Jason's review
The Last Opium Den
by Nick Tosches
Jason's review
The Last Opium Den by Nick Tosches
Jason's review
rating:
This is one of four newish books I recently read mostly so I could finally get them off my queue list, all of which were actually pretty good but are mere wisps of manuscripts, none of them over 150 pages or so in length. And indeed, Nick Tosches' The Last Opium Den was first published as a simple magazine article in Vanity Fair -- it was the edgy and controversial author's attempt at the turn of the millennium to see if there were any honest-to-God opium dens left on this planet, done up right with the seedy beds and the dressed-up Asian women holding giant long pipes and the whole bit, maybe out in the middle of the jungle in Cambodia or wherever. Of course, this being Tosches, the slim story is actually about a lot more than that as well; it's about the cannibalization of global culture, the proliferation of squeaky-clean Euro/Americans into every corner of the world, and incidentally why heroin was created in the first place, as basically a portable form of self-admin...more
