Who Is That Man?
by David Dalton (Hyperion, $27)
For 50 years and running, Bob Dylan has been a shape-shifter, said Colin Fleming in The Washington Post. Veteran rock biographer David Dalton “has taken a more involved approach” than previous Dylan portraitists, considering each successive persona the artist has adopted and arguing that Dylan’s fabrications are his most interesting features. Dalton is also a penetrating critic. His take on Blood on the Tracks—“as gut-wrenching an album as there is in rock ’n’ roll”—is “the freshest you’ll find.”
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On Celestial Music
by Rick Moody (Back Bay, $16)
“Some of the best writing on music in recent years has come from fiction writers,” said Ted Gioia in the San Francisco Chronicle. Novelist Rick Moody is a “first-rate” music writer, and his new essay collection offers “probing assessments” of such usual-suspect alt-rock bands as Wilco and Sonic Youth. Still, he’s “at his best championing artists others deride or ignore.” The Lounge Lizards’ edgy New York jazz comes off well, as do some of the efforts of Depeche Mode and Jethro Tull.
Fear of Music
by Jonathan Lethem (Continuum, $13)
The best way to read this brief treatise on the 1979 Talking Heads album of the same name is to listen to the music simultaneously, said Jesse Jarnow in TheMillions.com. Yet Jonathan Lethem’s reverent dissection of the record enables any reader to hear it build track by track as the novelist’s observations open up “a much bigger conversation about art and life and music.” This is exactly what a monograph about a pop album should be: “not too abstract” and “a good introduction to an album’s culture.”
Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll
by Marc Dolan (Norton, $30)
The latest Springsteen bio “suffers from the fan’s obsession with completism,” said Ian Crouch in The Boston Globe. Across its 500-plus pages, “every record, bootleg, and live performance” of the Boss’s career seems to garner analysis. But obsessiveness is also the book’s strength, because Marc Dolan’s subject is the career-long dialogue between an audience and an artist who wrestles endlessly with the expectations that his music has engendered.
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”