The East, The West, And Sex by Richard Bernstein Vintage, HK$128
Edward Said contended that the Western vision of the East is a highly eroticised one that arose not from reality but the need to find in Orientals the fantasies and cliches that had been embedded in the Western mind. Examples of men who had succumbed to this fallacy, according to Said, included Gustave Flaubert and 19th-century explorer Richard Burton. Of Said's theory Richard Bernstein, an International Herald Tribune columnist, writes 'there is both insight and blindness'. The same could be said of The East, The West, And Sex. A history of lustful encounters between Westerners (usually male, moneyed and powerful) and their Eastern counterparts (usually acquiescent females), the book explores the sex and power plays behind these pairings throughout the ages, from Marco Polo to the present. Readers will learn about the seraglios of Ottoman sultans, second-century Chinese love manuals and more in this wide-ranging volume that could have produced twice the content. His editors might have considered a more judicious selection of anecdotes, however, and nixing his personal appraisals of women.