{"title":"David Hajdu","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the insightful world of David Hajdu, exploring the intersection of music, culture, and biography. Perfect for readers fascinated by jazz, pop history, and the lives of influential artists.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"lush-life-book-david-hajdu-9781862070554","title":"Lush Life","description":"Billy Strayhorn was a black, gay man who wrote and arranged much of the music played by the Duke Ellington Orchestra. This biography gives a picture of a vanished culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49516221858065,"sku":"GOR001523046","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49642187653393,"sku":"GOR001212237","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1862070555.jpg?v=1750899931"},{"product_id":"lush-life-book-david-hajdu-9781862070158","title":"Lush Life","description":"This is a biography of Billy Strayhorn, who wrote and arranged many of the most significant music of the Ellington Orchestra between 1940 and 1967. Billy Strayhorn lived his too-short life in the giant shadow cast by Duke Ellington. He rarely shared the limelight with his mentor and leader. His compositions, of which \"Take the A Train\", \"Lush Life\" and \"Passion Flower\" are some of the best known, are increasingly important to younger musicians and to a wide public. Hardly a year goes by without the release of another album of reverential versions of his tunes. And like his peers, Strayhorn's life was marked, and eventually shortened, by tragic levels of stress and self-destruction. Strayhorn was a cultured, black intellectual. He was also openly gay, at a time when this was brave and unusual, and in a culture - that of the male jazz musician - notably unsympathetic to homosexuality. Content to let Ellington play the role of flamboyant leader, Strayhorn nonetheless suffered from his marginalization. He took refuge in a stylized world of cafe society, of late nights, good food and fine clothes - and in drink.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49564110061841,"sku":"GOR008111252","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49577322053905,"sku":"GOR002112771","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51662824931601,"sku":"GOR008304103","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1862070156.jpg?v=1751155614"},{"product_id":"ten-cent-plague-book-david-hajdu-9780312428235","title":"The Ten-Cent Plague","description":"In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, American popular culture was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics, in this engrossing history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572146512145,"sku":"GOR003106593","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49786797097233,"sku":"CIN0312428235A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50031517860113,"sku":"CIN0312428235G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50329188532497,"sku":"CIN0312428235VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000918343953,"sku":"NIN9780312428235","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52662038233361,"sku":"NLS9780312428235","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53632802324753,"sku":"GOR008197856","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312428235.jpg?v=1751323895"},{"product_id":"positively-4th-street-book-david-hajdu-9780747558262","title":"Positively 4th Street","description":"In 1966 when Bob Dylan, age twenty-five, disappeared from public view, he closed a chapter on one of the most fascinating stories in post-war cultural history. In just five years Dylan had become a spokesman for the counterculture; Greenwich Village the epicentre of youth style; and folk music - once played by earnest throwbacks - had been crossed with rock 'n' roll to form a thoughtful, literate, new musical style. POSITIVELY 4th STREET relates just how folk became rock by looking at four young beatniks and their rise to fame: Bob Dylan, his part-time lover Joan Baez, her sister Mimi, and Mimi's husband, the writer Richard Farina. It is that rare find - a new story to tell of a moment no one can forget.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49575212613905,"sku":"GOR001622305","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49608047591697,"sku":"GOR001647033","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51682003353873,"sku":"GOR004637772","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51764923662609,"sku":"NGR9780747558262","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0747558264.jpg?v=1750881282"},{"product_id":"positively-4th-street-book-david-hajdu-9780374281991","title":"Positively 4th Street","description":"This is the candid, mesmerizing, and often intimate account of how four young people--Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina--gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s. Even before they became lovers in 1963, Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music. But their songs and their public images grew out of their association with Joan's younger sister, Mimi, a musician in her own right, and Richard Farina, the roguish novelist Mimi married when she was seventeen. Their rise from scruffy coffeehouse folksingers to pop stars comes about through their complex interpersonal relationships, as the young Dylan courts the famous Joan to further his career, Farina woos Mimi while looking longingly on her older sister, and Farina's friend Thomas Pynchon keeps an eye on their amours from afar.