David Greenberger's Book Reviews

Check out David Greenberger's Record Reviews

Click for more info or to order:
Where Dead Voices Gather

Where Dead Voices Gather
by Nick Tosches (Little, Brown)

History, sociology, music appreciation -- it's all here with masterful style, superlative research, and wryly delineated insights. Nick Tosches crawled through the underbrush in search of the forgotten singer Emmett Miller. Miller performed in blackface, a standard component in the minstrel tradition. Owing to societal embarrassment, history had left him to the trash heap. However, strains of his once popular recordings from the twenties and thirties can be heard in the jazz, country and blues which followed him.

The devoted son of Joe and Irene Teller goes by only his last name, and is known as the small, silent, poetic half of the duo Penn & Teller. This book had its origins in Teller's discovery of a portfolio of cartoons by his father from 1939. A loving portrait of a father by his son.

Click for more info or to order:
When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours

Click for more info or to order:
Sock Monkey

Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey: A Children's Book
by Tony Millionaire (Dark Horse)

Giving further depth to a sock monkey and a stuffed crow, we are here presented with a prequel, revelatory in many moments, most glorious when Ann-Louise's grandfather stands stocking footed and Sock Monkey first appears.

Subtitled "The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," the bleakest revelations come not so much from the thorough reporting of the diminished nutritional health of the country, but rather the insidious corporate lobbying and string pulling.

Click for more info or to order:
Fast Food Nation

Click for more info or to order:
Now Dig This

Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995
by Terry Southern (Grove Press)

Edited by his son Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman, this is a posthumous collection of interviews, stories, letters, and memoirs, many previously unpublished (foremost among them are the couple pieces pertaining to his work with Stanley Kubrick).

Subtitled "Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players," Fatsis spent a year penetrating the upper reaches of international Scrabble competition. Loaded with travel and psych-social portraiture, it's already been optioned for film (amazingly, there are currently two Scrabble movies in development).

Click for more info or to order:
Word Freak

Middlebrook's book is a moving quest for answers to this life of smoke and mirrors, riddles and masks. Originally motivated to pose as a man in order to secure work as a musician during the depression in Missouri, the charade eventually had it's footing in emotional and personal issues much harder to know. In fact, with Tipton not here to say why, conjecture is all there can be. This is a superb biography, rich with sad exhilaration.

0395654890

Fear and loathing in the boardroom. With G.I. Joe and Barbie as the flagship products of two competing toy companies, the rest of the marketplace becomes trampled or absorbed as they remain locked in mortal combat.

When a commuter train crashed within the 32-square mile marshland that is Meadowlands, emergency vehicles had considered trouble even locating the scene of the accident -- and this is all happened with the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop. Sullivan's book is motivated by a lifelong fascination with the area, coupled with a reporter's eye and ear for local color, the order of things and the ways of the world. An investigative naturalist out for an adventure.

A novel which steps in and out of the mind of Jack Connor as he sits on death row. His troubled and sadly difficult life flashes back before us with compassion and understanding. Emotional instability coupled with overbearing constraints and religious dogma can have devastating consequences.

Subtitled "White Castle and creation of American food," we follow the enterprising Billy Ingram as he starts his assault on America's distrust of the very idea of hamburgers. Not only did he win big by anyone's definition in the first quarter of this century, but he opened the door for the behemoths who have followed, planting their flags of franchise around the globe. Though the book is flatly written, the story it tells remains undiminished.