Tag Archives: books

Michiko Kakutani reviews Leon E. Wynter’s American Skin: Anyone who’s been watching television the last couple of years will be familiar with what Leon E. Wynter calls “the browning of mainstream commercial culture” in America. It’s not just the high profile of black superstars like Michael Jordan and Oprah, and …

Daniel Clowes’ Twentieth Century Eightball (Fantagraphics Books) is an entertainingly slapdash collection of rant comics and surreal misanthropy from the title that also yielded Ghost World and Daniel Boring. It’s probably safe to say that if Clowes had produced nothing but strips like the selection in this book, he’d still …

There is an evocative review of the new Carter family bio in the NY Times: Today’s popular musicians, morbidly alive to the anxiety of influence, labor to manufacture strangeness. (Except in Nashville, where they labor to manufacture normality.) But the Carters’ strangeness was just them being them. Like Dock Boggs …

From PW Daily For Booksellers: On the Eve of September 11, Bookstores Plan Commemorations With the anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaching rapidly, Hillel Italie of the Associated Press spoke to a handful of bookstores about their plans for commemorating the event. Borders, which had a store in the …

I took my son to his bass guitar lesson a couple of months ago. I was sitting there looking at the NY Times Sunday Book Review section, and I turned to page 12 for part 2 of the review of the new Primo Levi biography. My eye drifted over to …

Sons of legends never have it easy. Life is difficult enough without the burden of comparisons impossible to meet. Most either run screaming in another direction or coast in the slipstream of parental greatness. Perhaps most difficult of all is the attempt to achieve independence within the same field. Such …

Reviews of the new Dead bio and an assessment of the band's career.

If you don’t agree with the premise embedded in its somewhat whimsical title, than Mark Evanier’s Comic Books And Other Necessities of Life (TwoMorrows Publishing) probably won’t have much to say to you. A collection of pieces from a weekly column entitled “POV” that Evanier wrote for the Comics Buyers …

Though its title and cover (cartoon image of the lower half of a hot pants clad babe) give the impression it’s another of those pb sneer-a-thons, Mark A. Long’s Bad Fads (ECW Press) is actually a more benign creation. A print edition of the Museum of Bad Fads site that …