Another Little Piece of My Heart by Richard Goldstein (Bloomsbury 2015)

In 1966, at the age of twenty-two, Richard Goldstein approached The Village Voice with a novel idea. “I want to be a rock critic,” he said. “What’s that?” the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn’t yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein became the first person to write regularly in a major publication about rock as a serious art form. From his unique position in journalism, he saw and participated in the full arc of events that shaped culture and politics in the 1960s. He toured with Janis Joplin, spent a day at the Grateful Dead house in San Francisco, and dropped acid with Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. He was present for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the student uprising at Columbia, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was challenged to a boxing match by Norman Mailer and took Susan Sontag to her first disco. Goldstein developed close relationships with several rock legends –– Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, to name two –– and their early deaths came as a wrenching shock, fueling his disillusionment as he watched the music he loved rapidly evolve from a communal rite to a vast industry and the sense of hope for radical social upheaval fade away. ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART is the intimate memoir of the writer as a young man with profound ambition. It is also a sweeping personal account of a decade that no one else could provide –– a deeply moving, unparalleled document of rock and revolution in America.

“A deeply felt and largely compelling portrait of an age that indelibly marked everyone who took part in it. Indispensable for understanding the culture of the sixties and the music that was at its heart.”

—Kirkus (starred review)