The Christy Report

Rating:
Summary: No scholarship here!
Review: The book has some interesting vintage erotic photos, but virtually no attempt is made to place them in any historical context. The text is uninformative and useless. A waste of money!

Rating:
Summary: A Report on porn?
Review: This book can hardly be considered an in-depth report on American commercial sexual activity. John Quinn's text, in sixty or so pages, is a superficial overview of the last hundred years illustrated with a few vintage porn and burlesque photos, I would have expected to see examples of Tijuana Bibles, burlesque and film posters, men's magazine covers, video boxes, adult web-site home pages etc, etc. Dian Hansen contributes an interesting short postscript on the future of porn.

What fills the majority of the book are hundreds of hard-core photos which seem to come from the output of Californian porn producer Leoram (they even have an ad on page 440) Kim Christy I guess has some connection with this company.

The book designer, Armando Chitolina from Milan, assumes all this very (interesting) explicit material will bore the readers so he liberally splashes color panels, text and abstract shapes over the photos.

So, not really history book on American erotica, more a visual treat on what men and women get up to in the Los Angeles sex biz!

Rating:
Summary: TASCHEN Does it Again!
Review: This is a cover-to-cover porn odyssey...no holds barred. My copy has a very cool pink 3-D-psychodelic cover and while the text is minimal, the images are not.

Like a good porn movie the book is light on dialogue, but heavy on action!

TASCHEN didn't let me down on this one.