Playgirl: The Official History of a Cult Magazine (2024)
It’s Playgirl’s 50th anniversary, and the milestone has been marked with a glossy coffee-table book. Stealing the male gaze and handing it to women, the mag gave us sexy shots (even full-frontal!), plus writers like Anaïs Nin and Truman Capote. But one difference between us girls and the guys reading Playboy? We didn’t feel the need to pretend we perused Playgirl for the articles.
Full review by Laura Bell, October 18, 2024
Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham, by Deborah Jowitt (2024)
Longtime Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt takes us on Martha Graham’s journey through the American Century. “Jowitt has also taken her time: 10 years of research, on top of half a century of tracking the international modern dance scene.” The book, titled after a Graham duet from 1947, is “an ‘errand’ into the mind of an artist.”
Full Review by Elizabeth Zimmer, March 19, 2024
The Five Themes of the Twilight Zone, by Arlen Schumer (2024)
“Sixty years after going off the air, The Twilight Zone might be more relevant than it was at the end of the Cold War.” In The Five Themes of the Twilight Zone — “science and superstition,” “suburban nightmares,” “a question of identity,” ”obsolete man,” and “the time element,” Arlen Schumer dives deep into the show’s history, with production tidbits, notes on the actors, and classic episodes whose themes “ring depressingly familiar.”
Full review by Robert Shuster, October 31, 2024
The Ballad of Speedball Baby, by Ali Smith (2024)
Ali Smith recalls touring as the lone woman in Speedball Baby, a ’90s “rockabilly-inspired art punk band.” Her experiences on the road included “sexual abuse, harassment, misogyny, and sexism,” but the band itself stuck together: “We survived the death of our major label deal without infighting … without blaming each other.”
Review by Kyle Eustice, January 29, 2024
Earth to Moon, by Moon Zappa (2024)
Earth to Moon chronicles Moon Zappa’s life as the daughter of controversial musician and problematic father Frank Zappa. Living in the midst of sex with groupies in the family home, emotional abuse from both mom and dad, and poor parental advice (when Moon asks if she should go on tour with a married heavy-metal drummer, she’s told, “Go! It’ll be fun!”) has taught her “You make a decision. Mine is this: no more bullies allowed.”
Full review by Rafael Alvarez, November 12, 2024
Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Wolke Verlag, 2024)
A new volume of essays considers the innovations of Black composers of the past half-century. Hitting music history hard, the book “amounts to no less than a reconceptualization of the multidimensionality of modern classical music,” based on the claim that “the contemporary music world has predicated itself upon the ‘absence of Blackness.’”
Full review by Ben Gambuzza, March 12, 2024
Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, by Cynthia Carr (2024)
The transgender actress Candy Darling found a home in Andy Warhol’s Factory, a “haven where gender norms were challenged, identity was fluid, and the mashup of celebrity worship and creativity reigned supreme.” Today, the battles over gender identity rage on. As Carr puts it, Candy “predates many of the conversations about gender going on now” but “would prove to be no feminist. She had no interest in politics and saw herself as a traditional woman.”
Full review by Peter Noel, June 28, 2024
The Freaks Came Out to Write, by Tricia Romano (2024)
In The Freaks Came Out to Write, an editor sums up the Voice crew: “We were such a weird animal. We weren’t apples or oranges. We were like a kumquat.” Tricia Romano, who worked as a nightlife columnist at the paper, was still in college when the Internet began disrupting print publishing, but has “processed 70-odd years of publishing history into bite-size bits, and created an irresistible party platter of a book, rich and essential.”
Full review by Elizabeth Zimmer, February 21, 2024
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