Friday, May 18 2012
Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death
Britain’s pop culture knight, Christopher Frayling, offers the definitive biography and interpretation of the Spaghetti Western maestro, Sergio Leone.
Monday, April 30 2012
Enjoy Orientalism-Lite with ‘Stranger Magic’
Stranger Magic is an exhaustive compendium of the various tales in the Arabian Nights collection, as well as a robust and energetic investigation into how these stories of “Oriental” myth and folklore have seeped into the European imagination from the 18th century onward.
Thursday, April 19 2012
That Thing That Makes Funk Funky: ‘The One: The Life and Music of James Brown’
James Brown – an untrained musician, mind you, operating on not much more than feel, instinct and desire – revolutionized black pop music, setting off depth charges that would still be exploding a decade hence.
Wednesday, April 11 2012
A Third Spain, Neither Left Nor Right, United by Sex?
"Spanish majas wearing traditional peinetas made-in-Spain enhance their legs with imported French stockings; dark Spanish beauties leave Andalusia to sit in front of American typewriters in an office in Barcelona or Madrid; sexy middle-class señoritas speed away on German bicycles."
Tuesday, April 10 2012
Grunge: Straining to Challenge the Status Quo
Grunge: Music and Memory casts grunge as the unsure middle weight stepping into the ring against one pop music brawler after another. Down goes Michael Jackson, down goes Guns 'n' Roses, and while Springsteen is putting the finishing touches onHuman Touch/Lucky Town, Nirvana and Pearl Jam release the most influential albums of the decade.
Friday, March 30 2012
We Need This Map: Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder’s ‘Thinking the Twentieth Century’
This is a three-dimensional map of intellectual terrain, marked hastily but with enormous detail and vividness in the course of a conversation between two well-regarded historians. They have spread the map out on the hood of your car—or perhaps, in honor of Tony Judt, the map has been handed to you in a train station.
Wednesday, February 29 2012
Dead Stars Tell No Tales: Whitney Houston’s Death Casts New Light Onto Memoirs by Two ‘70s Pop Stars
Just as the winners of the war tend to write the history books, only survivors write memoirs. Nile Rodgers' Le Freak and Gil Scott-Heron's The Last Holiday.
Tuesday, February 21 2012
Celebrating the Possibilities of Fiction: A Conversation with Jennifer Egan
Pulitzer Prize winning author Jennifer Egan discusses her unique combination of influences, the role of genre and satire in her work, and the importance of distance in her creative process.
Friday, January 27 2012
‘Library After Air Raid’: On the Survival of Culture Amid the Barbarity of War
War is a science, science is an art and art, as Library After Air Raid attests, is everything.
Monday, January 23 2012
Riding Into a Nightmare: ‘A Train in Winter’
Caroline Moorehead's A Train In Winter, like Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, leaves nothing to the imagination, a decision that makes reading it simultaneously engrossing and deeply disturbing.
Friday, January 13 2012
If at First You Don’t Succeed, Failure May Be Your Style: ‘The Queer Art of Failure’
Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy.
Friday, December 16 2011
O Captain! My Captain! Going Where No Octogenarian Has Gone Before
As "Bill" explores the meaninglessness of celebrity, "Shatner" embraces the shallow and the superficial like an Andy Warhol soup can come to life.
Wednesday, December 7 2011
When the Music’s Over: Greil Marcus on the Doors
Apparently seeking to account for every important rock act of the '60s, Greil Marcus turns his critical attention to the Doors.
Tuesday, November 29 2011
Cold Wars End, Betrayal is Forever: ‘Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy’
What is espionage if not getting into bed with people -- physically or ideologically -- for purposes of betrayal?
Friday, September 30 2011
Chuck Eddy Will Piss You Off with ‘Rock and Roll Always Forgets’
Buy this infuriating and brilliant book. But get it in softcover. You'll be throwing it against your wall.
Friday, August 12 2011
‘Red Shambhala’: Telepathy, Mental Powers, Electronic Surveillance & Mysticism in the U.S.S.R.
While the practical experiments of laboratories bent on superhuman creations failed as surely as did the subversive aims to spark revolt on the Mongol plains or in the Tibetan monasteries, the lesson of this unbelievable plot lingers in this thoughtful, instructive, and sad testament of grand hopes and puny fates.
Monday, August 8 2011
Steve Earle’s ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive’
A been-there-lived-it-attitude and street-level redemption, all propelled by a songwriter's/storyteller's lyrical and narrative knack.
Friday, August 5 2011
‘Shock Value’: What Men (and Boys) Really Fear
Jason Zinoman argues that the fantastic, Gothic monsters of the first half of the 20th century were replaced by a New Horror -- the monster right in front of your face.
