Holding the Note

‘Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious’ The Times-----The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing ‘Respect’ or Bob Dylan performing ‘Blind Willie McTell’, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years. He portrays a series of musical lives – Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more – and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

Always up close and personal, always tenacious and informed by deep background, and always vivid and veracious, [Remnick] has a strong, muscular unpretentious style and a restless curiosity that enables him to write as well about literature and politics as he does about boxing, This collection of articles by David Remnick can stand as literature. ... He treats the reader as an informed, intelligent equal, Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine and a gifted writer, is almost alarmingly assiduous, Lenin's Tomb is an extraordinary confluence of observation, hard work, knowledge and reflection; a better book by a journalist on the withdrawing roar of the Soviet Union is hard to imagine.

David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998. He was a staff writer for the magazine from 1992 to 1998 and, previous to that, the Washington Post’s correspondent in the Soviet Union. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. He is the author of seven books, including Holding the Note, King of the World, a biography of Muhammad Ali, and The Bridge, a biography of Barack Obama. He lives in New York City with his wife and children.

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