Warren Leming

The Brecht Industry rolls on: doctoral dissertations, journals, blogs, websites, YouTube, and memoirs comprising millions of pages, much to the consternation of the boys at the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, who must be musing on how it is that an ardent anti-capitalist has entranced the cognoscenti and, much like Che, taken the moral high-ground…

Peggy Seeger, First Time Ever: A Memoir. Faber and Faber, 2017. Peggy Seeger has written an at times intimate biography charting her early years and her  marriage to British folk legend Ewan MacColl, which produced several talented children. The book’s title, First Time Ever, is drawn from a MacColl song which produced a huge hit…

Brett Anderson was the lead singer with the British pop Group Suede – a successful English group that worked the clubs for years, and finally emerged with all the gleaming trophies: magazine covers, exotic ladies, fashionista pals, backstage ennui, chart topping records, and drug addictions.  As Anderson notes, all bands have histories as predictable as the…

Somewhere in the yawning archives of WFMT Radio in Chicago is an ancient tape recording of a Bob Zimmerman/Dylan interview with the estimable Studs Terkel, which is utterly, inevitably, charmingly  and teasingly fabricated. The encounter with the unfailingly genial Studs disclosed a rich fantasy life as told by Dylan’s painstakingly constructed imaginary persona, flourishing all the folk…

Mark Harris’ fine biography of Mike Nichols, upon publication, was getting more media attention than the Trump impeachment hearings – almost. Harris comes well prepared to deliver a detailed, precise, well-formed and innovative study. He does not scrimp on the detail, which can be, I confess, rather exhausting. Indeed as exhausting as the indefatigable Nichols…