Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009)

From 1976 until 2002 Joseph Frank published the five (large) volumes of his biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As he explains in the preface to this (large) single-volume abridged version, he looked to Leon Edel’s similarly massive biography of Henry James (four large volumes), which was whittled down to a single book (large, of course). Frank thought that was a pretty good idea and brought in editor Mary Petrusewicz for the condensing work. It would take them seven more years, but I found the single volume particularly useful and worthwhile, given I had only limited interest in plowing through the original five. It connects a lot of dots that might be missed simply reading through Dostoevsky’s beyond-impressive work as a whole. Perhaps most crucially it covers the 10 years from 1849 to 1859, when Dostoevsky was charged and convicted of treasonous activity, imprisoned, forced to endure a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. He was imprisoned there for four years, after which it took him another six years to make it back to Russia, Petersburg, and Moscow. Understanding what happened in that period is almost staggering to contemplate—he lost 10 years of writing in his late 20s and 30s, the best years for many writers. It is crucial to understanding his work, both before and especially after, when he produced most of his masterpieces. Frank also provides excellent literary context and analysis for all Dostoevsky’s work. My takes were not always the same as his, but he’s the expert here, not me, and his analyses were always illuminating. Even this abridged version is still quite a honker—nearly 1,000 pages in print and closer to 1,500 in the kindle pagination (however that is calculated). But this biography was essential as I made my way through Dostoevsky’s work, lucid and informative. Even with its imposing length I would recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the great Russian novelist. Dostoevsky wrote great tales, but in many ways his life story rivals them.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Trouble Boys (2016)

The book we always thought had to be written about the Replacements has finally been written, and I have finally read it. Bob Mehr’s sensitive and meticulously researched biography might be one of the great rock biographies. It’s hard for me to judge. I was close to the action, a Twin Cities music journalist from 1982 to 1985. As someone scarred by alcoholism, my instinct was to keep my distance from such shenanigans. It wasn’t a big hilarious joke to me. But I saw my share of terrible shows and great shows and I heard a lot of the stories. Not all of them—there were some new ones for me in this book. I followed along with the albums, which got exponentially better from Stink through Let It Be and stayed pretty good even after that. All Shook Down is where it flattened out for me and never recovered. I was aware of the first Paul Westerberg solo album and of Tommy Stinson’s foray with his own band, Bash & Pop. I even knew Chris Mars’s solo album, on the brink of his painting career. I appreciated their potential to become a legendary great rock ‘n’ roll act—I appreciated that they were, to some extent, certainly on some nights. But Westerberg is the first to say they never scored a hit, a reasonable metric for any wannabe legendary rock ‘n’ roll act. In the end their underachieving and self-sabotage was a disappointment. I was disappointed—but check out their reactions here. There’s enough heartbreak to go around. I had to wince at some of their antics—setting per diem cash on fire, as one example. Drinking, drugging, defiantly playing their worst shows when it was important to be better, as when they knew the music industry was in the building. They often followed their terrible shows with great ones, coincidentally when they knew they didn’t need to make an impression on anyone. The greatest knock on them may have been their talent as consummate contrarians. The story of the Replacements is fun and exciting, full of laughs and great music, but it’s also sad, as illustrated by the fortunes of Bob Stinson (the soul of the band) and, later, his replacement Slim Dunlap. Tommy went on to become a real-life rock star, playing for years with Guns ‘N Roses. Even if he never had a hit, Westerberg wrote a handful or more of the best songs of the era, all of which should have been hits, as they say. It pained me to read how many of his song demos Westerberg has destroyed in fits of pique and self-doubt. But, well, it’s also the epitome of the Replacements too. All the glory and all the troubles are in this great biography.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Here Comes the Night (2014)

