The Voice begins with a birth, a not at all unusual start for a biography. But this scene grabs the reader as different. The language is vivid, like something out of Dickens, with “horse-s**t-flecked cobblestones” and air that “smells of coal smoke and imminent snow.” We soon arrive in a kitchen full of women gathered around a table on which lies a “copper-haired girl, hugely pregnant,” “moaning hoarsely.” This is a difficult delivery. Blunt methods are used to extract the baby, who is then thrown aside for dead, bleeding from its injuries, to save the mother. But both mother and son survive. The son, Francis Albert Sinatra, would later say of the event, “They just kind of ripped me out and tossed me aside.” This birth scarred him, physically and emotionally. It was the first painful event to drive him to the heights he attained.

But the birth is important to this book for another reason: it gives form to author James Kaplan’s unique plan.

Virtually everything that can be written about Sinatra has. So why another bio? Kaplan’s twist is to focus on Sinatra’s first 39 years: a sort of portrait of an artist as a young man, timed to close after his rise from the ashes of the first phase of his career. The Voice is a redemption story with Frank Sinatra in the lead.

Most of what people seem to remember about Sinatra is what happened long after his comeback, the Rat Pack era of the 60’s and the Chairman of the Board of the 70’s. But what Kaplan understands and was smart enough to put into written form is that the most interesting part of Sinatra’s life was really that time from the early 40’s to mid-50’s: his rise as “The Voice,” mobs of girls wetting their pants for him; his downfall in the late 40’s and early 50’s when his shady relationship with the mob, serial cheating on his wife, and a combustible second marriage to Ava Gardner - who was essentially a female version of Frank Sinatra - soured him to the public; then the comeback: the dissolution of his marriage to Gardner, his Oscar-winning role in From Here To Eternity, and, most importantly, his renaissance at Capitol Records, where he did his most beloved and artistically vibrant work.

Kaplan gets special credit for showing us so much about Sinatra’s volatile relationship with Gardner, and the often touching pain Sinatra experienced because of it, as well as the man’s respect and hard work on his music. These are two important touchstones in Sinatra’s life (the other being his mother), Ava and the music, and Kaplan lays everything out for us, more than I’ve ever read before. When Ava and Frank are on the stage, or when Frank is at work in the studio, the book is nearly impossible to put down.

Kaplan’s approach is also interesting in that he provides layer upon layer of witnesses to Sinatra’s life, offering sometimes inconsistent and conflicting testimony, so that the reader is often left to divine the truth, something that frequently seems as elusive as the man under study. Yet this doesn’t disappoint as one might expect, in fact it feels almost like a pleasant dissonance. I think this is because Kaplan still manages to nail Sinatra’s essence, the contradictions: the man who could buy a friend a new house and also leave a pregnant wife at home while he cheated; the man who thought life’s rules didn’t apply to him, but could be also be paralyzed with self-doubt. Kaplan’s Sinatra is the man most of us forget about - the human one - so used to the caricature that came later. And this is the beauty of The Voice: by focusing on Sinatra’s difficult fall and ultimate redemption, Kaplan turns the legend into a universal story; he shows us how Sinatra is just like us, while also showing us how he isn’t anything like us at all. He presents a character that at times we’ll like, and at other times we’ll hate, but we’ll always have empathy for.

The Voice ends on the night he won his Oscar. He has dropped his children off at his ex-wife’s house. Friends wait for him at his apartment to celebrate. But he wants to be alone, a rarity for a man who sometimes kept his friends up all night drinking so he wouldn’t have to be. Coming off his lows, he doesn’t trust anyone who wishes him well over his victory; he sees ulterior motives everywhere. The only person whose happiness has been true is his ex-wife’s, the woman he misses but left for the frenetic lifestyle he had no choice but to live. So he walks the streets of Beverly Hills with his Oscar, enjoying his moment, alone, as alone as the day he was born.

