Romancing the East

Reviews / Votes

"Hopkins, the author of famous rock bios on Jim Morrison and Elvis, as well as a chronicler of Asia in non-fiction titles such as Thailand Confidential and Asian Aphrodisiacs, has a highly effective bullshit detector. He knows how to disentangle the facts from the fictions....Thanks to the author's conversational writing style and talent for uncovering the telling anecdote, the book never gets bogged down in cumbersome lit crit. TripAdvisor will help you find restaurants and lodgings, but Romancing the East by Jerry Hopkins serves up the artistic spices and brain food that will nourish and embellish any of your wanderings in Asia and India. " --PATA Compass "Jerry Hopkins was present at the creation of Rolling Stone magazine and the early hippie days of West Coast rock. After penning the definitive biography of Jim Morrison--No One Here Gets Out Alive--he took off for a long sojourn in Hawaii. He's been in Thailand now for 20 years, still writing books, three dozen of them so far. My favorite is Bangkok Babylon--profiles of 26 well-known expatriates in Thailand. He's done the same now with 32 Western writers in Romancing the East. His portraits range from Conrad and Kipling to Greene and Burgess to Theroux and Naipaul...I would have preferred that weak chapters on Richard Conlon and Ian Fleming be replaced by more serious observers of Asia...but this is to criticize Jerry Hopkins for the book he did not write. The one he did is shrewd, fascinating, trenchant, an education and a joy to read." --Phuket Gazette "Sometimes it's hard to see the trees when the forest is so big. But, collectively, Hopkins' chapters paint an absorbing mural of displaced foreigners struggling to understand and explain "the exotic East" in the context of their own damaged lives and forsaken homelands." --The Nation