Review
Dave Hickey's twenty-three "love songs," which make up
Air Guitar, fly off the page to offer the reader a vista beyond the wasteland. In Hickey's "vast, invisible underground empire" of pleasure--record stores, honky-tonks, hot-rod shops, art galleries, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops and the like--joy abounds and truth speaks. --
The Nation, Margaret Juhae LeeFinally obliged to theorize his impolite tastes, judgments and ideas, Hickey lays his prejudices a little barer than altogether becomes them. Even caught in that old trap, however, he's as good as it gets, starting with his prose. Although his diction is often highfalutin (he was doing a doctoral thesis about
Foucault and
Derrida way back in 1967), his rhythms aren't, and he's more than fluent in colloquial English--I mean, the guy can flat-out write. --
Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Robert Christgau
Product Description
"As enjoyable and provocative a book of criticism as anyone has published in years."--Rolling Stone. "Hickey creates music of his own with the style of a good short-fiction writer and the insight of a first-rate thinker."--The Nation. "...a deliciously democratic style of prose."--The Boston Phoenix. "Air Guitar is naked pleasure, executing an unabashed literary seduction."--Los Angeles Times. Third Printing.