RaveObserver... exceptional ... Charnas has done well to untangle the ever evolving skein of art and money and family and friends his legend encompasses. Nor is that all Dilla Time achieves. Almost incidentally but also crucially, it also lays out the evolving culture and geography of African-American Detroit from Henry Ford through Motown through the 20-year mayoralty of progressive Coleman Young through the shrinkage that only accelerated after Young left office in 1994. Dilla didn’t grow up poor, but neither was he middle class, and Charnas diligently traces the shifting employment history and stalwart entrepreneurship of a family that never managed to convert its considerable musical gifts into a living wage while imbuing young James with music that turned out to be like no other ... Just on a sociological level, then, this is a rich read. But deeply and vividly reported though it is...that’s just background. Dilla’s seismic innovations were rhythmic, so Charnas and Jeff Peretz, his colleague at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, fashioned a system of grid-based musical annotation based on rhythm rather than pitch.
Nicholas Lemann
PositiveBookforumTransaction Man is recommended to anyone who got through the Great Recession without tackling any books about it. As unnatural as mathematical thinking may feel to the reading classes, the income-gap fault line plus the virtual kudzu of an internet that outstrips comprehension should be enough to convince the stubbornest humanist to watch the numbers, and Lemann provides an entry point ... [there are] fascinating figures who reward Lemann’s honed profiling skills ... As judicious as Lemann strives to be, we know where his heart is, especially given his accounts of three Chicagoans—an unflinchingly ethical white Buick dealer and two much poorer African Americans, a retired working mother and a community activist—victimized by financialization’s social costs ... It’s...hard to know how Lemann imagines pluralism might reassert itself in a post-we-hope transactional USA.
Hanif Abdurraqib
RaveThe Barnes & Noble Review\"They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us establishes Abdurraqib as a major rock critic — polished and deft and original in a searchingly unpolished way ... I don’t agree with all his analyses or feel all his tastes, but every one gains not just poignancy but heft from personal particulars that are also, inevitably, political. Abdurraqib always remains a critic who deals in textual interpretation and aesthetic judgment. But the urgency that infuses music for him, often captured in a few articulated details, is what criticism ought to be for and too often isn’t.\
Michael Chabon
RaveThe Village VoiceThe deepest of Moonglow's many tricks is that it leaves the reader deeply reluctant to acknowledge how big a hole his exception makes room for. You so love the two grandparents that you have a stake in their literal existence ... Although some complain that Chabon garbles his narrative purpose with these diversions, I loved their casual-looking dazzle, reluctant to leave one thread behind and then instantly caught up in the next ... I remain profoundly grateful for his ability to create this book's engrossing, contradictory, faux-memoiristic reality. Art, such magical stuff is called. We're going to need it.
