The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel

By Rachel Antony and Joël Henry. Lonely Planet Publications, 276 pages, $18.

Jumping off with the philosophy that "the journey of the mind is the greatest voyage of all," The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel throws a monkey wrench in the cogs of classic consumer-based tourism. Authors Rachel Antony and Joël Henry gleefully champion "experimental travel" – the use of structured games to explore both new and familiar places with fresh eyes – as a way to shed our conventional expectations of travel and concentrate on the evocative but overlooked details. Because the learning component of travel can be eclipsed by the mass-produced aspects of sightseeing, the focus here is on the mental journey rather than the final destination.

That said, this book is all about fun through discovery. In 1990 Henry founded the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (also known as Latourex), a synthesis of two unlikely bedfellows: tourism and surrealism. As those familiar with the high jinks of the San Francisco Suicide Club know, this isn't new territory, but the ideas collected here could jump-start many a jaded soul. With a tip of the hat to the dadaists, surrealists, and situationists, this cerebral yet utterly playful guidebook proposes 40 suggestions for incorporating whimsical journeys into daily experience.

The ideas are framed as mock-scientific hypotheses, and can be as charmingly simple as spending 24 hours roaming an airport without boarding a plane, or as optimistic as seeing how far around the world your hitchhiking thumb will take you. A number of experiments tilt toward creating itineraries through arbitrary instructions, such as exploring a place by taking alternating left and right turns until you can venture no farther. The most original (but impractical) idea might be Ero Tourism, where lovers travel separately to an unfamiliar city and then try to find each other.

It would be easy to dismiss the guide as an art-for-art's-sake confection if it didn't touch on one of the most salient truths of travel: that political and economic realities prevent most people from breezing across international borders or experiencing life beyond their cultures. That recognition makes the premise of this book so much more valuable, because "liberated from the expectations of typical tourism," the privilege associated with traditional forms of travel can begin to fade. And freed from the constraints of time, money, and geography, there's little excuse for lack of imagination. (Beth Kohn)

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

By Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osbourne with Peter Pavia. ReganBooks, 620 pages, $27.95.

One look at the author photos of The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry – he's seen sucking a cig from a police-lineup distance, wearing all black and indoor shades; she's got that classic Vampira thing down – and you know this epic porn history's authors, Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osbourne, are so terminally cool that they knew porn stars and called them friends even before starting work on a book about them. But Osbourne and longtime rock journo McNeil also know what sells, and in a way this 10-years-in-the-making tome sells out their friends. Cannily edited, highly entertaining, The Other Hollywood is also an incessantly lurid chronicle whose tabloid-style fixations on violence, tragedy, and general grotesquerie crowd out any less sensational insights into a business currently estimated as making up to $10 billion per year.

In a sense this Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry delivers just what the subtitle promises, emphasis being on the word industry. McNeil and Co. and their many dozens of interviewees aren't really interested in what's reflected onscreen. What it's actually like to make a skin flick, content trends, audience demographics and psychology, star personalities, societal sexual politics, and the occasional artistic aspirations are all subjects left unexplored here. Instead they follow the money trail, which – given porn's ever borderline community-standards legality and whipping-post popularity among conservatives – has often been a dirty one.

Thus, people having sex in (and for the) public, for money (and for posterity), constitute just a bait-and-switch front for The Other Hollywood's real protagonists: mafiosi and feds. Their elaborate dance through the decades, as the FBI tries to destroy organized crime syndicates by nailing them on (often trumped-up) violations in the sex-pic biz they encouraged for years, emerges as an amazing tragicomic saga. Most startling is the long thread spun by two agents who got a little overinvolved in their undercover roles as porn-dealing "made men," living the hedonistic high life while compiling a massive court case whose credibility then fell apart when one got arrested for shoplifting designer jeans.

Of course, the voices of porn producers, directors, and "models" are duly heard here as well. Some are not so bright, but many are articulate and funny – particularly Sharon Mitchell, the performer-turned-addict-turned-"AIDS geneologist" who becomes the book's cranky-bawd Greek chorus. Their input, however, is mostly channeled into recaps of familiar scandals: Marilyn Chambers's Ivory Snow detergent box cover, John Holmes and the Wonderland murders, porn-star suicides, Traci Lords's possibly self-leaked underage revelation, John Wayne Bobbitt, Pam 'n' Tommy, the industry AIDS crisis of '98 (likely patient zero Marc Wallice actually whines, "Just because I worked with every person who's become positive, does that mean I'm the reason?"), et cetera. Gay porn goes unaddressed because that, the authors concede, is another book.

