The SF Weekly Says Very Nice Things...

...about the book, and plugs the official "release party" and first reading. This reminds me I should do the same. It's at the Odeon Bar in San Francisco, Tuesday Aug. 10, starting 9 pmish and on til last call, it being a bar and all. You can always keep your eye on the long-term event plans by checking the official This Is Burning Man "personal appearances, signings" etc. page, linkable from the front page, and I'll also try to remember to remind you of them here closer to the date.

What SF Weekly columnist Silke Tudor said about my book is so nice that, in addition to linking to it above, I'm going to reproduce it below for those too lazy to click through and scroll down.

I use the words "burning" and "man" sparingly in print. But there will be no avoiding it this week because This Is Burning Man, the first book by Reason magazine Senior Editor Brian Doherty, cannot be overlooked. It might seem peculiar that a Los Angeles-based reporter should be the first to publish a comprehensive book about the San Francisco-born festival, but few writers are as qualified. Doherty is neither a slavering devotee nor a "spectator." He has faithfully attended Burning Man every year for the last nine, immersing himself in the beauty and madness of Black Rock City, but, much more important, he has spent the last two years plying his investigative skills and iconoclastic tendencies, doing interviews, digging up facts, stirring up memories, hearsay, and experience, compiling them as history and testimonial. With a deft and thoughtful pen, Doherty manages to invoke the magic and whimsy of life on the playa without giving way to idol worship in the form of obeisance to "community," acknowledging, at once, the pejorative nature of the term "Burner" and the sense of identity thousands of people have drawn from it. Unlike other books that have attempted to capture Burning Man, Doherty's leaves little room for photographs. His volume is not a catalog of art and excess but a historical narrative driven by the larger-than-life characters who have inhabited the festival from its earliest days as an anarchic camp-out to its present incarnation as a sprawling metropolis of 30,000. It is to these characters, not the festival itself, that Doherty pays the most deference, capturing their brilliance and blemishes with a shrewd yet empathic eye. He reads from This Is Burning Man on Tuesday, Aug. 10, at the Odeon Bar at 10 p.m. Admission is free; call 550-6994 or visit www.odeonbar.com.

What can I say? When she's right, she's right....