Daniel Gewertz
“Goyhood” can be larger than life, and its plot is a real doozy, but this isn’t a lightly comic excursion: the religious and social consternations that roil the brothers Belkin are as earnest as they are outlandish.
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Love for Nanci Griffith has empowered a hell of a record.
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Cockeyed anecdotes roam merrily through a satiric tale set in an East Germany that’s too larky to be oppressive.
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“Blood In the Tracks” delivers a minor miracle: a host of fresh looks at the most (over)written about musician of our age.
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Tony Bennett’s enthusiasm for life and music was persuasive, even when it seems outsized.
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Black and openly queer women are not allowed in the Nashville club. Secretly gay white men are not doing too badly, though.
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How could such a multitalented guy go so wrong with such a clever concept? It wasn’t easy.
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An unreliable narrator is a tough row to hoe for a fiction writer, but a narrator who doesn’t quite know what to think — that’s even harder ground to plow.
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This is a whimsical, well-written novel about an artistically respected Jewish family who managed to escape Nazi-annexed Austria at a perilously late date — September, 1939.
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Music Commentary: Nanci Griffith vs. the “New Yorker”
It was the sniping tone that made the article perplexing. I would almost call it perverse. Why treat so cavalierly — even shabbily — a deceased, highly esteemed, Grammy-winning artist?
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