[2] Publication of The Opium Wars (2002) in China was unusual because Chinese scholars and government watchdogs typically rejected Western accounts of their history as biased and Eurocentric.
"[7] In a review for the American Library Association's Booklist, Jay Freeman wrote: "[This] account of the causes, military campaigns, and tragic effects of these wars is absorbing, frequently macabre, and deeply unsettling."
Publishers Weekly wrote, "Hanes (Imperial Diplomacy in the Era of Decolonization) and film author and former Los Angeles Daily News critic Sanello have teamed up to produce this fine popular account...
The book covers a familiar time and place in history, but the authors make some nice analogies between the brutal economics and empire of the 19th century, and 21st-century forms of money, politics and war.
Tweakers was the source of a feature-length video of the same name in 2007, and featured grim, on-camera accounts of recovering and active methamphetamine addicts, adapted from case histories in Sanello's book.
Another nonfiction book by Sanello, The Knights Templars: God’s Warriors, the Devil’s Bankers, garnered international interest because of The Da Vinci Code’s fictional treatment of the Medieval monastic order.
[14] After a four-week trial in Los Angeles Superior Court in Santa Monica, Calif., the jury found in favor of the publisher of Naked Instinct, Schragis, and the author, Sanello.