Books
This is a handsome, smallish (7 1/2” by 9 1/2”) hardcover coffee table book, brimming with photos, and structured into brief, bite-sized chapters. Part of the fun is that it’s a volume you can pick up, put down, pick up again, and never worry about losing the mood or flavor.
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The book’s most damaging and embarrassing charge against Charles Dickens: he was a reckless syphilitic who infected his wife and children.
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“Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras” celebrates Blaxploitation as a positive as well as a necessary turning point in American cinema.
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This is a story about jazz that we only think we know: the book challenges our preconceptions with admirable restraint, and generously invites others to build on its work.
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“Master Lovers” is written in a lucid, personable style, and the fictional scenes — David Winner’s recreations of history and imagined trysts — are deft, believable, and vividly imagined.
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In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac voiced a longing to be “other.” He achieves this transfiguration in “Pic.”
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Newspapers are still our most reliable source of local journalism. Private equity, though, is squeezing the life out of newsrooms as greedy owners cash in.
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Author Mark Cantor has been the go-to guy for jazz film for decades: this authoritative book solidifies his position.
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The holidays and their aftermath are not always a time of cheer for families. Two recent children’s books provide empathy and understanding.
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Book Review: “The Geography of the Imagination” — Longing for Something Lost
Touted as “perhaps the last great American polymath,” Guy Davenport had a singular mind; never was an artist more deserving of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”
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