music critics

As he reflects on his love affair, marriage, and the untimely death of his wife, music critic and journalist Rob Sheffield describes the songs on fifteen mix tapes made during the 1990s while the events were happening.

Nelson George chronicles his childhood in the Brooklyn housing projects during the 1960s and 1970s and his introduction to the African-American music scene in the 1980s, and shares how his involvement in the music scene helped him come to terms with his own family.

Personal letters help profile the lives and careers of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and recount the unique friendship the two men had with one another.

These engaging and wonderfully alive letters paint an intimate portrait of two of the most important and influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Carl Van Vechtenolder, established, and whitewas at first a mentor to the younger, gifted, and black Langston Hughes. But the relationship quickly grew into a great friendshipand for nearly four decades the two men wrote to each other expressively and constantly. They discussed literature and publishing. They gossiped about the people they knew in commonJames Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, H. L. Mencken. They wrote from near (of racism in Scottsboro) and far (of dancing in Cuba and trekking across the Soviet Union), and always with playfulness and mutual affection..

As he reflects on his love affair, marriage, and the untimely death of his wife, music critic and journalist Rob Sheffield describes the songs on fifteen mix tapes made during the 1990s while the events were happening.

The author, an American music critic who spent his life unaware that he had Asperger's syndrome until he was forty-five-years-old, describes his childhood and the false medical treatments he endured.