Sweet Judy Blue Eyes
by Judy Collins
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
As a folk singer, Judy Collins has always used her “gorgeous, limpid soprano with restraint,” said Elysa Gardner in USA Today. Her prose writing is another story. Collins throws discretion to the wind in Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. Her memoir is full of “hot dish” about Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, and other folk greats of her era. Despite its corny title, punningly lifted from the song written for her by ex-beau Stephen Stills, Collins’s memoir is “easy to love.”
The Doors
by Greil Marcus
(PublicAffairs, $22)
The rock critic Greil Marcus “has a gift for sweeping readers up in his passions,” said Elissa Schappell in Vanity Fair. The author of Mystery Train has done it again with this 200-plus-page riff on the music of Jim Morrison and company. Though the grave of lead singer Jim Morrison “has been dug up and turned over hundreds of times,” Marcus achieves fresh insights by tuning out the lore associated with the band. “It’s just us, the music, and Marcus,” and it’s “a pleasure.”
Love Goes to Buildings on Fire
by Will Hermes
(Faber & Faber, $30)
Most critics consider the period from 1973 to 1977 a “cultural dead zone” for music, said David Gates in The New York Times. Not in New York, argues Will Hermes. Hermes finds the city to have been a hotbed of creativity, thanks to talents as diverse as DJ Grandmaster Flash, punk rockers the Ramones, composer Philip Glass, and salsa great Willie Colón. Hermes’s writing makes the scene come alive, though “his own teenage memories take up more space than their poignancy warrants.”
Le Freak
by Nile Rodgers
(Spiegel & Grau, $27)
Musician and “super-producer” Nile Rodgers turns out to be a gifted memoirist, said Johanna Fateman in Bookforum. Though he built his career as a behind-the-scenes talent, he’s stepped up to create a “chatty and astute” book from the raw materials of an interesting life: Rodgers survived “junkie parents in the ’50s, was a Black Panther in the ’60s, made himself a disco legend with Chic in the ’70s,” and wrote “a staggering number of hit songs for other artists in a cocaine-fueled blaze” during the ’80s.
-
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
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
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.
-
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.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
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.”
-
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.”