I fell in love with Patti in 1978. As a radio DJ and station music director, I broadcast "Because the Night" and "Space Monkey." I put her album "Easter" on the WARC FM playlist. I dropped the needle and danced about our dilapidated second floor summer apartment. Ah, spiritual NY punk, a reason for hope.
Smith promised artist Robert Mapplethorpe on his deathbed that she would write a memoir about them. At once honest, gritty, and spiritual—like both her and Robert's art—Just Kids is a must read if you have faith that your soul has no bounds.
“Reading rocker Smith’s account of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, it’s hard not to believe in fate. How else to explain the chance encounter that threw them together, allowing both to blossom? Quirky and spellbinding.” -- People
It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation.
Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer, and Robert Mapplethorpe would direct his highly provocative style toward photography. Bound in innocence…
Not surprisingly, Bob Dylan isn't interested in expectations. Instead, readers go into his mind and off-road as he riffs on 50 songs. Each song gets a retell of his own, which is a bit of a roller coaster ride of voice, almost like he's a medium and the song speaks to us from the dead. Sometimes he adds musical history that most readers will find interesting and surprising. Whether you find it delightful or annoying, sometimes both at the same time, if you stick with it, this book will change your brain.
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains…
Katie Fallon does a very cool thing here. First, she loves her some vultures. Second, she open your eyes to a whole lot of natural history you don't know. And third, this is no field guide and certainly no scientific paper. Instead, she structures her book within the spring, summer, autumn, winter of a single year and then weaves in historical notes (the ancient Egyptians, who like Katie, loved them some vultures), biological realities (vultures throw up to cool off), and personal anecdotes (a trip to the Hinckley, Ohio Buzzard Festival where they love them some vultures, too!)
Come on, get past the yuk, this is one of God's creations! Jesus was accused of being a glutton and hung out with the unclean, so get down and dirty with vultures and maybe you too can be redeemed!
Turkey vultures, the most widely distributed and abundant scavenging birds of prey on the planet, are found from central Canada to the southern tip of Argentina, and nearly everywhere in between. In the United States we sometimes call them buzzards; in parts of Mexico the name is aura cabecirroja, in Uruguay jote cabeza colorada, and in Ecuador gallinazo aura. A huge bird, the turkey vulture is a familiar sight from culture to culture, in both hemispheres. But despite being ubiquitous and recognizable, the turkey vulture has never had a book of literary nonfiction devoted to it-until Vulture.
A retired English teacher has come home to Appalachia, a land of industrial disaster and natural beauty. He has been enticed with stories of Wildcat’s transformation: of the collective action embodied in Hotel Wildcat as well as the artisanal pursuits springing to life in the old iron mill. But in returning, he must confront his dark memories: the lost love of his hippie chic girlfriend not to mention the lost trust between his middle-class family and working-class Wildcat.
Written in the lyrical grit so characteristic of America’s Rust Belt, Wildcat: An Appalachian Romance is a testament to the redemptive potential of rediscovered friendship, the restorative power of nature, and our personal and communal capacity for transformation.
