Ring of Fire: The Johnny Cash Reader Edited by Michael Streissguth. Da Capo Press, 352 pages, $26.00 When I was eight or so, I asked my stepfather what the difference was between Johnny Paycheck and Johnny Cash. As far as I could tell, they could be the same guy — or related, anyway. “Big,” my […]
Lisa Burrell
Lisa Burrell, a former associate editor of The American Prospect, writes about American music and culture.
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All Together, Now
We shouldn’t want to watch Temptation Island, Fox’s hypersexed answer to reality TV. The concept — let’s see if a bunch of alluring singles in an exotic locale can bust up a few established, if tenuous, relationships — is offensive; the couples claiming to test their love, shallow and vain. We shouldn’t, and we don’t. […]
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Love, Sorrow, and Rage; Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence
Love, Sorrow, and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, by Alisse Waterston. Temple University Press, 234 pages, $59.50. Alisse Waterston originally went to Woodhouse, a New York City residence for mentally ill women, to conduct HIV research. She left with Love, Sorrow, and Rage, not one of those “‘scientific’ reports [that] teach us all […]
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Interstate Hero
Truckers operate outside all sorts of boundaries. They know the whole country better than most of us know our own towns. They pick up hitchhikers. They speak in code. And a good part of America is enthralled. Kids in sedans throw desperate air-horn gestures out backseat windows in search of one reciprocating honk. We eat […]
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Knockin’ on Dylan’s Door
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, David Hajdu. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 328 pages, $25.00. Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Howard Sounes. Grove Press, 527 pages, $27.50. Because folk music in the 1960s was driven […]
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Workers United
Robert Bruno’s Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown 12.02.99 | reviewed by Lisa Burrell Black spots on his father’s lungs convinced Robert Bruno it was time to reconnect with his family and his working-class roots. The result of his journey home is Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, a well- researched argument that […]