Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man by Robert Christgau (Dey Street/HarperCollins 2015)

One of our great essayists and music journalists, the Dean of American Rock Critics, leads a heady tour through his life and times in this atmospheric, visceral memoir—both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of art.

Lifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at The Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock and roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan’s Avenue B forty years before it was cool, wit-nessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago 1968 and the first abortion speakout. He caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.

Listed in Oprah’s O Magazine December 2015 Top Ten Reading List

“To read Going Into the City is to spend hours in the company of a completely sui generis critical mind, one that’s not only encyclopedically knowledgeable about mid-to-late 20th-century pop culture but capable of lapidary prose, astute insight, and savage wit.” — Slate

“An intellectual autobiography that beautifully captures what it feels like when a cultural experience trapdoors you into a new life.” — Grantland