Phil Freeman
Punk didn't die in 1980, when mainstream media stopped paying attention. It just went underground, sprouting up in small, insular scenes in nearly every American city and town, and it started calling itself "hardcore," because to be devoted to ...
Anne Sheridan
The publication of V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life coincides with the greatest literary honor of the author’s career. After successive disappointments, Naipaul was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Coinciding with this major event as it ...
Kendal Butler
No, this is not a quickie paperback rushed into print after September 11. The Frommers’ book, subtitled An Oral History of Life in the City During the Mid-Twentieth Century, is a loving look at a Manhattan that now ...
Christi Davis
Stretch halter mini dress with open weave sides Madonna: The Style Book reads like one of those cheaply put together star memorabilia books written for young teenagers. In the 1980's, such books were published in the ...
Phil Freeman
Chicago saxophonist Fred Anderson is one of the most surprising success stories of the 1990s. Originally emerging as a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the mid-1960s, he played with members of the ...
Phil Freeman
The punks won. Dismissed upon emergence as an aberration, a mindlessly destructive tantrum at the expense of legitimate rock music, the “punk aesthetic” has been assimilated into mainstream American culture to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine ...
Bob Wake
Jonathan Franzen’s strength as a fiction writer lies in his micromanagement of characterization. It’s no oxymoron to call The Corrections a large-scale intimate portrait of an American family. By burrowing deep inside the bruised middle-class psyches of Alfred and ...
Bob Wake
Dogs Dream of Running collects forty-eight of John Lehman’s wry melancholic poems. Perhaps it’s bad form to recommend reading a book’s Epilogue before commencing with page one. However, Lehman’s end-of-the-book essay, “How I Started Writing Poetry,” is so revealing ...
Anne Sheridan
The Quarrymen attempts an unusual experiment. It’s a music book about men who never were serious musicians – a rock history about men who never became rock stars – a footnote in pop history which stayed just that. Its ...
Anne Sheridan
Suffer the Little Children - The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools makes horrifying reading. It is an account of the systematic abuse of underprivileged children incarcerated in Ireland’s industrial school system from the foundation of the State to ...