ROLLING STONE: THE '70s
(Little, Brown and Company)
$19.95

What was true for the '60s is true for the '70s--if you can remember the decade, you weren't there. Maybe that explains why some of the essays in this Rolling Stone compilation are based not on personal experiences, but on dull personal opinions. Ten years of sports, music, and politics get boiled down to commentary.

One essay opens with a kid all glammed out in platforms and makeup, on his way to see David Bowie in New York, 1974. Sounds interesting, right? But rather than describe the cool scene at the show and the fucked-up experience of seeing Bowie in his prime, surrounded by the most freaked-out looking people of the era, this guy goes into a long-winded monologue on the dispute over who invented glam. I might care if he wrote it well, if he came back to the Bowie show with a great ending, but he didn't. I was just about to write this book off as a waste of everyone's time and a reflection of how dull Rolling Stone itself has become....

Then I read the story of the former ball boy for the New York Nets and Julius Irving as a rookie basketball player. This story had soul--the social commentary was there, but it flowed through the piece with ease. I found myself completely satisfied and read on to the next essay: "The Rumble in the Jungle," the famous fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in Zaire, 1974. Then the story of the 11 people killed at the Who concert in Cincinnati in 1979. The list goes on. Many of these stories are captivating; most are at least worthy of print. It's hit or miss, but the hits are refreshing and informative. MARK DUSTON

SEX & SINGLE GIRLS: WOMEN WRITE ON SEXUALITY
edited by Lee Damsky
(Seal Press)
$16.95

The title of Sex & Single Girls pays tribute to Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl--a book that shocked its 1962 readers with straightforward talk about sex outside of marriage. Thank god the single girl's relationship to sex looks a whole lot different in the year 2000. Lee Damksy's Sex & Single Girls offers a myriad of voices, from women who confess to being cockteases to a savage deconstruction of the supposed link between love and fucking. Most of the essays illuminate an epiphany: the moment you realized you should have known better, the moment you quit caring that you should have known better. Some, like Mary Martone's "How Do You Do That Thing You Do?" swing through a succession of experiences that lead to a sometimes ambivalent, sometimes passionate, and always complicated relationship to sex.

Other essays deal with broad-ranging social issues: "The Not-SoFizGig Affair," by @nonymous, describes the adventures of an 18-year-old girl "golemed" up as an online identity for a 27-year-old woman. "FizGig," @nonymous explains, is slang for "flirty young woman" in some parts of the South. Being SoFizGig online allows @nonymous to relive her own un-Lolita-like adolescence, but the outcome of the affair is unexpected and revealing.

Sex & Single Girls is a book that'll give nice twice: as erotica and personal politics. The only way it could be better is if it doubled as a dildo. TRACI VOGEL

A DIFFERENT KIND OF INTIMACY
by Karen Finley
(Thunder Mouth's Press)
$17.95

Female sexuality is the reviled source at the center of America's culture war: The last three decades of social history are written on the bodies of women. In 1990, performance art provocateur Karen Finley came to star in our national psychodrama after her NEA grant was overturned by then-chairman of the endowment John Frohnmeyer, under political pressure from the Bush administration.

Finley, whose visceral work uses nudity and obscenity to tear at the seams of cultural misogyny and sexual abuse, was an easy target. Her media portrayal as "the chocolate-smeared woman" started as merely reductive and turned quickly into slander and character assassination. She became a political football, the latest female victim of hard-right misogyny and soft-left squeamishness. Losing the NEA grant was the least of it. Finley faced IRS audits, death threats, cancellations of her work, urine thrown on her at an anti-censorship rally, and a near-pariah status in the media.

A Different Kind of Intimacy collects Finley's performance texts and artwork. The essays provide a startlingly candid account of her life and the inspirations behind her work. She writes about how her father's suicide motivated her to perform, "to take the unanswered grief, the terrible sadness that I lived with and throw it back at the world." Her personal reflections on her censorship battles with the NEA and subsequent Supreme Court lawsuit, which ended in defeat, give the reader the opportunity to witness the frightening maneuvering on the part of the Bush and Clinton administrations that effectively gutted the NEA. Finley's controversial performance texts, though stripped of her Cassandra-like wail and fierce presence, are powerful, tapping into the rage and sorrow of the unspeakable, colliding the personal and political, and proving that the highest grade of blasphemy is telling the truth. NATE LIPPENS