When the question of classical music’s demise comes up these days, which it seems to do more and more often, I find it concerning, but not all that hard to understand: classical music has to be one of the hardest art forms to appreciate.

Virtually anyone can pick up a book written in their language and make some judgment about the work, no matter how simple that judgment may be: a reader doesn’t have to know the secrets of good storytelling to know whether or not a good story has been told. Most people can stand in front of a painting and understand what they’re looking at. And even in the case of abstract art, your average viewer can understand the intent of the artist once it’s explained to them.

But to fully appreciate a classical piece musically requires learning an entirely new language, or, at the very least, taking some form of music appreciation course that teaches one how to listen to the music and instructs them on what to pay attention to. Certainly even the simplest pop song employs musical “tricks” to grab listeners. But these songs are usually three to four minutes long and quickly grab its prey. Classical works can be thirty, forty-five minutes, and sometimes an hour long. They often work their magic slowly, almost imperceptibly. In a world of increasingly short attention spans, how can the form possibly compete?

This is where Alex Ross and his new collection of essays called Listen To This come in.

Fans of his work know Ross writes mainly about classical music, and this collection highlights some of his best writing on the genre in the last decade, including fantastic essays on Mozart, Schubert, and late-period Brahms. But he also has something for contemporary music fans with almost equally enlightening essays on Bob Dylan, Radiohead, and Bjork. His knowledge of music is deep - he grew up listening to classical instead of popular music, and took music lessons as a teenager - and he applies the same critical musical eye to Kid A and Medulla as he does the Eroica. Indeed, Ross shows us that some of our best pop composers pay just as much attention to textures, rhythm, harmony, and melody as a composer of orchestral music would.

In fact, this conjunction of music, crossing the border from classical to pop as he calls it, is precisely the book’s strength, and possibly its greatest potential benefit. Though these essays are primarily about classical music, he writes with such a contagious zeal, with such an obvious love of music, that he shades the restrictive boundaries we’ve created to categorize music. He does this well in the above-mentioned pieces, but nowhere is this idea better put than in his essay, “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues” where he ties the basso lamento of the middle ages through the centuries all the way to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Dazed and Confused’. Ross gets it. He gets that music is music and any genre has the ability to touch anyone.

Still, his first love is classical and nothing seems to concern him as much as the form’s lack of popularity, especially the greatly underappreciated works of the twentieth century. This concern informs many of his essays. In “Listen to This”, Ross outlines the history of classical music’s popular decline. He blames it partially on what he calls the “sacralization” of music, a process over time that turned the proceedings of a classical music concert into an almost religious experience. The most glaring example of this snobbery, the prohibition on applauding mid-piece, even between movements, is explained. (Ross also points out that when the great composers were alive, concert halls were bustling with noise, even during the middle of a piece. And many pieces were written as if begging for applause throughout. The modern listener of the first movement of, say, Beethoven’s or Dvorak’s 9th, or Mozart’s 40th will often find themselves having to sit on their hands at the end to avoid spontaneous shouts of joy. That’s because we weren’t meant to sit on our hands.) But perhaps worse than ridiculous rules of etiquette was what Ross calls the “fetishizing” of the past, the etching of the great classical composers onto a musical equivalent of Mount Rushmore, where there’s no room for new faces. He argues that this prompted modern composers to write for one another, pushing the music into territory far removed from the classical repertoire and foreign to the ears of most listeners who were untrained to catch the musical advancements these artists were making. Orchestral music became unlistenable to most, and, for the most part, this is where we stand to this day.

