This book is a collection of interviews with John Cage, the late avant garde composer who was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. The interviews span nearly a half century and give a cogent idea of Cage's thought on music, art, education, politics, and social revision.

If you are curious about why a composer would write music that is "silent", why he would use chance, nonintention, and denounce music as communication, this is a good book to begin an overview of Cage's philosophy of art.

It also shows that Cage's musical thought was not monolithic, but changed several times in the course of his life, as did his music.

This is quite a yarn. I leave it to others to debate Mezzrow's place in jazz history. I found it interesting as a social study. Tales of 1920s gangsters and prohibition, the Chicago and Harlem music scene, and race relations. Of course, it's not always clear how much of this is true and how much may be a product of Mezzrow's (or Wolfe's) desire to make the story better.

For me, Mezzrow came across as the ultimate wannabe. He wanted to be a black jazz musician from New Orleans. He was a Russian Jew, born in Chicago. He lived the life, the music *was* his life (except when opium was his life), but he could never fully be what he wasn't.

Compare, for example, Louis Armstrong's autobiography "Satchmo." Armstrong matter-of-factly tells about his life, not wanting it to be anything else. Mezzrow is always trying to be something he isn't and never can be. He was an interesting character.

It's a good read.

Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow was a white jewish kid who was born in Chicago in 1899. In his late teens he discovered the jazz music that was being played around the south side of Chicago in those days. "Mezz" fell in love with the sound of early jazz and with the excitement of the music scene. Chicago was a jazz center then, and Mezzrow heard many of the great pioneers of the music including Freddie Keppard, Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong and many others. Soon he bought a clarinet and began trying to play like his heroes.

The club owners who employed Mezzrow were prohibition era gangsters including Al Capone. The gangsters were interesting louts. Capone once wanted Mezzrow to fire a girl singer who was developing a romantic relationship with Capone's younger brother. Capone said, "she can't sing anyway." Mezzrow was so upset that he told Capone, "why, you couldn't even tell good whisky if you smelled it and that's your racket, so how do you figure to tell me about music." (sic) Feisty!

Mezzrow wrote this book in 1946, and he uses 20's era slang to tell his story. This is as groovie as a 10 cent movie, jack. It's also fun.

Mezzrow's maniacal enthusiasm for early jazz is endearing. Not many people who were actually present at the time considered jazz music to be important enough to write books about. Part of Mezzrow's purpose is to convince the reader that jazz music is important. One of the earlier reviewers compares Mezzrow's book unfavorably to Louis Armstrong's autobiography, Satchmo. Armstong's book is good, but Mezzrow's book is more honest than Armstrong's. Armstrong was born into dire poverty. His mother may have been a prostitute, and he was placed in an orphanage at an early age. His book cleans up the criminals and murders in his story so that they are merely "colorful characters", and he leaves out as much unpleasantness as possible. Mezzrow tells more of the whole story. He candidly discusses his drug experiences, and his jail sentences as well as his happier times.

An added bonus to this book is that Mezzrow leaves out all that boring background information that plauges other books, like who his grand parents were and what his childhood was like. Mezzrow's book starts right off with his discovery of music in Pontiac reform school.

If you like this book, or Louis Armstong's book, another good book by an early jazz musician is Jelly Roll Morton's book, Mr. Jelly Roll.

the hippest trip around...this book will grab you by the soul and spin you around. reading it changed my life.

David Pringle's 100 Best Science-Fiction Novels is a decent resource and shopping list for well-read SF fans. I was rounding out my classic post-apocalyptic & distopian future books part of the list (i.e. 1984, Brave New World, We, Canticle For Leibowitz, etc.) when I came across Limbo. The fact that I'd never heard of Limbo or it's author, Bernard Wolfe, and that it was, apparently, the only SF novel he ever wrote, intrigued me. I wasn't disappointed.

This is a wonderful 50's era cautionary tale, Swiftian in many ways, all dressed up as science fiction. Wolfe writes quite well and with a depth not encountered in much of SF. It makes for a great read not to mention a great recommendation to friends because it is so little known. Though the book seems quaintly dated at some points, the various themes all regard fundamental questions of the human condition that are timeless and universal.

It is essentially a commentary on Cold War era America through the device of future projection. In the spirit of great satire, Wolfe extrapolates an extreme and ludicrous version of the present moment and places it far into the future. The statement is simple: This is what we're going to be like if we keep going this way. It's all there - WWIII, nuclear devastation, rebuilding what's left with the few that are left, but here's the kicker: since we obviously will never learn to control ourselves and to prevent future destruction, everyone will lay down their arms and legs, literally, via amputation, and replace them with nuclear powered, auto-controlled limbs. Absolutely absurd and that's precisely the point.

I don't want to give away any more specifics. I'm sure you can find more elsewhere if you need to. As far as SF goes, I'm a pretty harsh critic. To this day Limbo remains one of my favorites, and IMO, may be the best American contribution to the distopian novel genre. It's a great ride that'll have you aching for your own brand new set of nuclear powered limbs by the end.

This novel of a post-apocalyptic world seemed very real to me when I first read it in 1966 as a junior in high school. I had read 1984 a year earlier and this book had a realism of a nightmare future in ways more compelling than Orwell's. Set in the mid 1970's the story tells the adventures of one man who leaves his solitude on an Indian Ocean island and travels to what's left of the United States. Bernard Wolf's characters and themes in this book are delightfully twisted and filled with a macabre humor. I only read this book once, but it has haunted the back of my mind all these years. Growing up in the thick of the cold war this book was all my nuclear nighmares come true. Please read the book with this perspective and you will not be disappointed!

Limbo is one of the forgotten classics of the SF field, a strong dystopian/post-apocalyptic work published in the same time frame as Orwell's 1984 and George Stewarts' Earth Abides, and very much belonging in that company.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Martine (pronounced like the drink - your first clue to the heavily satiric nature of this book) is happily ensconced on an idyllic tropical island, where there is no conflict and everyone is happy - and if they're not, the Doctor will merrily perform a lobotomy on the offending person to ensure that there are no wild cards that could upset the harmony of the islanders. But he himself is not quite happy, nagged by the feeling that this method of producing a utopia is not the best, and some memories he has of his part in the WWIII conflict. That conflict was one of two giant computers out to dominate the world, and eventually resulted in a rebellion by the people, a rebellion fueled by a certain notebook that Dr. Martine left lying around when he exited the normal world in favor of his island hideaway. Eventually Martine's doubts lead him to return to the outer world to see what has happened, only to find his old notebook has become the new bible, and people in following its maxims are deliberately having their limbs amputated and replaced by miracles of cybernetic prosthesis, as their method of proving the dominance of mind over machine. This portrayed society is fascinating both for its startling differences and its commonalties with our own.

The book obviously has a heavy philosophical component, as we follow the Doctor's thoughts and excerpts from his notebooks. But there is also a strong humorous undercurrent, with multiple (rather atrocious) puns (are puns ever anything else?), and a lot of laughing at itself for being so self-important. There is also a trend to treat sex as one of the most important actions of the human animal (one scene runs to a couple of pages as a single sentence), an item that inevitably gets folded into the philosophical discourse. The general prose style is quite readable, not overly descriptive and with reasonable dialogue, but it probably wouldn't win any style contests. Characterization is almost totally that of Martine, other characters have little development other than as foils for his development of a new philosophy - which naturally he records in another notebook.

There is much food for thought here, while Wolfe maintains a very interesting and dramatic story line, and keeps the whole thing all too believable. Is it the best thing ever written? No, but it is more than deserving of a contemplative read, and the thoughts and ideas presented will make you do a little thinking about just where our computerized world of today is headed.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)