Porn is a hard-knock business that's always attracted victims and fools as much as happy exhibitionists and conscious sexual rev olutionists. But victimization and folly get such star billing in The Other Hollywood that this colorful, compulsively readable yet far-from-definitive overview ultimately seems to exploit the exploiters. It's a freak-show depiction of a world that, lest we forget (or deny it), is nonetheless very much in the mainstream of American life and leisure. (Dennis Harvey)

Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

By Andrew Lam. Heyday Books, 192 pages, $14.95 (paper).

Perfume Dreams, a long-awaited first book and memoir by journalist Andrew Lam, of Pacific News Service and National Public Radio, opens with a scene of Lam's burning his family photos as the Vietcong near Saigon. Soon he is "watching Vietnam recede into the cloudy horizon from the plane's window." Lam remembers Vietnam – he was almost 12 when his family fled – but he knows that his Vietnam is irretrievable. He concludes that loss is the communal identity of Vietnamese immigrants who remember the war: the pain of having, in both senses, lost their country. In a scene from his San Francisco home, Lam lets his mother and father, a former South Vietnamese general, represent the two forms of loss.

The refugee father told and retold wartime stories.... He stirred his whiskey and soda on ice, then stared blankly at the TV.... The refugee mother grieved for lost relatives, lost home and hearth, lost ways of life, a whole cherished world of intimate connections, scattered and uprooted, gone....

Lam depicts himself as being caught between the weight of this loss and America's "forward arc" of "self-invention." He becomes a journalist and world traveler as if to pull a third point out of the shuttling back and forth. Only near the end of the book does he realize that his gesture shares something with those of more recent Vietnamese expatriates – including some who have left only in spirit.

Lam rails against the fatalistic materialism of Vietnamese youth who idolize "Baywatch starlets," "go 'wilding' " and drag-race motorcycles, "playing Rebel Without a Cause." But he admires Phuong Anh Nguyen, a boat person turned cosmopolitan socialite extraordinaire. "This is, I think, her strategy," Lam remarks. "To belong to many places all at once. To keep traveling so she can have control over her past, to own it.... Born in Vietnam, remade elsewhere ... going back and forth becomes easy, seductive...."

Lam, similarly, thrives on his own mobility. But, he wonders, again over the Pacific, "Why is it some can travel back and forth over its vast expanse with ease and others die trying to traverse its treacherous waters?" The answer is obvious: The problem is class.

It seems Lam is also seduced almost into unreality by the American dream. "In America one feels little the weight of history," he says of his adopted country. "The past is not important; the future is always bright." One finds oneself expecting a but, but there is none. In its relentless stereotype, America is a form of denial, and the American dream uses money to paper over the ways that the past does matter – the past that sits like a black hole at the center of Lam's story. (Cameron Scott)

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs

Edited by Jonathan Ames. Vintage, 314 pages, $13.95 (paper).

Literary celeb Jonathan Ames used to hang out in a New York tranny hooker bar called Sally's (now closed) and discovered a fascination with the bohemian lives of transgenders. He mined that experience for The Extra Man, a novel of a tranny chaser and failed cross-dresser. And now Ames has compiled Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs.

"Transsexuals are groundbreakers [and] sexual adventurers," Ames announces in his introduction. He offers readers the chance to live the adventure of transsexualism vicariously, like tourists in Trannyland. The excerpts carve out the most dramatic or revelatory moments of transition, including surgery and coping with family.

Sexual Metamorphosis includes most classics of the genre, including Jan Morris's Conundrum, Lili Elbe's Man into Woman, Christine Jorgensen's Personal Autobiography, Aleshia Brevard's The Woman I Was Not Born to Be, and Jennifer Finney Boylan's more recent She's Not There.

It also includes lesser-known writings by famous trannies such as model Carolyn Cossey, whom newspapers outed after she appeared in a James Bond film, and Calpernia Addams, who lost her soldier boyfriend to the transphobic violence of his comrades. And it throws in case studies from sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Harry Benjamin.

Much of the source material gains from skillful editing. Instead of being trapped in an elevator for hours with the aggressively whimsical Morris or the perky Jorgensen and Mark Rees, you feel as if you're sharing a pleasant ride with each of them. The distinctive voices play off each other and form a composite story of struggle, bravery, and brightness in unexpected places. The result is surprisingly literary, like a set of monologues by Dickens characters.

Sexual Metamorphosis isn't perfect. Some trannies will object to the word sexual in the book's title. Only 4 out of 15 stories come from transmen, a fact the editor blames on the stoic shyness of FTMs. It necessarily skips genderqueers and more complex stories of gender transformation. And I would have left out economics professor Deirdre McCloskey in favor of rock star Jayne County.

But this is probably one of the best books to give to people who want to learn about transsexualism. The wealth of anecdotes shows the experiences many transsexuals share, as well as offering a glimpse of the diversity of trans experience. The availability of these stories may help open a crack in the implacable "boys will be boys" logic of our culture. (Charlie Anders)