I found the error of the modern composer’s way neatly summarized in Ross’s essay on Mozart, which is called “The Storm of Style: Mozart’s Golden Mean”. Mozart’s ‘Golden Mean’ is early advice the composer’s father, Leopold, gave him. Leopold told the young Wolfgang that he had to write music that would be appreciated by both connoisseurs of music as well as the general public. (And by all accounts Mozart did a pretty good job at that.) As enjoyably and thought-provokingly as Ross writes, I would’ve liked to have seen him tie the problem of modern music to this simple rule. Because as a fan of classical music who hates just about every modern orchestral piece he’s ever heard, I see this as the core problem. I often read rave reviews about contemporary composers like John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, and Osvaldo Golijov, but they’re almost always written for the intelligentsia of classical music: conductors, other composers, or the classical press, people like Ross. Modern composers must make music smart AND entertaining for regular listeners. Otherwise the music will remain as distant from most of us as the lives of the great composers are. Most people can enjoy Beethoven’s 5th even if they don’t understand how he spends the entire symphony harmonically taking apart the famous eight-note beginning. But will the average listener appreciate Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring if they don’t know about or understand the rhythmic intricacies of the piece? I doubt so in most cases. It’s all about the golden mean.

Of course, anyone willing to put in the time can learn to appreciate even the most challenging works of any art form. Ross was inundated with classical music at a young age; while the majority of us were losing our virginity to our favorite rock bands, he was listening to classical works over and over again, learning them and divining all their secrets. But again, with children having the attention spans of gnats these days, and adults with the time to maybe play music as background noise while loading the dishes in the dish washer, what chance does even Beethoven or Mozart have with the modern crowd?

Perhaps the answer lies in Ross’s essays on pop music. Maybe Radiohead and Bjork are our modern masters. Both are inspired by the composer Olivier Messiaen, but have used his influence in a form more readily accessible in the current world culture. In the essay, “Symphony of Millions”, Ross goes to China and finds music conservatories there teaching not just classical theory, but also pop music arranging. As we may find China driving world culture in the twenty-first century, is this a sign that blended genres and shorter works will render modern orchestral compositions permanently irrelevant? Imagine a hundred years from now a list of the twenty-first century’s greatest composers with the names Bjork and Jonny Greenwood on it. (Of course, I already believe a list of the greatest composers of the twentieth century is incomplete without the names Lennon and McCartney.)

Wherever you come down on the issue, Ross’s thought-provoking work is a great guide to have in the research. He hits his own golden mean with his engaging and intelligent writing, which will appeal to a broad category of music lovers, not just classical fans. It’s for anyone who wants to know how music works its magic, and about the artists who create that magic.

Ross even convinced me to give some modern works a try: I bought a few John Luther Adams and Golijiov pieces. I won’t say I prefer these to Beethoven’s or Bach, but I’ll open my mind and heart just a little more thanks to this excellent collection.

On December 8, 1980, I was ten. Though I vaguely remember hearing about John Lennon’s murder, I didn’t know much about the Beatles so the event meant little to me. But as anyone who loves music has to eventually, I realized about twenty years too late that the Beatles were it, that they were where music I had been listening to my whole life sprouted from; and like any born-again, I became a rabid fan. I now have all their albums and the Anthology, and I count them as the most important band ever, hands down. The only bit of Beatle fandom I haven’t partaken of is the predilection to pick a favorite Beatle. With ‘Yesterday, ‘Dear Prudence’, and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ as my three favorite songs, how can I choose?

So as we approached the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon’s murder with all the documentaries and specials and magazine articles to remind us of the that day, I now had a chance to sort of re-live the experience, to grieve someone who means more to me now than he did when he died. And it was with great interest that I began Keith Elliot Greenberg’s new book about that day thirty years ago.

This short book begins by showing us Lennon on his last day as he was beginning to turn his life around. In 1980 he was jumping back into the music business after a five year sabbatical. His new single ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ was near the top of the charts. He’d dedicated his life to his family - his five year-old son Sean and wife Yoko - and was making overtures to repair the damage he inflicted on his older son, Julian, then seventeen. Greenberg’s opening approach immediately appealed to me more than if he had flaunted the Lennon of peace and love and revolution. We got shades of this grown-up Lennon at the end of the movie Imagine, when ‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’ played over home movies of Lennon with his son, scenes that become utterly heartbreaking once we remember he will die, that he would never see Sean “come of age”. Greenberg also mentions the poignancy of that song given Lennon’s murder, and it completes a good set-up for what is to come. He’s given us a character we care about, whether we know John Lennon already or not.

