People always want you to be born where you are. They want you to have leaped from the womb a public figure. It just doesn’t go that way. I am the composite of my experience and all the people who had something to do with it. And I’m going to try to lay that out. —Barbara Charline Jordan [Read more…] about A very Texan story: Shelby Hearon writes Barbara Jordan’s biography
biography
Love and jazz
Maxine Gordon has loved jazz music all her life. From going to hear Miles Davis and John Coltrane as a teenager, to working as a road manager and promoter when she was a young woman, to becoming the personal manager and ultimately the wife of one of the most influential jazz artists of the twentieth century, Maxine has seen it all. She makes full use of these experiences in her new book, Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon (University of California Press). [Read more…] about Love and jazz
The Art of American Crime: Q&A with Dr. Jerome Loving on Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”
In a review for The New Republic, Sarah Weinman says of Jerome Loving’s recently released biography, “Jack and Norman is a book that makes one wonder why it took so long for someone to write a full-length treatment of the whole mess.” [Read more…] about The Art of American Crime: Q&A with Dr. Jerome Loving on Jack and Norman: A State-Raised Convict and the Legacy of Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song”