Friday, July 1 2011
Enmeshed In Modernity: Malcolm Turvey’s ‘The Filming of Modern Life’
Most of these films have been studied to death, then autopsied, buried, exhumed, and autopsied again, but Malcolm Turvey unearths some fresh perspectives and in the process, provides a nice corrective to long-misguided notions.
Wednesday, June 29 2011
Tommy McKearney’s ‘The Provisional IRA Is an Insider’s Analysis of the Dream and the Reality
A contemporary analysis of the main IRA force in its 40 years "from insurrection to parliament", from a participant not in a seminar but a cell, as an operative and not as a professor, a volunteer and a leader of the IRA -- not a reporter.
Thursday, June 23 2011
Dylan As Text, Sub-Text, Ur-Text in ‘Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown’
This is Bob Dylan as shifting text, not just layered like pages, back or front, or over-laid like a palimpsest, but cross-wise and motile as a termite.
Tuesday, June 7 2011
David Foster Wallace’s Posthumous ‘The Pale King’ Explores Self-Consciousness As a Disease
The problem with The Pale King is not that it killed a great writer, but that a great writer’s own problems became the narrowing factor for what might have been his greatest work.
Monday, June 6 2011
Cinderella May Have Eaten Peggy Orenstein’s Daughter, But Who Ate Cinderella?
All the expertise in the world doesn’t prepare a parent to face the vagaries of American culture that lays itself pink, shiny, and bejewelled at the feet of a young girl.
Friday, May 6 2011
Christopher Newfield’s ‘Unmaking the Public University’
What happens to America's higher education system when humanists meet industrial (and now post-industrial) knowledge managers and technocrats?
Thursday, April 28 2011
‘Atheist Manifesto’ Combines Density with Levity
This brisk study encompasses vast learning, marshaled with much wit, considerable venom and steady argument, all doled out in differing amounts.
Thursday, April 21 2011
‘Electric Eden’: A Musical Retelling of the Elusive Past
Rob Young, editor at The Wire music magazine, conjures up the contradictions of sound technology harnessed to rural moods, and an urban audience longing for antiquarian lore.
Monday, April 11 2011
‘The Brothers’ Lot’ Reaches Monty Python’s Heights of Nomenclature
Upon this ethical foundation for an entertaining tale, Kevin Holohan follows a satirical tradition which questions authority, undermines cliché, and upends the social order.
Friday, March 18 2011
Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways
When halal turkeys sell for Thanksgiving, "Happy Holidays" drowns out "Merry Christmas", Easter egg hunts replace Mass celebrating the Resurrection, and sacred Catholic terms in Quebec serve only as swear words, culture has parted ways with religion.
Friday, March 11 2011
Strong and Soft Opinions: Tony Judt, Public and Private
Like J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Ill Fares the Land and The Memory Chalet reveal the diverse cross-pollination of public and private speech. Ill Fares the Land ostensibly contains the strong opinions, The Memory Chalet the "soft" opinions.
Friday, February 18 2011
Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City
The essays included in this fine, wide-ranging, thought-provoking volume take pains to remind the reader how every instance of urban dystopia – whether in Mexico, India, Africa or the United States – is shadowed by the particular history and legacy of its geography, culture, and society.
Tuesday, February 15 2011
Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America
While Disintegration contains its share of frank, bracing, straight talk that dispels long-held notions about black Americans, one of Eugene Robinson’s underlying assumptions — that America persists in seeing black people as an experiential monolith — is not the defining absolute it used to be.
Wednesday, February 2 2011
Ammon Shea Is Not In the Phone Book, But He Read It, Cover to Cover
I’ve finally met somebody who possibly loves books more than I do, and certainly knows more about them.
Wednesday, January 12 2011
‘The Sentimentalists’ Is a Novel That Lives Up to Its Title
The Sentimentalists has all of the hallmarks of a book published in Canada circa 1972, full of purple prose, a seemingly anti-American tract, and a classic rural setting, aka: Can-Lit.
Friday, December 24 2010
Clash City
Marcus Gray's book about London Calling inspires a journey around the London of the Clash. There's a huge sense of disaffection in this city, a feeling that the government protects only the rich and will leave the poor to suffer the recession – it’s like 1979 all over again, and London is still calling, calling out into an atmosphere of impending catastrophe.
Wednesday, November 24 2010
‘Life’: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stone
Because Keith Richards lived the book he’s written, he’s written a book that lives on.
Wednesday, November 17 2010
Rosanne Cash: More Than Just a Legend’s Daughter
Rosanne Cash’s lyricism plays on the page as if she’s on stage with guitar in hand. You can hear the music as you read. PopMatters Jaime Karnes talks with this gifted writer of songs and stories.