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49587174834449,"sku":"GOR002433882","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49710381924625,"sku":"CIN0374281998G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":49942728835345,"sku":"CIN0374281998LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50309187666193,"sku":"CIN0374281998A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50517709422865,"sku":"CIN0374281998VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374281998.jpg?v=1751166043"},{"product_id":"heroes-and-villains-book-david-hajdu-9780306818332","title":"Heroes and Villains","description":"Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu, award-winning author of The Ten-Cent Plague, Positively 4th Street, and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial, Hajdu's essays take on topics as varied as pop music, jazz, the avant-garde,  comic books, and our downloading culture. The heart of Heroes and Villains is an extraordinary new piece of cultural rediscovery, original to this book. It tells the untold story of one of the most important-and, ultimately, one of the most tragic-figures in American popular music, Billy Eckstine. Through exhaustive new research, Hajdu shows how this great, forgotten singer, once more popular than Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, transformed American music by combining sex appeal, sophistication, and black machismo-in the era of segregation. The cost, for Eckstine, was his career-and nearly his life. Other essays in this expansive book deal with topical and surprising subjects like Beyonce, Bobby Darin, Kanye West, Marjane Satrapi, Woody Guthrie, Will Eisner, the White Stripes, Elmer Fudd, Elvis Costello, Harry Partch, Ray Charles, Joni Mitchell, and more.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49592944427281,"sku":"GOR005604977","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348162711825,"sku":"CIN0306818337G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51320988336401,"sku":"CIN0306818337A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52865458274577,"sku":"CIN0306818337VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0306818337.jpg?v=1750738834"},{"product_id":"positively-4th-street-book-david-hajdu-9780865476424","title":"Positively 4th Street","description":"This is the candid, mesmerizing, and often intimate account of how four young people--Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina--gave rise to a modern-day bohemia and created the enduring sound and style of the 1960s. Even before they became lovers in 1963, Dylan and Joan Baez were seen as the reigning king and queen of folk music. But their songs and their public images grew out of their association with Joan's younger sister, Mimi, a musician in her own right, and Richard Farina, the roguish novelist Mimi married when she was seventeen. Their rise from scruffy coffeehouse folksingers to pop stars comes about through their complex interpersonal relationships, as the young Dylan courts the famous Joan to further his career, Farina woos Mimi while looking longingly on her older sister, and Farina's friend Thomas Pynchon keeps an eye on their amours from afar.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49660811542801,"sku":"GOR006200280","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49927633994001,"sku":"CIN086547642XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50307402334481,"sku":"CIN086547642XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50364697379089,"sku":"CIN086547642XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53076778909969,"sku":"GOR014730424","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/086547642X.jpg?v=1750916129"},{"product_id":"ten-cent-plaque-book-david-hajdu-9780374187675","title":"The Ten-Cent Plaque","description":"In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created - in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress - only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told - until \"The Ten-Cent Plague\". David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. \"The Ten-Cent Plague\" shows how - years before music - comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.\"The Ten-Cent Plague\" radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between \"high\" and \"low\" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49913173115153,"sku":"CIN0374187673A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49921859125521,"sku":"CIN0374187673G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50514152980753,"sku":"GOR006395139","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50516547043601,"sku":"GOR005671158","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50994540445969,"sku":"CIN0374187673VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374187673.jpg?v=1751196869"},{"product_id":"lush-life-book-david-hajdu-9780374194383","title":"Lush Life","description":"Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as Take the 'A' Train, Lush Life, and Something to Live For. Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by another great composer: his employer, friend, and collaborator, Duke Ellington, with whom he worked as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. Lush Life, David Hajdu's sensitive and moving biography of Strayhorn, is a corrective to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz. It is also a vibrant, absorbing account of the lush life led by Strayhorn and other jazz musicians in Harlem and Paris. A musical prodigy who began a career as a composer while still a teenager in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn came to New York City at Duke Ellington's invitation in 1939; soon afterward he wrote 'A' Train, which became the signature song of the Ellington Orchestra, one of the most popular jazz bands in the country. For the next three decades, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington thrived in the role of public artist to Strayhorn's private one, often taking the bows for Strayhorn's work. Strayhorn was alternately