I picked up this biography of songwriter and record producer Bert Berns by Joel Selvin for a couple reasons. I know Selvin’s first book, a biography of Rick Nelson, which is pretty good. And then I was curious to know more about Berns and Van Morrison, whose T.B. Sheets album was produced by Berns, rumored as under unusual and extreme circumstances. The subtitle to this bio, The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, suggested all the juicy details would be here about Morrison being stranded in Boston with no money to get home, virtually held against his will and forced to record the original version of T.B. Sheets, called Blowin’ Your Mind! That story, if there is any truth at all in it, is not here. Instead it sounds more like Morrison was merely unhappy and surly. Take as you will. The album remains great and powerful, in either version, both of which include the amazing 10-minute “T.B. Sheets.” The Berns story and all its accomplishments are here, as songwriter and producer. Born in 1929 with a heart condition he was told would kill him by 21, Berns served a long apprenticeship in the proto-Brill Building milieu under such leading lights as Doc Pomus, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Jerry Wexler, and Ahmet Ertegun. His biggest hits are very big: “Twist and Shout,” “Cry to Me,” “Hang On Sloopy,” “Here Comes the Night,” and “Piece of My Heart,” among others. His production credits include Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk.” He owns a share of the ‘60s even though his heart problems finally caught up with him late in 1967, before he was 40. I have been working on building a playlist out of the massive, detailed discography Selvin includes here as an appendix (see here). I love the pop music across all of his proximate era—1959 to 1967—and even a lot of his obscurities (often blatant variations on his biggest hits) are a pure pleasure for me. Selvin’s book largely contains the stories of Atlantic Records, Leiber & Stoller, and the Brill Building ferment. It features lots of bad actors, as the subtitle suggests, including Berns himself in many cases, stealing from artists by taking publishing rights and/or just not paying royalties. Berns is interesting but his music is even more so. The discography may well be the single most valuable point about this book—very valuable indeed. Everything else is perfectly competent.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life (2009)

Carol Sklenicka's biography of poet and short story writer Raymond Carver is very good, packed with research and interviews and inevitably nearly as heartbreaking as some of Carver's stories. It was good to get to the bottom, more or less, of Carver's relationship with Gordon Lish, which is surprising in many ways. It's fair to say Lish is almost wholly responsible for the "minimalist" tag Carver was stuck with by Lish's alarmingly aggressive editing of the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection. Carver was generous and deft in circumventing the subsequent problems, but I believe he is still taken as a literary minimalist by many. In typical fashion, he was happy to accept the glory and evolve his writing from there in the limited time he had left. Inevitably, also, as biographies will, Sklenicka reveals the clay portions of Carver's feet. Some of this is painful to learn, such as the way he treated his family and first wife. He always meant well, at least you can say that about him. By the time he and his first wife were deep into their alcoholism there were incidents of domestic violence. Those things are less fun to learn. Still, Carver produced some great work in his 50 years on the planet. Calling him the American Chekhov is a reasonable proposition, although we should also remember Chekhov was a doctor, died six years younger than Carver, and produced about five times as much work. I don't know Carver's poetry very well (or anyone's), but I see his stories putting him in the company of Sherwood Anderson, early Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever, which is no shabby lineage. I look forward to reading all his stories and reading them again. At the same time, there's a slightly sour taste from some aspects of his life, particularly the way his first wife was treated in the aftermath of his death. Sklenicka appears to have no dog in any of these fights in Carver's life, but I did come away with somewhat dimmed views of both Lish and Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. "Money changes everything" as a rock band from Atlanta called the Brains once noted—an eternal truth and no less so here. But Carver was a great writer and always will be. This biography does a solid job of telling the story.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Divine Invasions (1989)

