NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

[CLICK TO ENLARGE] FRESH AIR While most record companies of the 1940s and 1950s made money in one genre, Cincinnati-based King Records spread the love to R & B, rockabilly, bluegrass, western swing and country. Jon Hartley Fox tells the story in his new book King of the Queen City. Combining archival research with contemporary interviews, Fox describes the company by focusing on the people who made up the culture, including executives Sydney Nathan, Henry Glover and Ralph Bass, as well as artists like Red Foxx, Johnny “Guitar” Watson and James Brown. A Dayton resident now based in California, Fox […]

John Hodgman Is NOT A PC, He Just Plays One On TV

PHAWKER: So just to be up front, your new book, More Information Than You Require, just showed up this morning, so I have barely even skimmed it. But my favorite endorsement is from Justin Long, the guy who plays the Mac dude in your Apple commercials, who says “I love this book so much I almost read it!” But seeing as how I am completely unprepared to discuss your book, we will have to do this on the honor system. Is your book any good? JOHN HODGMAN: I think my book is ‘any good’, yes. I would categorize it as […]

BOOKS: Glorious Bastard

ST. JOHN BARNED-SMITH: The compact biography deftly recreates the scenes of Barney Ross’s life, of a striver “intoxicated by the clouds of cigar smoke hovering over the men in fedoras; the fists mummified in billiard cloth and tape; the mineral jelly smeared on gashed eyebrows; the tattoo of leather on leather….” Century moves from Ross’s early years in Chicago to his place in the history of Jewish prizefighting. More interesting to me, though, was the author’s ability to convey a life defined by strife, one that seemed to embody that of a generation. From the very beginning, “Life was a […]

RAWK TAWK: Q&A With Rock Critic Jim Derogatis

  BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jim Derogatis is the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, co-host of public radio’s rock talk show Sound Opinions, the definitive Lester Bangs biographer and author of five books, including the just-published and altogether beautiful The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side. Derogatis got his start in the rock crit biz back in 1982 when Lester Bangs agreed to sit for an interview to satisfy Derogatis’ high school journalism class assignment requiring him to interview one of his heroes. Two weeks later, Bangs was dead at the ripe old age […]

BOOK REVIEW: Undiscovered Gyrl

BY SYDNEY SCOTT Pretty much everyone on the planet, it seems, has a blog. Sharing your ideas, opinions, and life stories with millions of anonymous Internet users is now commonplace. Allison Burnett blurs the lines between blogging and book-writing with her novel Undiscovered Gyrl. This book surprised me. What looks like an annoying chick lit novel is the surface turns out to be anything but: Katie Kampenfelt is a seventeen-year-old high school graduate who decides to start an online journal chronicling her life and sexual escapades. She posts stories of her first job, an affair with a married man and […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Edward M. Kennedy, who died Aug. 25, 2009 after serving 46 years in the U.S. Senate, kept careful notes and journals about his life for nearly 50 years. Now, in his posthumously published memoir True Compass, Kennedy reflects on the controversies, successes and tragedies of his famous family. The book, which was co-authored by Ron Powers, is published by Twelve Books. Jonathan Karp, editor-in-chief and publisher of Twelve, speaks with Terry Gross about his experiences working with the late senator in the final year of Kennedy’s life. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 According to the most recent Department of […]

DOOMSDAY: Libraries To Close October 1st If State Legislature Is Still Dicking Around With Budget Fix

INQUIRER: The Free Library of Philadelphia has posted notices at its branches and on its web site advising users that all libraries will close at the end of business on Oct. 2 if the state Legislature does not act on the city’s budget request. The notices also say that all material will now be due Oct. 1 and that nothing can be borrowed after Sept. 30. Besides closing libraries, the Nutter administration’s so-called Plan C doomsday budget includes eliminating court-system funding, shutting down all recreation centers and laying off up to 3,000 workers, including police and firefighters. MORE PHILLY CLOUT: […]

RIP: Basketball Diaries Author Jim Carroll Dead At 59

NEW YORK TIMES: Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60. The cause was a heart attack, said Rosemary Carroll, his former wife. As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during […]

BOOKS: Q&A With Methland Author Nick Reding

BY JEFF DEENEY The heartland as detailed by Nick Reding in his new book, Methland, is not your father’s heartland.  Stripped of any means of getting ahead by multinational agribusiness conglomerates, many residents of Smalltown, USA are using crystal meth to cope with endless low-wage packing plant shifts and the despair that comes with poverty and social decay.  Mexican drug trafficking organizations have capitalized on Big Agriculture’s need for a steady stream of illegal immigrant workers by flooding cornfields with high purity meth made in sprawling superlabs and carried across the border by the same workers who slaughter America’s pigs […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Writer and director Quentin Tarantino discusses his new film, Inglourious Basterds, which blends elements of the spaghetti western with those of World War II films. Tarantino’s other films include Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill films. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 We devote the hour to the life and work of Senator Edward Kennedy. Our guests include historians ROBERT DALLEK and JULIAN ZELLIZER. Then, Washington Post political reporter DAN BALZ joins us to talk about the Kennedy’s influence in politics and in the Congress. Hour 2 Vogue has set the standard for fashion and fashion magazines for […]

BOOK REVIEW: Best Friends Forever

BY SYDNEY SCOTT Your name is Addie Downs, you live in your parents’ house in Pleasant Ridge, Illinois, where your days are spent taking care of your troubled brother and your nights are spent looking for Mr. Right on the Internet. It’s the night of your high school reunion and you’ve decided not to relive those horrible moments with people you have no interest in seeing again, specifically your former best friend. But, your planned night-long Food Network marathon is cut short when your former best bud shows up on your doorstep claiming to have killed someone. Thus begins Jennifer […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR  Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus. Reid was the lead correspondent for the 2008 Frontline documentary Sick Around […]

NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Writer-director Robert Siegel wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 2008 film The Wrestler; Patton Oswalt, the stand-up comic and actor, starred in CBS’s The King of Queens and provided the voice for Remy, the main character in Pixar’s food romance Ratatouille. Now the two have collaborated on a new film — a drama, not a comedy — called Big Fan, about an obsessive 35-year-old New York Giants fan. Oswalt’s character, Paul, works as a parking-garage attendant, lives with his mom, and finds an outlet for his passion — and a minor kind of celebrity — as a frequent […]