Just Kids by Patti Smith

In 1978, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe collaborated on an art show in New York that poet-critic Rene Ricard dubbed “Diary of a Friendship.” That could have been the corny subtitle of Just Kids, but the book⎯which is only occasionally corny and often deeply affecting⎯has none. Smith appends nothing market-friendly like “My Life with Robert Mapplethorpe,” probably for the same reason she uses, on the cover, a faded portrait of them taken at Coney Island in 1969 in lieu of a Mapplethorpe art photo. This is not a memoir of what these two became; it’s about their becoming.

They met in 1967,

syllabi December 01, 2009

Please Read Me

The Beatles called it quits forty years ago, but books about them are still released at a pace as steady as Ringo’s drumming. No rock band, and few pop icons, have received so much literary attention. The Fab Four continue to inspire new memoirs, revised histories, and critical reassessments. Here are some titles to consider when you feel like getting back to where you once belonged.

Greg Milner's new book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber and Faber) was published in June.