I probably should have gotten to Lawrence Sutin's biography of Philip K. Dick sooner, if only to help direct my little reading program. This biography appears to be well-researched and certainly has a good deal of sympathy and understanding for Dick's work. Dick is one of those artists like William Faulkner who was both so prolific and so consistent that no one really agrees on his single best, though a handful of titles show up regularly: The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, you-pick, etc. I have been flailing around looking into any Dick titles I see endorsed by anyone, which led me to more arguably minor work, such as Dr. Bloodmoney or The Zap Gun or some of the stories. At the same time, I missed no fewer than four of the 11 titles Sutin says are essential, including VALIS (which I must admit I've foundered on a few times). I'll be trying to get to them eventually. As a biography, Divine Invasions performs the usual service of pinning down data points and clarifying the life and the work. Things I did not know: Dick hated his mother, was married four times, and never took hallucinogens much. In his relationships with women, in fact, he comes across as a creep—a contemptible one even. So it goes. Most biographies reveal feet of clay one way or another. On the other hand, it sounds like Dick was even more of a high-IQ genius than I thought, reading widely in modern and ancient texts, including in Latin and German. I was a little dismayed to find out how religious he was, even more or less conventionally Christian, though it wasn't entirely surprising, except maybe the Christianity. I was less interested in his psychology and ideas anyway, and more in his work strategies. There's plenty of everything in Sutin's biography, and I was particularly happy to extend my reading list as I came to implicitly trust Sutin. Then I went to the wilds of the internet to assay the opinion wilderness. It is particularly rich and confusing when it comes to Dick and not much less so on which of the half-dozen or so biographies are best. Dick had a way of reaching lots of people in lots of different ways. Sutin's book is invaluable at taking a crack at organizing it all and is generally acknowledged as the most encompassing, objective, and accurate. In a way, I'm still trying to figure out what appeals to me about Dick in the first place. I used to think it was the hallucinogenic weirdness and certainly that's part of it. But read enough Dick and that side starts to feel more mechanical, even rote. I found myself landing on The Man in the High Castle as my idea of the best—though it's marred slightly by too-busy weird elements, it's less so than many of his most lauded. The one thing I think everyone agrees on, including Sutin, is that no one has yet got to the bottom of Dick, and no one may ever. He is a moving target forever.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013)

There were already at least four biographies of Norman Mailer when J. Michael Lennon's brick was published in 2013. I'm not sure why it's the one I grabbed but generally by the reviews I seem to have made the right choice. It is detailed and exhaustive, covering every step of Mailer's professional development, from The Naked and the Dead in 1948 to The Castle in the Forest in 2007. Lennon was a friend and colleague of Mailer and his huge family, which probably makes him the "authorized" biographer. He is more kind, or politic, than I would be on some of Mailer's work (notably The Prisoner of Sex and maybe Ancient Evenings). But he also attempts to imbibe the Mailer spirit and let the chips fall where they may on some of the ugliest chapters, such as Mailer stabbing his second wife (a crime that would have sent many to prison) or his judgment vouching for the parole of Jack Abbott. Mostly I appreciated getting the stories more or less straight. I feel confident I could pass a test now on who each of his six wives were, though I'm probably still muddled on which of the nine kids belongs to whom. I'm envious of his support too—his greatest fan, from inside the womb, was his doting mother. It's such an improbable life in many ways. He studied engineering in college but already wanted to be a great American novelist. He tried to get out of being drafted but decided war experience would be good for his literary career—and it was. Mailer and James Jones are generally credited with writing the "great" American novels about World War II—conventional in many ways, but big and sprawling and ambitious. Jones never tinkered much with his impulses to churn out massive pulpy narratives, but Mailer went around the bend a few different ways, eventually arriving, 30 years later, with The Executioner's Song, back at writing very big books—but now with virtually all the pulp extruded. Jones never came close to the place. Lennon's title means all kinds of things—the double portion of vitality Mailer seemed to have, his lifetime of philandering (well detailed here, speaking of delicious pulp—he had sex with Gloria Steinem!), and his theology / cosmology in which he believes every person bears two conflicting persons at war in a single body. Beyond that an intriguing vision that God is not omnipotent and is engaged in a deadly war with Satan. Mailer's case for faith is thus that God needs all the help he can get. On the other hand it does make some intuitive sense and explains a lot about what we can see in the world and church. I think one of Lennon's ambitions is to restore that side of Mailer's work to credibility. It was often ignored, or laughed at and treated as a joke. Lennon's biography is so thorough and answers so many questions about Mailer, he's entitled to advocate for what he likes. If you have any interest in Mailer it's also fun to read.

In case it's not at the library.

