An Exhilarating Tale of European Auto Racing on the Eve of World War II
Neal Bascomb’s account of the improbable victory of René Dreyfus over Nazi Germany’s elite racing team has speed, depth, and poetry.
The Turbulent Life of the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed
A review of The Life of Lou Reed: Notes from the Velvet Underground, by Howard Sounes.
Bridge Across the Atlantic
John F. Kennedy’s Special Relationship with Great Britain
Working Man’s Bard
At base level, Bruce Springsteen is a songwriter whose grasp of musical and lyrical economy is unusual in the often excessive world of rock ’n’ roll.
Mystery Man
Writing about Bob Dylan’s politics would seem to be a thankless task. The famously curmudgeonly songwriter claims to know and care little about the subject, and what he has said ...
The Wild Side, Magic, and Loss
Caught between the twisted stars
the plotted lines the faulty map
that brought Columbus to New York
So begins “Romeo Had Juliette,” a song from Lou Reed’s 1989 album New York. As Jim ...
Throwing Shadows
David Bowie has spent much of his career shocking people. In the early 1970s the iconoclastic British glam rocker publicly proclaimed his homosexuality and then embarked on a series of ...
Behind the Music
The inner flap of the dust jacket says it all: “Pete Townshend has some explaining to do.”
Indeed. He needs to explain, in no particular order, why he smashed hundreds of ...