Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!! by Albert Goldman (1974)

I've never read a book with two exclamation points in its title before!! ...Nor a biography with a picture of the subject portrayed in death on the cover. There's something a little sensationalistic about this book.

I'm not even all that interested in Lenny Bruce although I do like to listen to his records, not so much for the content but for the incantatory rhythms of his delivery. What I do like about this book is the way it describes the USA of the 1950s and early '60s focused through the magnifying lens of one of its sharpest critics.

In a way this makes me think of a tourist photograph where whoever is in the foreground is less interesting than what's going on behind them. I didn't expect to get caught up in this but it's held my attention for 300 pages so far. Goldman sometimes gets a little too caught up in the momentum of his prose but for the most part it's an exhilarating read with plenty of sex, drugs, and jazz to hold one's prurient interest.

Although Bruce himself doesn't come off in not the most flattering light as a person (a junkie who collaborated with the same narcs he criticized), the atmosphere of conformity, repression, and paranoia which is the fabric of the society described reminds this jaded shock-proof reader how revolutionary Lenny Bruce's accomplishments really were--burning holes in that fabric like so much casually dropped cigarette ash.

Get the hardcover dirt cheap at amazon.com. It has cool tiled end papers comprised of Lenny's mugshot.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

The Fahrenheit scale of temperature is completely insane, yet somehow charming in its anthropocentric ordering of the cosmos. At 451 degrees F, paper combusts. Combustion is what this book is all about. Books, people, cities--all burn.

Do you like books? This is a book for book-likers.

Often lumped in with 1984 and Brave New World (not bad company to keep), the key difference is the villain is you and me; that is to say, the "everyperson" who prefers distraction to taking action. The denial of history brings about endless bloody repeats.

F451 offers a grim and despairing view of the American mind as one distracted to death by television and the continual pounding of vapid music through uncannily iPod-like "seashell" earbuds which keep the wearer tuned out from reality. I happened to read those passages while watching clueless Seattleites absentmindedly run their powerboats near lake swimmers of whom they were completely oblivious. The future Bradbury predicted is here now, minus the bookburning. But in a way Bradbury could not have anticipated, books are losing their sacred status as carriers of culture as people turn to the internet for information. That repository of trivia and unchecked facts leaves history open to endless revision which, as Orwell warned, makes it easy to manipulate the present.

Although it offers a sad view of the declining American intellect, the book's ending is hopeful in a destroy-to-create paradoxical way.