Henry James: A Life (1953-1985)

Does it say something about the tendency of Henry James toward prolixity that even the condensed version of his biography comes in over 700 pages? It might have more to do with making his three score and ten in a productive career, but that's still a big book, cut down from Leon Edel's original five volumes published between 1953 and 1972. It's enjoyable for anyone with more than passing interest in James and who can stomach people routinely calling him "The Master." Yes and yes for me, though just barely on the latter point. I learned a lot of interesting things. He knew Flaubert and Zola as a young man. He became close friends with Ivan Turgenev. His flirtation with theater was a humiliating disaster. Beginning midway through composing What Maisie Knew in the mid-1890s, he dictated to typists and revised from there. In fact, his personal life in the 1890s—acquiring a typewriter and having electricity installed in his flat—vividly place him in the far past. I should know, because typewriters did not become available until 1874, but it still blows my mind that James and all the others submitted manuscripts in longhand. No wonder he developed some kind of repetitive strain injury, which prompted the move to dictation. Maybe that's all beside the point. Edel is an assiduous biographer, meticulously chasing down points of detail via letters, diary entries, and any way he can find evidence. By his view, James was celibate all his life, and there's a strong sense he was probably gay in an era that would not countenance that. James saw what happened to a much younger man, Oscar Wilde (whose work he didn't think much of anyway, though I still suspect Dorian Gray had something to do with James's The Sacred Fount, doubtless unconsciously). Edel's insights can be striking and illuminating, notably in that 1890s period, when James's greatest personal failure was followed by some of his greatest work, through which Edel traces an ingenious restorative process. Edel lauds the last three novels above all others, as do most students of James, but his personal favorites appear to be the short novel The Aspern Papers and the long story "The Beast in the Jungle"—excellent choices. Along the way, James has interesting friendships with Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the public at large, which has always been a little dubious about James, the wise course. For the rest of us, this is a great one-stop account of his life.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 714 pages

In case it's not at the library.

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man (1995)

When you think about it, it's not surprising that, if Norman Mailer were going to write a book about art, it would be about Picasso. He always preferred his giants to be 20th-century egomaniacs—perhaps something about the reflection in the mirror. To some degree I'm on board with that myself, at least a little. There was a lot I didn't know about Picasso, so among other things I have to count Mailer's "interpretive biography" as informative. "Interpretive biography" means very little original research (even Marilyn had some), but rather a survey of select existing literature, major biographies and some criticism, along with his own take on Picasso and his work. Mailer's main idea here is that all of Picasso's innovations were done by the time he was 35, in 1916, effectively discounting one of the most prolific careers in art history. Mailer sees an incident involving the Louvre and stolen pieces of art (including da Vinci's Mona Lisa) as the point where something in Picasso broke. It's a tumultuous time in his life—a breakup of a long-term relationship, the death by cancer a few years later of his next girlfriend, and the coming of World War I are all equal contributors, along with plain old aging. I'm not even sure there was such a drop-off. A few samples of Picasso's art after 1916 in this book are pretty impressive. In fact, all the pictures, including color plates, are among the best reasons to dawdle along with Mailer through the Picasso story. I hadn't known what a prodigy Picasso was as a child. I didn't know how the Blue Period, Rose Period, and Cubism fit, exactly. I suspect someone with more background might get more out of this, but I'm not sure how much they'd like it—that's the pugnacious Mailer problem. Mailer notes early that Picasso was a project he'd been giving thought to since 1962, when he was close to a book deal. He has an interesting eye and his discussions of the art are often lucid. It didn't entirely surprise me, given his versatility as a writer, but I hadn't expected him to be so good in the realm of art, a pleasant surprise. He is dismissive of Gertrude Stein but I enjoyed the discussion of her, and again, this was my first exposure to so many details and so much context about Picasso's life, work, and art. Weirdly, perhaps, Picasso in this telling reminded me a lot of Andy Warhol—maybe it's the combination of celebrity and work ethic. Picasso's art speaks for itself, and if I have any complaint here it's that there's not more art. Mailer generally stays out of his own way.

In case it's not at the library.

Marilyn: A Biography (1973)

