"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose or critic's posturing—in short, the history in cultural happenstance—that Marcus reveals here, exposing along the way the distortions and denials that keep us oblivious if not immune to its lessons.
Whether writing about the Beat Generation or Umberto Eco, Picasso's Guernica or the massacre in Tiananmen Square, The Manchurian Candidate or John Wayne's acting, Eric Ambler's antifascist thrillers or Camille Paglia, Marcus uncovers the histories embedded in our cultural moments and acts, and shows how, through our reading of the truths our culture tells and those it twists and conceals, we situate ourselves in that history and in the world. Rarely has a history lesson been so exhilarating. With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time, the social milieu in which they took place, and the individuals engaged in them. As he does so, we see that these cultural instances—as lofty as The Book of J, as humble as a TV movie about Jan and Dean, as fleeting as a few words spoken at the height of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, as enduring as a Paleolithic painting—often have more to tell us than the master-narratives so often passed off as faultless representations of the past.
Again and again Marcus skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin. Here we see instead that history is very much with us, being made and unmade every day, and unless we recognize it our future will be as cramped and impoverished as our present sense of the past.
Marcus has abilities which I've always thought of as characteristic of the best critics of the great New York School: he embeds the works of art he discusses in a wonderfully vivid recreation of the cultures that produced them. As a historian he succeeds again and again shows how a speech, an exhibit, a song, or a movie, seen in context but not reduced to context, offers us either the history we didn't get to live or the history we couldn't avoid--and does so better than a library of supposedly higher art forms.
Elvis Costello
This book could just as easily be called The Theft of History. Even being a witness to events is no longer a guarantee of their permanence. In the course of my recent interrogations, I found that Greil Marcus's words were quoted to me as often as those of the subjects of his essays. But once you have enough words in circulation, somebody will come along to use them to trip you up.
Anthony Grafton
Marcus has abilities which I've always thought of as characteristic of the best critics of the great New York School: he embeds the works of art he discusses in a wonderfully vivid recreation of the cultures that produced them. As a historian he succeeds again and again shows how a speech, an exhibit, a song, or a movie, seen in context but not reduced to context, offers us either the history we didn't get to live or the history we couldn't avoid--and does so better than a library of supposedly higher art forms. — Anthony Grafton, author of New Worlds, Ancient Texts
