Book Review: Leon Russell

Leon Russell is an icon, but somehow is still an underappreciated artist. He is spoken of in tones reserved not just for the most talented musicians, but also for the most complex and fascinating. His career is like a roadmap of music history, often intersecting with rock royalty like Bob Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles. He started in the Fifties as a teenager touring with Jerry Lee Lewis, going on to play piano on records by such giants as Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, and Phil Spector, and on hundreds of classic songs with major recording artists. Leon was Elton John’s idol, and Elton inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. Leon also gets credit for altering Willie Nelson’s career, giving us the long-haired, pot-friendly Willie we all know and love today.

Now, acclaimed author and founding member of Buffalo Tom, Bill Janovitz shines the spotlight on one of the most important music makers of the twentieth century.

Book Review: Into the Dark Dimension

Dormammu, Lord of the Dark Dimension has almost completed his conquest of Earth, with a stranglehold on the minds of its citizens. Only a few have managed to resist him… To free the world, Doctor Strange must reassemble his Shadow Avengers, while Tony Stark and a team of amoral tech geniuses cook up a tech defense to break the mind control. As the Shadow Avengers defend Earth, even against those heroes under Dormammu’s influence, Ms Marvel must enlist an unlikely ally to destroy the evil lurking within the Dark Dimension.

Book Review: The Tyrant Skies

Victor Von Doom has many enemies, but he has a special loathing for the Red Skull. When the Red Skull creates a flying haven for the billionaire elite who share his deplorable values, Doom prepares himself for the worst. When Latveria is beset by a rash of terrorist attacks, his suspicions are confirmed: the Red Skull is coming for Doom’s homeland. Now he must infiltrate the shielded microstate drifting in the skies above Latveria to save his people from annihilation. But finding a way on board the floating city is just the first in a series of trials that will test Doctor Doom to the limits of his beliefs, his strength and his powers.

Book Review: When Rock Met Disco

Disco began as a gay, black, and brown underground New York City party music scene, which alone was enough to ward off most rockers. The difference between rock and disco was as sociological as it was aesthetic. At its best, disco was galvanizing and affirmative. Its hypnotic power to uplift a broad spectrum of the populace made it the ubiquitous music of the late '70s. Disco was a primal and gaudy fanfare for the apocalypse, a rage for exhibitionism, free of moralizing. Disco was an exclamatory musical passageway into the future.

For all its apparent excesses and ritual zealotry, disco was a conservative realm, with obsolete rules like formal dress code and dance floor etiquette. When most '70s artists "went disco," it was the relatively few daring rockers who had the most impact, bringing their intensity and personality to a faceless phenomenon. Rock stars who "went disco" crossed a musical rubicon and forever smashed cultural conformity. The ongoing dance-rock phenomenon demonstrates the impact of this unique place and time. The disco crossover forever changed rock.

Book Review: A Broken People's Playlist

A Broken People’s Playlist is the soundtrack of life, comprised of twelve music-inspired tales about love, the human condition, micro-moments, and the search for meaning and sometimes, redemption. It is also Chimeka Garricks’s love letter to his native city, Port Harcourt, the setting of most of the stories.

In these loosely interlocked tales, Garricks introduces a cast of indelible characters. There is a teenage wannabe-DJ eager to play his first gig even as his family disastrously falls apart—who reappears many years later as an unhappy middle-aged man drunk-calling his ex-wife; a man who throws a living funeral for his dying brother; three friends who ponder penis captivus and one’s peculiar erectile dysfunction; a troubled woman who tries to find her peace-place in the world, helped by a headful of songs and a pot of ginger tea.

Book Review: The Farewell Tour

It’s 1980, and Lillian Waters is hitting the road for the very last time. Jaded from her years in the music business, perpetually hungover, and diagnosed with career-ending vocal problems, Lillian cobbles together a nationwide farewell tour featuring some old hands plus a few new ones. She yearns to feel the rush of making live music one more time and bask in the glow of a packed house before she makes the last, and most important, stop on the tour: the farm she left behind at age ten and the sister she is finally ready to confront about an agonizing betrayal in their childhood.

As the novel crisscrosses eras, moving between Lillian’s youth—the Depression, the Second World War, the rise of Nashville—and her middle-aged life in 1980, we see her striving to build a career in the male-dominated world of country music, including the hard choices she makes as she tries to redefine music, love, aging, and womanhood on her own terms. Nearing her final tour stop, Lil is forced to confront those choices and how they shaped her life.

Book Review: The Missing Hours

One moment, Dr. Selena Cole, a consultant on kidnap and rescue operations, is at the playground with her children . . . the next, she has vanished without a trace.

The body of Dominic Newell, a well-respected lawyer, is found on a remote mountain road, blood oozing from the stab wound in his neck.

In the sleepy borderland between England and Wales, serious crimes are rare. Which makes this Tuesday morning, with two calls coming in to the local police station, even more remarkable. Detective Constable Leah Mackay and her brother, Detective Sergeant Finn Hale, soon find their respective investigations inextricably linked. And when Selena reappears alive and unhurt twenty hours later, the mystery deepens.

Book Review: Into the Groove

In Into the Groove, vinyl collector and music buff Jonathan Scott dissects a mind-blowing feat that we all take for granted today--the domestication of sound. Thomas Edison's phonograph, the first device that could both record and reproduce sound, represented an important turning point in the story of recorded sound, but it was only the tip of the iceberg, and came after decades of invention, tinkering and experimentation. Scott traces the birth of sound back to the earliest serious attempts in the 1850s, celebrating the ingenuity, rivalries and science of the modulated groove.

He examines the first attempts to record and reproduce sounds, the origins of the phonograph, and the development of commercial shellac discs. Then he divulges the fascinating story of the LP record, from the rise of electric recording to the fall of 7-inch vinyl, the competing speed and format wars, and an epilogue that takes the story up to the present-day return of vinyl to vogue.

Book Review: Silver Sable - Payback

Doctor Victor von Doom holds Symkaria in his despotic grip, selling its treasures to pay off the country’s exorbitant debt. Yet patriotic heroine Silver Sable desires its freedom. Doom doesn’t do favors, so he offers her a deal: track down the Clairvoyant – a device for seeing the future – and he’ll erase her homeland’s deficit. Sable soon discovers she can’t outwit someone who can predict her every move. She needs the help of someone wild and unpredictable. Someone like Black Cat… Together they must chase down the Clairvoyant’s creator, pull off the ultimate Vegas heist, survive backstabbing exes, and outsmart one of the most powerful people on the planet. All they need now is a little bit of luck.