Norman Mailer's meditation on the life of Marilyn Monroe turned out to be one of his most successful books commercially, second only to The Naked and the Dead. That was partly because of its subject—it started life as, and was mainly, a collection of photographs of Monroe—and partly because of Mailer's fanciful suggestion that government agents had something to do with her death. Mailer's text is mostly a kind of book report on three previous biographies, though he also conducted some original research with a dozen or more interviews. The first section is titled "A Novel Biographer," but thankfully he does not borrow any more from The Armies of the Night, with its talk of the Novelist and the Historian. For me, Marilyn is a useful enough primer on the arc of Monroe's career and life. I've never read a biography of her, though most of the basic points were familiar. I know I read portions of this when excerpts were published in Rolling Stone in the '70s. I've been mostly bemused by Monroe and have no particular stake in her reputation. Particularly her turn in Some Like It Hot, where she is often zombie-like, has had some fascination / repulsion for me. More recently, I'm willing to give her her due for much better performances elsewhere  (Bus Stop, The Misfits, and a lot of her early comedy roles such as in Monkey Business). But I was still surprised to learn how highly regarded she was by Lee Strasberg and his many disciples of the Method school of acting. Knowing this, I can see it, but even in her best roles I think she's often hit and miss from scene to scene. Mailer's text is a little lacking in the kindle version without the photos, which can have a vivid impact. Probably better to look at a print version that has them. Mailer is dogged about telling her whole story, relating it anecdotally but at the same time searching for the patterns and larger meaning. So it's good on the basic points, even if they are secondhand from the other biographers. It's a useful way, perhaps, to start thinking about the themes of her life and death. It was taken as controversial in its time for all the suggestions of government malfeasance of some kind surrounding her death. They didn't strike me as particularly out of line, but rather more just as Mailer being Mailer. Pugnacious to a fault (literally) and always willing to entertain conspiracy theories, as far as he thinks he can take them. The liaisons (alleged?) with the Kennedys are woefully under-documented, the best I can tell, and so Mailer's speculations about CIA and/or FBI dirty tricks seem built on frailest reeds. At the same time, I remembered it's J. Edgar Hoover he was talking about with the FBI. I wouldn't put anything past that guy. An interesting read.

In case it's not at the library.

Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (2004)

As much for the opportunity to acquaint myself anew with the music of Elliott Smith, I really enjoyed reading Benjamin Nugent's early biography. I don't know any other Smith bios besides the recent documentary, so I know only vaguely whether or how much some of the principals in the story may have opened up by now. Insights or comment from his family are notably absent here, and many of his girlfriends and other key figures are also missing in action. But Nugent steps away from the problem by focusing on Smith's work and development as an artist. Nugent does not shy away from what he knows of the problems—drugs, obviously, and Smith's speculations that he may have been abused as a child, which together with other factors produced a personality that tended toward isolation. As usual in these things, the greatest obvious weakness is also the greatest obvious strength—all artists require a degree of isolation. Nugent again is very good at keeping the focus on the work. He talked to many of the people who worked with Smith in the studio, and there are wonderful revelations about Smith's sources and influences. Very high at the top were the Beatles, a fact that surprised me and then didn't. Even more interesting to find out how constructed his sound was—again, it seems obvious in hindsight, but something about Smith's music projects so directly that I'd never thought about how mediated it is. The very distinctness of his sound—based in many ways on a strategy of double-tracking both the vocals and guitar—should have been my first clue. There's more lyrical analysis here, which is all good though it reminded me, by how unfamiliar these snatches could be, how little Smith's lyrics have ever mattered to me. His music is almost purely a matter of mood, a hazy counterpane for the chills, psychic and otherwise. Instead of the Beatles (and then Kinks), I realized I had long assumed his '60s guide star was Simon and Garfunkel—more fool me, perhaps. But Simon and Garfunkel were equally masters of similar moods (and better than I had remembered or expected when I came to revisit them a few years ago)—equally literate, reasonably privileged, and capable of writing about life's underbellies in detailed ways. Smith's story remains a sad one, but his music is no less stirring and brave. Nugent's book is a nice version of his life.

In case it's not at the library.

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942)

