The Dustbin of History

This is a collection of disparate essays, most of them previously published in ""small"" journals, by the esteemed author of the oft-reprinted and expanded Mystery Train (LJ 4/1/75). Here Marcus ponders the blues, John Wayne, genocide, French intellectual anomie, Cro-Magnons, and a few dozen other phenomena he declines to connect editorially. The closer he stays to rock, the better he does: the best, freshest pieces are on Jan and Dean and R&B songwriter Deborah Chussler (also the subject of a large section of his book Lipstick Traces, LJ 4/15/89). His Robert Johnson meditation will bore the initiated and scare off the blues-challenged, and the moral derivative for his complaints about some recent writers on Nazism seems to be outrage for its own sake. Marcus is so bright and covers so much ground that the book does offer intermittent pleasures, but he expresses nothing of particular import. Not recommended.--Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.