RaveA.V. ClubThe Beastie Boys have created a book, and it is preposterous ... Literary heavyweight Jonathan Lethem shows up to pen some sort of philosophical treatise on \'white boys\'; it’s kind of bad ... It is also a beautifully messy (and large) talisman containing within it many of the great joys and surprises that come with listening to the Beastie Boys, which can be weirdly moving to read in 2018 ... You realize, reading the Book, that this was actually part of a cohesive philosophy within the band (MCA dubs it \'so bad it’s awesome\')—to pretty much exclusively do shit that cracked each other up ... This surplus of voices is part of the joy of Beastie Boys Book, particularly in its first part, which vividly recreates the pulse and feel and very concrete topography of pre-Giuliani New York ... You realize in this back stretch that the reason you’ve been reading wasn’t all the goofy humor or wild metatextual interjections but rather the music itself, lively and taut and funky, bouncing off the page. A-.
