke self-publishing dozens of books and founded a short-lived Thelemic abbey in Sicily, the Beast never managed to retain more than a handful of disciples at any one time. Sutin itemizes his futile attempts to persuade parties as diverse as the British government, Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford to adopt Thelema and his history of derision in the English and American yellow press, which billed him as “The Wickedest Man in the World.” Despite Sutin’s sympathetic intentions, Crowley emerges here as an egomaniacal blowhard who used his role as the prophet of the New Aeon as an excuse to treat women horribly, get buggered as often as possible and become a heroin addict, which he remained for decades until his death in 1947.

Sutin leaves no doubt that Crowley believed wholeheartedly in Thelema, but his efforts to make sense of the Beast’s drug-addled rantings are in vain. And largely missing here is the context of more popular spiritual movements of Crowley’s time, like theosophy and the burgeoning Western passion for Zen, Hinduism and other Eastern philosophies. Why should we care about a confusing cult promulgated poorly by a weirdo who lacked for sane disciples? Because unlike Krishnamurti, say, Crowley stalked around in black cloaks, looked spooky and claimed he could make himself invisible at will, which means he’s still a great poster boy for everybody who’d rather embrace cool-sounding mystifications and the promise of “Magick” than submit to more rigorous or metaphysically plausible spiritual disciplines.

Sutin’s earnest, clunky, overlong biography portrays a spoiled fourth-rate poet who not only didn’t get over that adolescent yearning for new spiritual kicks, but insisted until the impoverished end on his own spiritual supremacy over all other men — a regular fascist of the soul.

The term “Triad” comes from one of the most prominent early groups, the Three United Society — the three in question being heaven, earth and man — and refers to either a society or one of its members. Triad societies have operated in China for 2,000 years as more or less Masonic-style fraternities, trade guilds and forums for political dissidence. They incorporated elements of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and ancestor worship into their complex ceremonial rites and imagery. When the ethnic Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty in the 17th century and inaugurated the Q’ing dynasty, the Triads adopted the goal of returning the Ming to power, wresting China back from the foreigners.

But the secret societies quickly evolved into extortion and protection mobs as well, and got rich off the 19th-century opium trade — Booth notes that since this trade was run by Europeans with the compliance of the Q’ing, the Triads could claim they were inserting themselves into the trade in order to resist foreign domination. When Chinese began to emigrate and open businesses in new overseas Chinatowns, Booth says they were (and still are) often obliged to pay “insurance” money, just as they were back home, so as not to put themselves in the way of jolly Triad punishments, like a decisive meat cleaver to the fingers or the “death by myriad swords.”

The Q’ing Dynasty was felled in 1912 by the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party, whose head, Sun Yat-sen, himself a Triad, had rallied Triads to unite and fight for the republican cause. Chiang Kai-shek was a Triad, too, and Booth contends that his presidency both before and after the Kuomintang government fled to Taiwan in 1949 was marked by giddy criminality and collusion in the opium trade. The Triads flourished under this misrule, and most of the societies’ noncriminal ideologies dropped away until they simply became crime syndicates with elaborately silly initiation rituals.

Strongly discouraged from remaining in China after the Communists took over, the Triads established themselves primarily in British-ruled Hong Kong. In the past half-century opiates have remained at the core of their far-flung operations, but Booth claims that they also peddle counterfeit CDs, videotapes, computer programs and credit cards; smuggle indigent emigrants overseas in slave-ship conditions for absurdly steep fares; run gambling and prostitution houses wherever there’s a large Chinese population; engage in low-level loan-sharking and high-stakes financial-market skulduggery; demand and receive protection payments from businesses large and small; and still haul out the myriad swords when inter- or intragang protocol is breached. And these days, enticed by China’s economic reforms, they’re regaining their foothold on the mainland.

Booth elegantly places the story of the secret societies in the greater context of China’s history, and his discussion of the importance to their solidarity of “guanxi” — the Chinese concept of loyalty to clan and obligation to repay favors — is incisive. He posits intriguingly that, beginning in the ’50s, the Triads not only provided most of the world’s heroin supply, but virtually created the whole market, most devastatingly by offering heroin as a novel experience for American soldiers in Vietnam. More trivially, I was delighted to learn that there used to be a Hong Kong Triad chief called Limpy Ho.

