Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis
★★★★☆ After graduating from Syracuse University in 1964, a young Lou Reed took a songwriting job for a label that mass-produced pop tunes and released them under fictitious band names. As a sort of...
Category: Biography & Memoir
On Power by Gene Simmons
★★☆☆☆ KISS co-founder Gene Simmons really likes power. So much so that his new book’s title contains this word three times. On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can...
Down Below by Leonora Carrington
★★★★☆ In 1940, surrealist artist Leonora Carrington suffered a psychotic breakdown. She was in her early twenties, and her partner, celebrated master of Surrealism Max Ernst, was just taken from her at rifle-point and...
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Leonardo da Vinci may be the best biography of the year. It has certainly received the most hype, and in this instance it rises to the level of approbation...
Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke
★★☆☆☆ Kristen Radtke’s aimless comics memoir Imagine Wanting Only This is about little more than a writer in search of a story. Kristen clumsily wanders through a series of inspired diversions with hope that,...
Morgue: A Life in Death by Dr. Vincent Di Maio and Ron Franscell
★★★★☆ Morgue: A Life in Death is an enlightening read; do not be put off by the title. Although there are graphic descriptions of wounds and modes of death, this is not a blood...
Arthur and Sherlock by Michael Sims
★★★★☆ Why should there be yet another book written about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes? There have been so many explorations of their real and imagined (and intertwined) lives that it seems...
Home and Away by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund
★★★★☆ Karl Ove Knausgaard and Fredrik Ekelund’s Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game is a mesmerizing correspondence about the World Cup in 2014 that quickly grows into a text about so much more...
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin
★★★★☆ Why do we write? Why do so many school kids say they are going to be writers? What causes the disconnect between that desire and its actual execution? We write to learn, to...