relieved to be kept out of the limelight and frustrated about it. In Harlem and in the cafe society downtown, the small, shy black composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. His compositions and elegant arrangements made him a hero to other musicians, but when he died at age fifty-two, his life cut short by alcohol abuse and cancer, few people fully understood the vital role he played in theEllington Orchestra's development into a vehicle for some of the greatest, most ambitious American music of this century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49931680514321,"sku":"CIN0374194386G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51423316607249,"sku":"CIN0374194386VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52085776875793,"sku":"GOR009101276","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":52103639400721,"sku":"CIN0374194386A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374194386.jpg?v=1750878501"},{"product_id":"revolution-in-three-acts-book-david-hajdu-9780231191821","title":"A Revolution in Three Acts","description":"Winner - 2022 Deems Taylor \/ Virgil Thomson Book Awards in Pop from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers  Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape.  A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world.  This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49934965997841,"sku":"CIN0231191820G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231191820.jpg?v=1751226848"},{"product_id":"love-for-sale-book-david-hajdu-9780374170530","title":"Love for Sale","description":"David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of pop music, in an unexpected place - not with nostalgic reminiscences of the 45s of his youth but with the sheet music era at the end-of the nineteenth century. It was not so much the beginning of popular music - many songs were already popular - as it was the beginning of the popular music industry. And if he's going to understand what his 453 meant to him, this is the place to start: the rise of Tin Pan Alley, of minstrelsy, of million copy sellers and One hit wonders and cultural arbiters decrying the baseness, simplicity, and signs of the end of times in popular music. From there, Hajdu takes us on more unexpected routes through the history of pop music - back to Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of records ...and to his grandmother's collection of Italian crooners on shellac records that young Hajdu liberated from her New Jersey basement. And neither Italians nor New Jersey are incidental to his story - not just because of Frank Sinatra but because Hajdu's mom, a waitress in a chrome clad diner on Route 22, helped shape the fate of a budding young music critic by introducing him to one of the diner's most prominent patrons, the writer of the timeless song \"I'm from New Jersey.\" Love for Sale does ultimately spin through more familiar territory - the Cotton Club, the rise of radio, the battle of disco versus punk for the soul of New York as Hajdu made his chops as a critic, the rise of hip-hop, and the current atomisation of the music landscape but it is always with a unique, insightful, and eloquently presented point of view, as one would expect from one of our most celebrated music critics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49947440644369,"sku":"CIN0374170533G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50097872994577,"sku":"CIN0374170533VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323589263633,"sku":"CIN0374170533A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51444225868049,"sku":"GOR008970822","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53233052025105,"sku":"GOR014818997","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0374170533.jpg?v=1751448808"},{"product_id":"lush-life-book-david-hajdu-9780865475120","title":"Lush Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Billy Strayhorn (1915-67) was one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as \"Take the 'A' Train.\" Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for three decades as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. A \"definitive\" corrective (\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e) to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz, David Hajdu's \u003ci\u003eLush Life\u003c\/i\u003e is a vibrant and absorbing account of the \"lush life\" that Strayhorn and other jazz musicians led in Harlem and Paris. While composing some of the most gorgeous American music of the twentieth century, Strayhorn labored under a complex agreement whereby Ellington took the bows for his work. Until his life was tragically cut short by cancer and alcohol abuse, the small, shy composer carried himself with singular style and grace as one of the few jazzmen to be openly homosexual. \u003ci\u003eLush Life\u003c\/i\u003e has sparked an enthusiastic revival of interest in Strayhorn's work and is already acknowledged as a jazz classic.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50189596197137,"sku":"CIN0865475121G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50364652355857,"sku":"CIN0865475121A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008944374033,"sku":"NIN9780865475120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333055873297,"sku":"CIN0865475121VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51575639572753,"sku":"GOR005814361","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52430309359889,"sku":"NLS9780865475120","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0865475121.jpg?v=1751140070"},{"product_id":"positively-4th-street-book-david-hajdu-9780312680695","title":"Positively 4th Street","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347944149265,"sku":"CIN0312680694G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0312680694.jpg?v=1750940645"},{"product_id":"adrianne-geffel-book-david-hajdu-9780393634228","title":"Adrianne Geffel","description":"Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the “Geyser of Grand Street” and the “Queen of Bleak Chic,” she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her? Despite her renown, Adrianne Geffel vanished from public life, and her whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.   