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.

Acknowledgments  xiii Introduction  1 I. Collectibles The Informer: John Leonard's When the Kissing Had to Stop  11 Advertisements for Everybody Else: Jonathan Lethem's The Ecstasy of Influence  14 Democratic Vistas: Dave Hickey's Air Guitar  17 II. From Blackface Minstrelsy to Track-and-Hook In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter  23 The Old Ethiopians at Home: Ken Emerson's Doo-Dah!  40 Before the Blues: David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve  43 Rhythms of the Universe: Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music  46 Black Melting Pot: David B. Coplan's In Township Tonight!  49 Bwana-Acolyte in the Favor Bank: Banning Eyre's In Griot Time  56 In the Crucible of the Party: Charles and Angelilki Keil's Bright Balkan Morning  59 Defining the Folk: Benjamin Filene's Romancing the Folk  64 Folking Around: David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street  67 Punk Lives: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me  70 Biography of a Corporation: Nelson George's Where Did Our Love Go?  72 Hip-Hop Faces the World: Steven Hager's Hip Hop; David Toop's The Rap Attack; and Nelson George, Sally Banes, Susan Flinker, and Patty Romanowski's Fresh  75 Making Out Like Gangsters: Preston Lauterbach's The Chitlin' Circuit, Dan Charnas's The Big Payback, Ice-T's Ice, and Tommy James's Me, the Mob, and Music  80 Money Isn't Everything: Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill  86 Mapping the Earworm's Genome: John Seabrook's The Song Machine  89 III. Critical Practice Beyond the Symphonic Quest: Susan McClary's Feminine Endings  97 All the Tune Family: Peter van der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style  100 Bel Cantos: Henry Pleasant's The Great American Popular Singers  102 The Country and the City: Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City  109 Reflections of an Aging Rock Critic: Jon Landau's It's Too Late to Stop Now  115 Pioneer Days: Kevin Avery's Everything Is an Afterthought and Nona Willis Aronowitz's (ed.) Out of the Vinyl Deeps  117 Impolite Discourse: Jim Derogatis's Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer's A Whore Jus Like the Rest, and Nick Tosches's The Nick Torches Reader  123 Journalism and/or Criticism and/or Musicology and/or Sociology (and/or Writing): Simon Firth  129 Serious Music: Robert Walser's Running With the Devil  137 Fifteen Minutes of . . . : William York's Who's Who in Rock Music  139 The Fanzine Worldview, Alphabetized: Ira A. Robbins's (ed.) Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records  140 Awesome: Simon Reynolds's Blissed Out  143 Ingenuousness Lost: James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin  147 Rock Criticism Lives: Jessica Hopper's The Fist Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic  151 Emo Meets Trayvon Martin: Hanif Abdurraquib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us  156 IV. Lives in Music Inside and Out Great Book of Fire: Nick Tosches's Hellfire and Robert Palmer's Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks!  163 That Bad Man, Tough Old Huddie Ledbetter: Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's The Life and Legend of Leadbelly  169 The Impenetrable Heroism of Sam Cooke: Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie  171 Bobby and Dave: Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One and Dave Van Ronk's The Mayor of MacDougal Street  178 Tell All: Ed Sanders's Fug You and Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water  180 King of the Thrillseekers: Richard Hell's I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp  185 Lives Saved, Lives Lost: Carrie Brownstein's Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Patti Smith's M Train  189 The Cynic and the Bloke: Rod Stewart's Rod: The Autobiography and Donald Fagen's Eminent Hipsters  194 His Own Shaman: RJ Smith's The One  199 Spotlight on the Queen: David Ritz's Respect  201 The Realist Thing You've Ever Seen: Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run  205 V. Fictions Writing for the People: George Orwell's 1984  213 A Classic Illustrated: R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis  217 The Hippie Grows Older: Richard Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout  222 Comic Gurdjieffianism You Can Masturbate To: Marco Vassis' Mind Blower  224 Porn Yesterday: Walter Kendrick's The Secret Museum  225 What Pretentious White Men Are Good For: Robert Coover's Gerald's Party  230 Impoverished How, Exactly? Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked into Doors  236 Sustainable Romance: Norman Rush's Mortals  237 Derrnig-Do Scrapping By: Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue  240 Futures by the Dozen: Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire  245 YA Poet of the Massa Woods: Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star  248 A Darker Shade of Noir: The Indefatigable Walter Mosley  252 VI. Bohemia Meets Hegemony Épatant le Bourgeoisie: Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris and T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life  263 The Village People: Christine Stansell's American Moderns  278 A Slender Hope for Salvation: Charles Reich's The Greening of America  280 The Lumpenhippie Guru: Ed Sanders's The Family  285 Strait Are the Gates: Morris Dickstein's Gates of Eden  289 The Little Counterculture That Could: Carol Brightman's Sweet Chaos  293 The Pop-Boho Connection, Narrativized: Bernard F. Gendron's Between Montmarte and the Mudd Club  297 Cursed and Sainted Seekers of the Sexual Century: John Heidenry's What Wild Ecstasy  301 Bohemias Lost and Found: Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams, Richard Kostelanetz's SoHo, and Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia  304 Autobiography of a Pain in the Neck: Meredith Maran's What It's Like to Live Now  309 VII. Culture Meets Capital Twentieth Century Limited: Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air  315 Dialectical Cricket: C. L. R. James's Beyond a Boundary  320 Radical Pluralist: Andrew Ross's No Respect  323 Inside the Prosex Wars: Nadine Strossen's Defending Pornography, Joanna Frueh's Eroctic Faculties, and Lara Kipnis's Bound and Gagged  327 Growing Up Kept Down: William Finnegan's Cold New World  331 Jesus Plus the Capitalist Order: Jeff Sharlet's The Family  334 Dark Night of the Quants: Ten Books About the Financial Crisis  338 They Bet Your Life: Four Books About Hedge Funds  345 Living in a Material World: Raymond Williams's Long Revolution  350 With a God on His Side: Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God, Culture, and Materialism  369 My Friend Marshall: Marshall Berman's Modernism in the Streets  374 Index  381