Unfortunately he gets it almost completely wrong from there. Rather than give us a book about the day with historical background sprinkled in to give us context, he gives us a history of the Beatles with elements of the day dusted over. This book is primarily background and secondarily about the event. Now, I understand background was necessary. He rightly gives us a rundown on Lennon’s troubles from childhood, through the Beatles and post-Beatles period. (Important for the redemption story.) He rightly gives us background on the murderer, Mark David Chapman. (Which, BTW, Greenberg does a good job with. He adeptly shows us the man’s instability, how his mind could switch quickly between lucid and mad. By the end, I almost saw him as a sympathetic figure too, which is no small feat.) But do we really need to know about Brian Epstein’s family history, for example? No. But that’s what we get. I suppose if you didn’t know much about the Beatles, this would all be well and good: you’d get a miniature portrait of the Beatles along with a book about Lennon’s murder—a two-for-one deal. But I can’t imagine many people buying the book who don’t already know the basics of the band’s history. Was Greenberg trying to show off his Beatle knowledge or just trying to inject enough filler to make this a full-length book? Probably a little of both, I imagine.

Greenberg also brings in additional characters as a device to broaden the book and make it feel like more of a story. We meet a reporter, a DJ, a city councilwoman - even Mayor Ed Koch. All these players, I suppose, were meant to eventually coalesce around the murder, which isn’t a bad idea, but unfortunately they never do. There’s such a long gap between references to certain people that we forget who they are when they reappear. And once we get to the shootings, all but one or two of these bit players are distractions. When Greenberg is writing about that day - about the photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz, his last interview, his last recording session, the shooting - the book is mesmerizing. It’s such a compelling event, it practically tells itself. All Greenberg had to do was get out of the way. But he seemed intent on getting in the way. He bounces around so much chronologically that sometimes it was hard to keep up with where we were in the story. This is especially the case when he discusses Chapman’s two trips to New York. Sometimes it was hard to know if he was talking about the October trip or the December trip. Greenberg undermines himself by pulling away from the actual events or background relevant to those events.

There are other issues. Greenberg moves around between an omniscient POV and that of an investigative journalist. Most of the time it wasn’t a hindrance, but it could sometimes be distracting. The worst example is the scene of Yoko at the hospital after John has died. Greenberg goes into Yoko’s mind to tell us that she’s worrying about Sean at home, but then a few sentences later quotes her from an interview. This scene was especially discordant because of where it came in the book: John had just died and it was an intense and engrossing spot. Greenberg didn’t need to get in the way.

But narrative decisions are one thing. In a non-fiction book though, factual accuracy is everything, and I found one inaccuracy too big to overlook. Greenberg states on page 164 that when the police drove Lennon to the hospital in their squad car after the shooting: “No one was in the back seat with John Lennon.” Yet not a few hours before earlier, I saw an interview with one of the police officers who accompanied Lennon to Roosevelt Hospital in which he stated that Lennon died in his arms in the back seat. Of course, the former-cop could’ve been lying, but I tend to doubt it. And even if he had, who would Greenberg’s source be to the contrary? The other cop? In the interview, he sat right next to his partner. So are we to believe these men are conspiring? Doubtful. This rather glaring inaccuracy naturally gave me pause as to the validity of other facts in book.

For all this though, the book is still worthwhile. Though I wish the project had ended up in abler hands, a book about the shooting was long overdue. And there is some astute writing here. Greenberg nicely weaves in the other Beatles on the day and in the fearful aftermath. He correctly ties Lennon’s murder to a change in celebrity and their relationships with fans. (And murders still to come.)