David Hajdu cuts through the noise to tell, for the first time, the full story of Geffel’s life and work, piecing it together through the memories of those who knew her, inspired her, and exploited her—her parents, teachers, best friend, manager, critics, and lovers. Adrianne Geffel made music so strange, so compelling, so utterly unique that it is simply not to be believed. Hajdu has us believing every note of it in this slyly entertaining work of fiction.   A brilliantly funny satire, with characters that leap off the page, Adrianne Geffel is a vividly twisted evocation of the New York City avant-garde of the 1970s and ’80s, and a strangely moving portrait of a world both utterly familiar and like none we’ve ever encountered.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50350353842449,"sku":"CIN0393634221VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50351906160913,"sku":"CIN0393634221G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52994867364113,"sku":"GOR014686081","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393634221.jpg?v=1751102985"},{"product_id":"positively-fourth-street-book-david-hajdu-9780747554141","title":"Positively Fourth Street","description":"The story of how four young would-be bohemians met in Greenwich Village, fell in love, and changed the course of American music. The book describes how folk music crossed with rock'n'roll to form a new musical style and how the young beatniks rose to fame.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50469414666513,"sku":"GOR001984843","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50651813347601,"sku":"GOR012546357","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51769027723537,"sku":"GOR008052338","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51985358094609,"sku":"GOR001218104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0747554145.jpg?v=1751232680"},{"product_id":"revolution-in-three-acts-book-david-hajdu-9780231191838","title":"A Revolution in Three Acts","description":"Winner - 2022 Deems Taylor \/ Virgil Thomson Book Awards in Pop from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers  Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape.  A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world.  This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51000494850321,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000498422033,"sku":"NIN9780231191838","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51600795074833,"sku":"CIN0231191839VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231191839.jpg?v=1751101331"},{"product_id":"uncanny-muse-book-david-hajdu-9780393540833","title":"The Uncanny Muse","description":"What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.   From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanise creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesisers and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art—and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognise. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching\".   With thoughtful, wide-ranging and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it—and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51002143211793,"sku":"NIN9780393540833","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51202118746385,"sku":"NGR9780393540833","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51430227083537,"sku":"CIN0393540839VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":52879962013969,"sku":"CIN0393540839LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393540839.jpg?v=1751134406"},{"product_id":"love-for-sale-book-david-hajdu-9781250141217","title":"Love for Sale","description":"David Hajdu begins Love for Sale, his personal history of pop music, in an unexpected place - not with nostalgic reminiscences of the 45s of his youth but with the sheet-music era at the end of the nineteenth century. It was not so much the beginning of popular music - many songs were already popular - as it was the beginning of the popular music industry. And if he's going to understand what his 45s meant to him, this is the place to start: the rise of Tin Pan Alley, of minstrelsy, of million-copy sellers and one-hit wonders and cultural arbiters decrying the baseness, simplicity, and signs of the end of times in popular music. Love for Sale does ultimately spin through more familiar territory - the Cotton Club, the rise of radio, the battle of disco versus punk for the soul of New York as Hajdu made his chops as a critic, the rise of hip-hop, and the current atomisation of the music landscape - but it is always with a unique, insightful, and eloquently presented point of view, as one would expect from one of our most celebrated music critics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51022207484177,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51022209155345,"sku":"NIN9781250141217","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51878313197841,"sku":"CIN1250141214G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52532767064337,"sku":"NLS9781250141217","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52816329441553,"sku":"CIN1250141214VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1250141214.jpg?v=1751302854"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-david-hajdu.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}