Australian Radio and etc.

Taped a groovy 15-minute segment last night for the Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s Counterpoint program, hosted by Michael Duffy, about the book and Burning Man. It will be airing Monday Nov. 1, I am told, and should be available in a stream on their site then. I will link to it from here when that happens.

A rather curiously of-two-minds review of the book appeared in the Las Vegas City Life, by Matt Wray. I excerpt here from the parts I liked:

Described alternatively as an arts festival, a utopian intentional community of edge-seekers or as a giant desert rave, it continues to defy easy description and burners -- almost without exception -- can offer only a few electric tales of their ecstatic experience before their own narratives collapse.

"You know," they'll say with a resigned shrug, "you have to see it to believe it. You got to be there."

Now along comes a book that attempts a sustained, descriptive narrative of the 18-year-old desert happening. Brian Doherty, a senior editor at the anarcho-libertarian inspired Reason magazine, chronicles the event from its founding year in 1986 to 2003. Doherty, an active participant for the past nine years, does a reasonably good job of conveying some of the high weirdness that accompanied the event in its earliest years on the playa. I can attest that he gets most of the details right. This Is Burning Man is a carefully researched piece of storytelling, and one gets the sense that Doherty spent scores of hours patiently interviewing the core enthusiasts from those early years.....Doherty says he wants to tell the tale of Burning Man by focusing on the human stories, and in this respect, he stays true to his aim from first chapter to last.

.....Doherty is a gifted storyteller and has a superb ear for catching the moments of luminous hilarity and comic genius that happen everywhere all the time on the playa -- the crowds of mock-protest marchers chanting, "You can't make us chant! You can't make us chant!"; the staged "dysfunctional family freakout" at Christmas camp, where Peter Doty yells and screams at his family and friends, "Why can't we for once just go out to the desert and have a perfect Christmas? Is that really asking too much? I hate all of you; I wish you were dead!"

And on the Web site of Body Shop founder Anita Riddick, she gives free rein to her friend Matt Wallace to explain Burning Man at length; at the very bottom, he recommends my book. Thank, you Matt!