Don't let anyone tell you Nebraska does not have a place in the literary history of America, producing at least two fine writers in Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz. Sandoz is the author of this excellent biography of the Lakota legend, along with a shelf on the American West, including novels and straightforward histories alike. Crazy Horse is admirably detailed and even more admirably sensitive to the legend, legacy, and enduring influence of the colossal figure, one of the most important of the 19th century and in all American history. Sandoz is a great writer, straightforward, unadorned, and evocative, and has even further bona fides in that obviously the Great Plains of North America run deeply in her blood—she bears a wistful affection for the harsh geography and the cultures it has nurtured, a flinty realistic approach to ordering the facts, and a profound respect for the Lakota (also known as Sioux). This all serves her quite well in her genuine appreciation for a figure who remains powerful and mysterious well more than a century past his death. Much like the white man's George Washington, Crazy Horse is a historical figure who is known generally by a great many far and wide—but push deeper and he only becomes strange and inscrutable. We know basic things about Crazy Horse. He is considered a great leader by all, a brave, shrewd, and cunning warrior. He never allowed his photograph to be taken. He was instrumental in defeating Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. And he was ultimately betrayed into an ignominious death in an isolated outpost. Sandoz details all this painstakingly but with lucid and penetrating style. Her work feels authoritative at every step and she has great sympathy for the tragedy of the story, which nonetheless never gets in the way of her telling it. Obviously Crazy Horse was no more successful at stemming tides of history than any other Native American to date, a continuing tragedy. But something about Crazy Horse remains uniquely vital, moving, and significant. It can't be any surprise, for example, that he has inspired one of the greatest monuments ever created, still in progress, set in the Black Hills, intended partly to eclipse Mount Rushmore itself. I haven't read other biographies of Crazy Horse, partly because Sandoz's book seems so definitive in both its meticulous research (extraordinarily thorough), and partly because the story is so sad and infuriating. It's a story you don't want to miss—really—and this is a very fine place to get it.

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Savage Art (1995)

The thing I like best about Robert Polito's biography of Jim Thompson is the light it sheds on Thompson's work. What I consider the best of that work—A Hell of a Woman, say—is not necessarily as celebrated as a few, and one in particular: The Killer Inside Me. Granted, Savage Art is a biography, and Polito's critical assessments have to be extracted. But until this I had flailed away at reading Thompson without direction, and often disappointed. Thompson's catalog runs to 30 or better titles, and there are some fairly stinkers in the mess. I know because I read two of them—The Alcoholics and The Criminals, bought for their titles obviously. I was thus happy to see Polito dismiss them quickly, which had the effect of making me more inclined to believe him generally. And he's a good writer in his own right. Thompson lived a singularly depressing life, but Polito's own hard-bitten voice keeps things moving along. Lots of interesting stuff about Thompson and his life, of course. I wasn't surprised but still fascinated to learn that Thompson was a binge writer, locking himself away for intense bursts of work. His best usually has that magical quality of first drafts that somehow came out just right (see also: Sherwood Anderson, Philip K. Dick). It's so rare and unusual it's something to appreciate itself (for all his reputation for that kind of thing, for example, I think Jack Kerouac managed it only once, with The Subterraneans). Polito has also proved his critical bona fides with the two great Library of America volumes, Crime Novels: American Noir, so one always feels in good hands, and Jim Thompson is obviously right in his wheelhouse. Thompson himself is about what you would expect him to be from reading the novels, a leathery old drunk with a marked edge of desperation. A faintly Bukowski type of character, alcoholic and impoverished for much of his life. All that anxiety in the novels had to come from somewhere, of course, and Polito neatly catalogs it from start to finish. I thought the saddest part of Thompson's life, the way Polito tells it, was that Thompson always felt strongly that his work was not recognized for what it is, Stanley Kubrick's late interest notwithstanding. Thompson always held out hope for it—how could he not? At this point, I'm not sure you can overstate his position to the second half of the 20th century, in terms of the fascination for human depravity that wears a crime fiction mask. Polito and this book steered me to most of my current favorites by Thompson. For that alone I love it.

In case it's not at the library.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1984)

