Reviews

[“Lilith: a biography”] is a gorgeous, if brutally tragic, love story set against a backdrop of a fast-collapsing planetary wilderness — the most impassioned love story this reviewer has encountered outside the classics. In fact, if sensuality ever soars higher or hotter than it does in these pages, the tale will be unprintable … not for being graphic but for combusting the moment it hits paper …

. . . One of those books for which the word novel was invented…a sure bet to become the Romeo and Juliet of environmentalists everywhere, if not, by virtue of its philosophic clout, their bible.

– Shaelyn Chaminade


 

Frank tenderness and intelligent awe — unusual qualities for propelling a reader into the darkest, most forbidden, corners of modern existence. Yet perhaps it is this very fusion of qualities which makes gunther’s purview of our civil existence so staggering. For instance, there is little of what is severely amiss with our society which gunther fails to lay bare to its causes…and in so doing he crafts a stunning roadmap to ultimate solutions. Of course, we don’t expect a novel to do all these things—which makes “Lilith: a biography” not just a surprise summer read but the read of a lifetime.

– Sándorá Chárdos


 

. . . Such a myth-buster book as this can ultimately lead to only two outcomes: The end of civil hypocrisy or its deeper entrenchment. In the meantime I suggest, all daring and creative readers enjoy gunther’s exposé, if only to rubberneck as pants drop and dresses fly up from civilization’s underbelly. You will regret it in the morning but so what? It’s an emotional feast and intellectual orgy no daring or creative reader will want to miss. The only thing about the book I regret is the distance between its covers — way too short for such meaty edutainment. Give us Book 2, Mr g, please. You know we want it!

. . . Henceforth pure love and stratospheric sex can no longer be treated as mutually exclusive. Gunther’s story has seen to that. Even as I write I catch myself glancing at the shelf where “Lilith” sits … all at once realize I’ve been unconsciously checking the spot for signs of smoke. Yes, even at ten paces, in broad daylight, the book has an incendiary glow. Zounds, Willy! Shaw and Camus would definitely set aside their pens and give this unique book a long winter’s read.

– Amanda Rolf


 

. . . A paradigm-shattering book…leaves few areas of civil society sacred or unindicted. Of course it is one thing to be a craftsman of scathing criticism and quite another to have good answers in tow. Sensitive to this, while the book’s storyline exposes the many malignancies of what modern society calls progress and success, gunther follows his criticisms with causes as well as cures. For this reviewer, “Lilith: a biography” was a read like no other. [It is] the sort of book that changes lives. For one cannot escape that which keeps answering his better questions.

– Sándorá Chárdos


 

Picture Arthur Miller, Stanley Diamond, Carl Jung and Ernst Mach collaborating with Ed Abby on a sequel to his “Monkey Wrench Gang”. What would we get? At the very least a contemporary love story of deep politics and moral heat, a tragicomic drama which takes a wrecking ball to civilization’s most destructive icons. Then, in a denoument of sweeping force, “restore[s] those icons to the Naturcosm from which they were hijacked and bastardized in the first place”. Picture a contemporary Romeo who is a Greenpeace activist, and a Juliet who uses him as a prototype for a cartoon paladin she names Captain Greenpeace, a TV series which becomes an international success — till it’s shot down by corpolitical forces, etc., etc. All of which is only to scratch the surface of this amazing social wake-up in the guise of a novel.

– Shaelyn Chaminade (Editor, “The Civilizing Principle:
Essays on an Apocalyptic Misconception”)


 

If the last thing you need is more friends and loved ones, don’t read this book. For its main characters, Lilith McGrae, Nathan Schock, the Baron, and of course Lilith’s sister Lalage — precisely because they are dished up souls and all by their creator — will soon move into the main rooms of your life with all the baggage of their fascinating worldviews in hand.

– Amanda Rolf


 

. . . If I’m forced to be more critical? Well then, I suppose you could say: Up till Part 6 the story seems rather externally driven. This is due to the book’s narrator needing so often to pause the storyline to assist the reader in grasping at least the superstructure of his extraordinary worldview. As the bulk of this “instructerruptus”, as he calls it, occurs in Book 1, by the time of Book 2, as the thrill and horror of free-fall begin to take over, the drama begins to take on an internal impetus. Yet isn’t that exactly what constitutes, or even causes, any good denouement? – when the combined weight of all the externally given pieces of the tale suddenly snowball into a single self-propelling mass? – that catalytic point in a story when its infrastructure (scenery, props, habituating characters and choreography) transforms before the reader’s eyes into a self-completing puzzle? – that point when the story reaches critical mass and begins to hurl itself, and us, headlong into an apotheosis?

What I’m saying I guess is: Denouement and apotheosis are largely only implied throughout Book 1. Even in the early parts of Book 2 the denouement congeals and fades, congeals and fades, several times before it snatches the reader and jumps off the edge. But once Part 9 is reached, the snowball that’s been growing growing growing begins to drag the rest of the mountainside with it; snow, trees, boulders, buildings, animals, people, everything, all of it becoming an unstoppable avalanche, the bottoming-out explosion of which doesn’t settle to complete stillness till Part 11. But by then the stillness is wholly apocalyptic.

– Shaelyn Chaminade (Editor, “The Civilizing Principle:
Essays on an Apocalyptic Misconception”)