The book is by no means flawless: In some passages, so many names are piled on top of one another that it becomes impossible to keep track of who or what Booth is talking about. And the later pages necessarily become more speculative. Although organized-crime trails are always deliberately convoluted, he doesn’t convince me that all Chinese organized crime is still part of a global Triad network, that all of the crimes he itemizes are really connected to Triads, or that the term “Triad” even means anything now that higher political and social ends have been abandoned. Finally, he gives the unsettling and, I’d hope, wrong impression that most Chinese people are either merciless Triad predators or helpless Triad prey — could any organization that’s illegal everywhere be that pervasive? Nevertheless, Booth has fashioned a rip-roaring survey that dispels the mystery of the Triads’ rituals and reveals them as a confederacy of gangsters like any other, only one that’s so enduringly efficient it’s no wonder if it continues to thrive. But he does leave room for that “if.”

The Tacoma Narrows disaster is one of many engineering fiascoes analyzed by Phillip Wearne in “Collapse: When Buildings Fall Down,” the companion book to a Learning Channel TV series of the same name. On the surface, the book appeals directly to the mayhem-hungry 8-year-old in all of us. But what it’s really about is the technical nitty-gritty of structures of all kinds — how they’re designed, built and inspected, and how oversights at any stage of the process can have terrible consequences.

Wearne focuses on collapses within living memory, calling on the testimony of witnesses, geological experts and, especially, forensic engineers, the experts who comb the rubble to figure out what went wrong. It’s a fascinating and alarming survey. The Point Pleasant Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed in 1967, killing 46 people, because of a tiny flaw in a single piece of steel that had taken four decades to grow into a fatal crack. But that’s a rarity among the incidents Wearne examines.

Sometimes the design was unsafe to begin with or was modified without proper safety checks during construction, like the catwalks over Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency atrium that fell in 1981, killing 114. Sometimes structures were solid but the earth they were built on was not, as with the 1989 collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, Calif., and the port of Kobe, Japan, in 1995. And sometimes the use of the structure had been modified, giving rise to load-bearing problems that were never anticipated by the architect — like the Sampoong Superstore in Seoul, South Korea, originally designed as an office block, which was turned into a department store by way of suicidally reckless structural modifications. It collapsed in 1995, fatally squashing 498 people.

One of Wearne’s case studies tells of a 22-story high-rise apartment block in England called Ronan Point, a hefty chunk of which fell down in 1968, 10 weeks after it was finished. A small gas explosion on the 18th floor blew out the walls of one outside room; the walls themselves were all that was holding up the floors above, and when the upper floors fell, they took out all the floors below. That’s a basic design flaw, and a particularly scary one since it was used for a whole program of high-rises thrown up by the British government during this period. These buildings were shored up after the collapse, and Ronan Point was partly rebuilt, but as an added nightmare, Wearne reports, when Ronan Point was finally demolished in 1984, investigators looked at the very mortar of the building and found that it was intermixed with cigarette butts, tin cans and dust: The building was made of garbage.

Usually a building’s problems are harder to pinpoint. When the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown up in 1995, the bomb directly took out only one support column, but there was no redundancy built into the load-bearing scheme, and a chain reaction of beam and column failures caused nearly half the building to disintegrate in seconds. It simply wasn’t designed to resist a bomb. Wearne points out that unlike a car, a new building can’t be crash-tested, so what happened in Oklahoma City provided invaluable guidance for future construction of government buildings. It also confirmed that many existing buildings would fare just as poorly if bombed.

Perhaps most astonishing is the tale of the Vaiont Dam, completed in 1960 in a gorge in Northern Italy. In 1963, a large section of mountainside broke off and slid into the dam’s reservoir, sending most of the water over the top of the dam and down the valley in a wave hundreds of feet high. Several small towns were washed away, 2,043 people drowned … and the dam itself remained intact. It was, Wearne writes, “a construction disaster without a structural failure — a unique occurrence.” There had been a smaller landslide during construction of the dam; a couple of geologists had warned the government strongly that the mountain was still unstable and had been rebuffed in their attempts to get the project scaled down.

What’s so chilling about Wearne’s book is that in a great many of the other collapses he describes, problems were similarly called to the builders’ attention at some point and economics or bureaucratic laziness stymied corrective action. He makes you wonder why our homes and offices aren’t always falling down around our ears. Or, rather, he instills in you a new admiration for all the architects, contractors and inspectors who do their work properly, so we don’t usually have to think about them at all.