Stanley Booth is an American music journalist from the South. He happened to fall into the orbit of the Rolling Stones shortly after the death of Brian Jones, and was on hand for a good deal of the band's first extensive tour in several years in 1969, including the ill-starred show at Altamont in December that year. Even the Stones formally recognize and acknowledge the legitimacy of Booth's reporting in a brief, vaguely mocking letter to him, dated October 21, 1969, which is reproduced in my 1985 paperback edition (I'm not familiar with the 2000 edition, which reportedly contains minor revisions and an afterword that discusses the writing of the first edition): "This letter assures you of the Rolling Stones' full and exclusive cooperation in putting together a book about the Stones for publication," and it's signed by Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and Mick Taylor. It's fair enough to call this book a labor of love, but the emphasis there must fall on the "labor," as it took Booth some 15 years to complete and the language feels well worked over, honed and buffed to a point where it's occasionally a labor to read as well. But I don't know of anything better anywhere on the Stones, or particularly on Altamont, and it makes an excellent companion piece and counterpoint to the Maysles brothers well-known documentary Gimme Shelter; each is a nice tonic to the excesses and deficiencies of the other, and both offer converging yet significantly differing points of view that harmonize well. Both have also earned colossal burdens of reputation, hailed as landmark works about the times—figures of no less stature than Harold Brodkey and Robert Stone, for example, call Booth's book the best single volume on the '60s. OK, fair enough. I'm inclined myself to put that on a few other volumes first (Dispatches, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Manchild in the Promised Land, or Catch-22 come to mind immediately). But I see how it works. And if I'm going to indulge hyperbole of my own here, it's for the 50-some pages that Booth devotes to the Altamont show proper, which open with a section of transcript from the discussion between Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips on the epistemology and ontology of evil, and hell, in the context of the song they are attempting to record, "Great Balls of Fire." It's an earnest and serious discussion, at least on the part of Lewis, steeped in old-time Christianity. Just so, I have never encountered anything anywhere that penetrates so deeply into the simple facts of what was happening that day at Altamont as Booth's book (and that includes Gimme Shelter, which I have always counted as impressive and important)—nor, more importantly, any more powerful, simple, and nuanced suggestions of "what it all meant." There are no easy answers here, and not much comfort. I should get that 2000 edition, if only to find out for sure what held up the writing of this for 15 years. But I have a feeling I might already know.

In case it's not at the library.

Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (2007)

It's hard to believe, this late in this game, that here we have what amounts to perhaps the first substantive, more or less "authorized," and well-received biography published of Iggy Pop, who turned 60 the year it came out (setting aside Iggy's own odd 1982 picture book, I Need More). Brit journalist Paul Trynka delivers an admirably workmanlike account, covering it all from grade school to the launch of the Stooges' reunion gigs of recent years. The organizing conceit—the psychic war between Jim Osterberg and Iggy Pop—can grow tedious from getting banged on so frequently, but that doesn't mean it doesn't explain an awful lot of the mystifying goings-on. I came to the story with a fairly good sense of the general outlines: the fizzled catapult to fame out of Michigan, the subsequent drug addiction problems and institutionalization in Los Angeles for reasons of mental health, the return to form with the aid of David Bowie, and much of the turmoil that followed. But there was still a lot I didn't know, particularly about the bleak mid-'70s LA period. Or, the best part of this book, the details of the Berlin years and of Iggy's really you have to call it heartwarming friendship with David Bowie, which Trynka finally clarifies for those, like me, who have may have watched Velvet Goldmine too many times and generally picked up (and/or believed) too many urban legends to really understand the nature of it. Or even little fun facts like that Iggy (make that "Jim") was a student council member notched Most Likely to Succeed in junior high. Well, didn't he? This is as welcome as it is long overdue.

In case it's not at the library.

Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982)

The basic word on this—as a perusal of practically any edition's blurbs will attest—is "Best Rock Bio Evah." I think the Boston Phoenix may have actually got closer to the heart of the matter: "To call Hellfire the best book written about a rock 'n' roller is to miss the point.... Hellfire is a rock 'n' roll event." I'm not here to argue with anyone about this—no one can deny that this is a remarkable book, a marriage made in ... some place fantastic ... between its subject Jerry Lee Lewis and biographer Nick Tosches. In general, not enough is understood about the religious convictions of some of the key figures in that first wave of rock 'n' roll and their beliefs in the basics of sin and redemption: thinking here specifically of Elvis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the subject at hand, who once famously (or maybe not so famously) shut down a recording of "Great Balls of Fire" to argue the metaphysics, epistemology, and orthodoxy of the song with producer Sam Phillips. "How can the Devil save souls?" Lewis cried at one point. Tosches, a painstaking fact chaser, probably doesn't have the problems associated with this conflict, but he understands it. He understands the sources of those beliefs, and most importantly, he understands the language in which they are expressed. His book will make you laugh out loud at them. It will also chill you to your core.

In case it's not at the library.