And ultimately, the heart of the story - the story of a man’s redemption that came either too late or just in time, depending on your worldview - is strong enough to bleed through even the worst artistic choices. Despite all the problems with this book, after reading it I think John is my new favorite Beatle. If nothing else, Greenberg helped me figure that out.

If you’re a lifetime rock and roller like I am, the idea of reading Keith Richards’ autobiography is a no brainer. A no brainer that is if you can be convinced he actually wrote it. If it’s a hack job, you’ll be sorely disappointed. I mean, let’s face it, one of the big money brands suffering with the global economic downturn is The Rolling Stones. Who’s going to fork out $300+ for a Rolling Stones concert ticket nowadays? The question then is: Is Life just a way for Keith to bide his time until the next tour or a really good read?

I was really on the fence about this one. I wanted to read it but I don’t like heroes letting me down, which may be why I don’t read many life stories – auto or bio – anyway: they usually disappoint. But if Life really was writ by Keith then it’d be worth it. Luckily I good a pre-sale price on Amazon (46% off!) and took a chance and am I ever glad I did. From the opening pages describing Keith’s bust in Arkansas during The Rolling Stones American tour of 1975 - “… the tour of the giant inflatable cock.” is how Keith puts it on page 12 – it’s a fun read: sort of like hanging out one night in a dive with the most “elegantly wasted man in the world,” one of many phrases describing Keith’s unique lifestyle choices. And one he actually acknowledges.

Primarily I recommend Life to two camps: musicians and fans.

For musicians, this is “Keef’s Guitar Workshop” as he references the time-outs on his life story; giving guitarists the benefit of his almost 50 years in the business. Guitar teacher Keith will tell you about Scotty Moore’s “secret lick” (that he still hasn’t figured out the secret of), show you the Jimmy Reed 5 chord that Bobby Goldsboro showed him, discuss in depth 5 string open G tuning, and reveal the fact that he’s only used boxes on ‘Satisfaction’ and the Some Girls album. He also strongly advocates giving children an acoustic guitar as their first guitar. It’s better for learning finger coordination.

Of the album sessions discussed, Exile On Main Street and Some Girls seem to get the most pages. Turns out that ‘Miss You’ and ‘Start It Up’ derive from the same session. Keith’s right when he says ‘Miss You’ doesn’t really fit the Some Girls mold when the band was trying to outpunk punk rockers. In retrospect, ‘Miss You’ should’ve really just been an EP on its own. Imagine starting Some Girls with ‘Start Me Up’ and ‘When The Whip Comes Down’? I tried it. It’s breathtaking. Makes it a real rock album. It could never have happened though. Even in ’78 when the band did a single take of ‘Start Me Up’ as a rocker (and not the reggae number it had been at Black And Blue sessions in 1976), Keith didn’t like it. Told the engineer: “Wipe it!” As in: “Erase it.” The engineer never did and the rest is pop history.

For fans, you’ll hear “Ian Stewart. I’m still working for him.” I liked the way Keith stated that. Who is Ian Stewart you might ask? Ever hear of the Led Zeppelin track ‘Boogie With Stu’? That’s Ian Stewart. He founded The Rolling Stones. Not Brian Jones who often professed to be the leader. Not Mick Jagger. Not Keith Richards. Ian Stewart, a pianist, who was kept out of the group when The Rolling Stones signed with Decca Records and rock bands didn’t have six guys in the group back in the 1960s. He didn’t look very rock and roll either and knew it and so never objected. He became their roadie instead and wound playing piano on every Rolling Stones studio album up until his death in 1985 except for Beggars Banquet.

As for some insights to the other Stones you’ll find out Bill Wyman was just in the band at first for his amp; that Charlie Watts was the drummer they couldn’t afford because he was making real money at paying gigs; that after awhile Brian Jones was a starstruck, whining, pain-in-the-ass; that Mick Taylor was an enigma; and that Ron Woods has a rehab habit.