Friday, November 12 2010
Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock
What the world really needs is a straight-up account of one of the most important rock groups of all time. Now we have it in the form of music scribe Andrew Earles.
Thursday, November 4 2010
President Obama and The Long Fade
Two new books on the Obama presidency make clear that the dream, such as it was, is over -- though not necessarily in the way you'd think. Whether or not something has actually died, the obituary has already been written for Barack Obama's promise of progressive reform
Tuesday, October 26 2010
And Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson: ‘Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics’
In a conversation with Jerry Robinson, the man who created the Joker, we learn he is much like the superheroes with which he will forever be identified; his career reflects a lifetime of pushing boundaries, challenging conventions, and fighting for artistic integrity.
Monday, October 18 2010
The 24-hour News Cycle Rhetoric Yields to Something Far More Human in ‘The Promise: President Obama’
This book works because it doesn't skimp on details: the reason behind every major Obama Year One decision is explained, and the result is fascinating. If only Alter toned down the declarative statements...
Tuesday, October 12 2010
Philip Roth’s ‘Nemesis’: The Case Against God and Man
Here is Philip Roth in his familiar, brutal finery, his most biting and honest eloquence: the great existential wondering which has tormented so many of his characters.
Friday, September 10 2010
Ironically Facebook and Its 500 Million Friends Remain Largely a Mystery
In the beginning, Mark Zuckerberg was a socially-awkward teenager, a computer science major at Harvard University, who arrived toting an eight-foot-long whiteboard as a brainstorming tool...
Friday, August 27 2010
‘The Men Who Would Be King’ Reveals the Stuff That DreamWorks Was Undone By
With energy and a candor reflecting a veteran journalist unworried whether she'll eat lunch in that town again or not, author Nicole LaPorte reveals the parallels between the DreamWorks story and that of any dream's road to either reality or perdition.
Thursday, July 29 2010
Future Shock, Postmodern Nostalgia, and Uncanny Technologies
The speed of technological change is unprecedented. Author Anna Jane Grossman finds that it has imbued her "with a kind of odd nostalgia for right now.”
Wednesday, July 21 2010
Manly Love: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s Letters
Kerouac and Ginsberg are cosmic twins borne from Whitman’s Universal skull, bonded as comrades, cerebrally-joined as poets -- but it will sour for Kerouac when Ginsberg uses his poetic voice as a political trump card.
Monday, June 28 2010
Confessions of a Political Romantic: Christopher Hitchens’ ‘Hitch-22’
Hitchens often remarks here on his being a late bloomer, and so it is that some will see the core of Hitch-22 as the story of the author’s inner journey in adulthood from firebrand '60s campus radical to geezery Tory of the Anglo-American variety.
Tuesday, May 4 2010
Barbara Ehrenreich and the Brahmin Fantastic
In Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, she experiences an exclusive corporate culture in America that is disturbingly similar to India's privileged genetic intelligentsia; also know as the caste system.
Monday, April 19 2010
Greil Marcus on Van Morrison: When That Rough God Goes Riding
This is the story of a burly monk in shades, of flesh chasing the divine, of a voice ecstatic in southern blues and gospel and Celtic mysticism.
Friday, April 9 2010
Hellraisers: They Lived This Way Because Nobody Else Could
These guys were geniuses at life: living fully on their own terms, and after all the broken glass, bludgeoned livers, and wrecked relationships, the sum shined brighter than the scattered bits and pieces.
Friday, April 2 2010
Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular
This book comes very close to being a faithful mirror of the endlessly fascinating Harry Smith and, like its subject, will provoke, educate, and entertain in equal measure.
Tuesday, March 23 2010
You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried, by Susannah Gora
This book is part cultural analysis of ‘80s youth films, part trivia, and whole bunch walk down memory lane.
Tuesday, March 16 2010
Last Words by George Carlin with Tony Hendra
Part raucous credo, part comic pilgrim’s progress, this is George Carlin’s celebration of his own human condition and how he became not just a comedian, but a conscience.
Monday, March 8 2010
The German Issue: Still Straddling the Berlin Wall
The German Issue provides us with a time capsule from a very different era, but so much of its content remains pertinent.
Tuesday, March 2 2010
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life
We so want our geniuses to be perfect people. Or at least nice people -- and so often they aren’t.
Friday, February 26 2010
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
Sociologist Sharon Zukin looks at the forces at play in some of the cooler neighborhoods of New York in this update of Jane Jacobs and the principles of urban revitalization for the 21st century.
Monday, February 22 2010
Howard Zinn: The Dying of a Light
A tribute to the signature interwar polymath: the historian, activist, dramatist, dockyard worker and teacher Howard Zinn.
