Book Reports: A Music Critic on His First Love, Which Was Reading - Softcover

Christgau, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478000309 ISBN 13: 9781478000303

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2019

Synopsis

In this generous collection of book reviews and literary essays, legendary Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau showcases the passion that made him a critic—his love for the written word. Many selections address music from blackface minstrelsy to punk and hip-hop, artists from Lead Belly to Patti Smith, and fellow critics from Ellen Willis and Lester Bangs to Nelson George and Jessica Hopper. But Book Reports also teases out the popular in the Bible and 1984 as well as pornography and science fiction, and analyzes at length the cultural theory of Raymond Williams, the detective novels of Walter Mosley, the history of bohemia, and the 2008 financial crisis. It establishes Christgau as not just the Dean of American Rock Critics, but one of America's most insightful cultural critics as well.

About this title

Review:

“Robert Christgau writes with an infectious energy and applies his unflagging intellectual curiosity to an unpredictable array of subjects. His critical sensibility is so developed that the book generates its own interest, as the reader will want to know how this sensibility plays itself out over the course of this unfailingly interesting book.” Author: Greil Marcus

From the Author:

Robert Christgau wrote for and edited at The Village Voice from 1969 to 2006 and currently contributes a weekly record column at Noisey. His books include Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967–2017, also published by Duke University Press, and Going into the City: Portrait of the Critic as a Young Man.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1478000309
• ISBN 13: 9781478000303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416