AltWeeklies Wire
Nancy Had Two Mommiesnew
Nancy Drew has lasted 75 years as a childhood favorite. Melanie Rehak chronicles a character who influenced at least two generations of women in an exhaustive literary biography designed to give the perky teen her due.
Boston Phoenix |
Clea Simon |
12-20-2005 |
Nonfiction
Gangsta to Gangsternew
Two books about hip-hop expose and explain the scenes in New Orleans and New York.
Boston Phoenix |
James Parker |
12-20-2005 |
Nonfiction
Car Talknew
Like many another Jewish writer before him, Rafi Zabor sees family as an epic subject. But a more apt comparison than Saul Bellow is jazz. Zabor writes and riffs -- each tonal shift leading to another alliterative romp.
Boston Phoenix |
John Freeman |
12-13-2005 |
Nonfiction
Tags: I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir, Rafi Zabor
Queer Scarenew
In 1920, Harvard president, A. Lawrence Lowell, put into action an inquisitorial secret court to ferret out, expel, castigate, and humiliate homosexual students.
Boston Phoenix |
Michael Bronski |
12-05-2005 |
Nonfiction
Eclectic Masternew
A profoundly gratifying new two-volume Library of America collection of James Agee's works makes it clear that his broad range of literary output is unified by the beauty of his prose.
Boston Phoenix |
Steve Vineberg |
11-22-2005 |
Nonfiction
A Master's Lifenew
From afar, he and his art were worshipped; closer in, both looked less comfortable; seen intimately, the paintings worried observers. The second volume of Hilary Spurling's Matisse biography covers the difficult man's life from 1909-1954.
Boston Phoenix |
Michael Freedberg |
11-08-2005 |
Nonfiction
Alan Lomax Uncovered: Challenging the Delta Historiannew
Alan Lomax has long been a controversial figure among roots-music insiders. Lost Delta Found inflames that controversy with the publication of work by other researchers that Lomax used without proper attribution.
Boston Phoenix |
Ted Drozdowski |
10-27-2005 |
Nonfiction
The Gold Standardnew
Peter Guralnick's life of Sam Cooke shines.
Boston Phoenix |
David Kirby |
10-14-2005 |
Nonfiction
Dark Starnew
Through meticulous research Charles R. Cross, who also wrote the Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven, has blown away the hearsay lazily sustained by earlier Jimi Hendrix books.
Boston Phoenix |
Ted Drozdowski |
10-11-2005 |
Nonfiction
Poetic Licensenew
The authors of The 9/11 Commission Report may have unwittingly created America's first epic.
Boston Phoenix |
Daniel Aaron, Leslie Dunton-Downer and Harvey A. Silverglate |
09-09-2005 |
Nonfiction
Talking the Talknew
Anthony DeCurtis has had A-list access for decades as an editor at Rolling Stone, but this book gets as much juice from his gently thoughtful manner of questioning as from his connections with celebrity.
Boston Phoenix |
Ted Drozdowski |
08-04-2005 |
Nonfiction
A Brick of Crumb: A Handbook Collects the Cartoonistnew
The R. Crumb Handbook is a peculiar hybrid: part sampler of Crumb’s work, part autobiography, part festschrift, part documentation of his favorite things, part collection of photographs of the artist looking like one of his own caricatures.
Boston Phoenix |
Douglas Wolk |
07-22-2005 |
Nonfiction
Passionate Aristocrat: Robert Lowell's Unvarnished Shop Talknew
This is unrevised Lowell, spiky, provocative, with signature strings of adjectives that must have delighted his correspondents.
Boston Phoenix |
William Corbett |
07-08-2005 |
Nonfiction
How Sweet It Wasnew
Philadelphia music took the country by storm during the disco era. A House on Fire describes these singers' success without telling enough about their sound.
Boston Phoenix |
Michael Freedberg |
06-10-2005 |
Nonfiction
From the Bronx to South Central: Jeff Chang’s Epic History of Hip-Hopnew
Critic and activist Jeff Chang’s ambitious and thorough Can’t Stop Won’t Stop might be the best book ever written on hip-hop, precisely because he treats it and its attendant generation as the coda rather the song.
Boston Phoenix |
Hua Hsu |
06-09-2005 |
Nonfiction
