Heartfelt and often amusing, these essays will have you reaching into your record collection to listen with fresh ears.
Selected essays from an acclaimed music critic.
Marsh (b. 1950) was a founding editor of Creem, where he was mentored by his colleague Lester Bangs, and he has been an editor and writer for the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and other publications. He has also published numerous books on bands and musicians, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, the Who, Michael Jackson, and Sly and the Family Stone, and he is a committee member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame known for his unapologetically candid opinions on rock. Most importantly, though, he’s someone who truly loves music, regardless of genre or style. This volume brings together his best essays from 1984 to 2017, ranging from the personal to the political and everything in between. A self-proclaimed “musical omnivore,” he tackles artists as varied as Nina Simone, Green Day, and Madonna—who, he writes with characteristic humor, “has entered the rarified ranks of those pop stars who function as lightning rods for assholes.” The author also explores lesser-known musicians such as gospel singer Dorothy Love Coates (“In her music, the African American tradition of the social gospel comes to full, fierce life”) and the Chinese rock artist Cui Jian (“Chinese, with its guttural intonations and short words, is perfectly suited to rock and roll”). Throughout, Marsh’s deep passion for the music and the artists he writes about provides a bassline of energy and excitement. The author breathes new insight into well-known artists and provides avenues of discovery for new music while maintaining humor and heart. Many of the best essays are not about artists but the industry itself, including critiques of record companies that remain relevant today and astute analyses of music’s relationship to politics. Springsteen, for one, offers Marsh an avenue to examine Ronald Reagan, and Kurt Cobain leads to a larger discussion of the punk revolution.
Heartfelt and often amusing, these essays will have you reaching into your record collection to listen with fresh ears.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781982197162
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
IN THE NEWS
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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