And according to Keith, Mick Jagger is an insecure, power hungry frontman who solely wrote some of the Stones’ best songs – e.g., ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘When The Whip Comes Down’ – and could unexpectedly do something kind when least expected. Keith and Mick also don’t have a friendship so much as they have a business relationship, an arrangement that stems from hurt and resentment over Mick’s attempts to ditch The Rolling Stones in the 1980s. It’s disconcerting to learn Keith hasn’t visited Mick’s dressing room in over 20 years. Still, Keith says he’d defend Mick to the death and likens him to a family member.

As a fan you also find out a lot of interesting things about other songs and musicians like the fact that ‘Mystery Train’ has no drummer, that John Lennon critiqued Richards’ guitar solo in ‘It’s All Over Now’, that Don Everly was one of the best rhythm guitarists ever, that Mick Jagger resented Gram Parsons, that Billy Preston was gay.

It’s a wild ride with car crashes, houses burning down, overdosed musicians, a Russian Roulette recipient, dead babies. What is even more of a wonder than Keith Richards surviving to tell us about his life is how well he tells it. If you like rock and roll, you should read it.

As most aspiring authors do, I take note every year of who the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature is. For example, I can tell you Peruvian author Mario Vargos Llosa was selected in 2010. What I don’t typically do, however, is read one of the selected writer’s works.

But when the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was tapped for the prize in 2006, I bought and read his then most recent Snow because I was interested in the author’s attempt at documenting the recent transformation of Turkish society from secular to rabidly religious. It was Pamuk’s attempt to make sense of what was going on in his homeland much like Freedom is Jonathan Franzen’s attempt at making sense of America post 9/11. Now, being an American, I get most the “types” depicted in Freedom – i.e, the disillusioned liberal, the conservative son, the ambitious minority woman – whereas I did not in Snow because I’m not Turkish. You could say this is evidence of Pamuk’s failure as an author but I disagree. Some things peculiar about our societies are not so much lost in translation as much as they cannot be conveyed.

Still, I liked where Pamuk was coming from even if in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he “stole” my theory that authors eventually pick up a pen or laptop in order to write the book they want to read. I chalked it up to an example of de Kooning’s theory of harpsichords (see my Someone Still Likes You Boris Yeltsin CD review elsewhere in Hellbomb for what that means) and took solace that I shared an original idea with a Nobel Prize winner. And looked for another book of his to read.

I bought several used books – e.g., My Name Is Red and The Black Book - but when The Museum of Innocence was published in English I was piqued enough by the Proustian possibilities to use a 40% off Borders coupon to buy a copy.

And Proustian it is. If you found The Captive captivating, then The The Museum of Innocence is for you. Pamuk uses a story of stolen virginity to depict a unique love story and capture more effectively the changes to Turkish society in the 1970s. Coups and changing mores serve as the backdrop for an accounting of the relationship between of Kemal Bey, an upperclass businessman and eventual filmmaker, and Füsun, his beautiful, poorer, shopgirl cousin: a story that is either one extreme cuckoldry or unadulterated romance. What you think will say a lot about yourself.

Like Proust, Pamuk is interested in the power of inanimate objects to absorb and contain the past so that they become virtual time machines. For Kemal Bey, china dogs and cigarette butts and misplaced earrings serve as his madeleines and his way of holding onto Füsun.

Like reading Proust you find yourself sometimes bogged down by Pamuk’s prose and begin despairing that plot will ever regain traction only to find yourself racing suddenly, anxious to find out what is going to happen to our narrator, who – it turns out – happens to Orhan Pamuk himself! As he relates Kemal Bey’s visits to thousands of museums devoted to not only authors and others – did you know there was an Ava Gardner Museum? - we find out how Kemal finally decided take the numerous mementoes of his love - or obsession and downfall according to some of the novel’s indexed secondary characters – and erect The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul to Füsun’s memory. The final forty pages are the best pages of the book and made this sometimes difficult read worthwhile.