Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll
Nick Tosches. Da Capo Press, $16.5 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-306-80713-8
A historical look at the seedy underbelly of country music. (Nov.)
Details
Reviewed on: 08/19/1996
Genre: Nonfiction
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- WHERE DEAD VOICES GATHERNick ToschesBeyond a handful of recordings revealing early jazz-era blackface minstrel Emmett Miller as "one of the strangest and most stunning stylists," some good press in the late 1920s and a few Continue reading »
- THE LAST OPIUM DENNick ToschesIn classic Tosches (Where Dead Voices Gather) fashion, the author offers an amazing recital of his around-the-world jaunt in search of the world's last opium Continue reading »
- IN THE HAND OF DANTENick ToschesDeftly blending the sacred and the profane, Tosches boldly casts himself as the protagonist in his latest novel, an outrageously ambitious book in which he procures a purloined version of the Continue reading »
- KING OF THE JEWSNick ToschesReaders who make it to the end of this unusual book may already have asked themselves the author's closing questions: "Why am I writing this, and why are you reading it?" Those Continue reading »
- The Nick Tosches ReaderNick ToschesTosches is best known for his 100-proof biographies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, and his beautifully trenchant life of the prize-fighter Sonny Liston (see review above) will arrive to the Continue reading »
- The Devil and Sonny ListonNick ToschesTosches has always been drawn to the lives of dark and mysteriously flawed or fallen public figures--Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire, Dean Martin in Dino--and in one-time heavyweight champ Charles Continue reading »
- Cut NumbersNick ToschesMaking his fiction debut, Tosches, a rock journalist (Hellfire), strikes gold with a brutal, corrosively funny portrait of New York's penny-ante hoods and professional lowlifes. Louie Brunellesches, Continue reading »
- DinoNick ToschesAn immigrant barber's son, high-school dropout Dino Crocetti--aka Dean Martin--left a job in an Ohio steel mill to achieve what no one before him had pulled off: simultaneous fame as a star of stage, Continue reading »
- TrinitiesNick ToschesIf the prospect of Yoruba tribesmen employed as drug couriers and detonating all over the inside of airplane cabins seems intriguing, Tosches's (Cut Numbers and the biographies of Jerry Lee Lewis and Continue reading »
- TrinitiesNick ToschesTosches's thriller has New York's Italian Mafia battling with Asian drug lords for control of the heroin trade. Continue reading »
- Me and the DevilNick ToschesIn this novel of sadomasochistic vampirism, an aging writer drinks blood to restore youth, vitality, and the urge to write. Nick is a misanthrope who sees people as “a source of tedium and acid Continue reading »
- Under TiberiusNick ToschesNovelist, poet, and Sonny Liston biographer Tosches blows the doors off the historical novel with an unflinchingly blasphemous, mirthfully vulgar, and ultimately brilliant story of Jesus. In the Continue reading »
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