Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives

by Stanley Crouch

Book Overview

From the author of The All-American Skin Game comes a brilliant new collection of essays on the sublime and the ridiculous in contemporary American culture and society. Erudite and passionate,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375701680
• ISBN13: 9780375701689
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

he takes no prisoners

In this collection of essays the brilliant Stanley Crouch comes off a lot like your grouchy old uncle who hates everything. This may put you off but keep reading because a lot of what he's saying is true. Miles Davis did turn out scholk ablums in his later years, much of what passes for black comedy is half a step from the old mintrel show and the O.J.Simpson case was lost becuase the prosecution did a lousy job. Crouch takes know prisoners and spares no one's feelings. If he loves something he says so and if he thinks someone is a fool he says that too. You'll smile, you'll be offended and you might hurl the book down in anger but read it. Mr. Crouch has an interesting mind, something that is sorely lacking in much of our media figures today.

Stanley 'live wire' Crouch...

....I dig Crouch, because, right or wrong, he, like one of my favorites Camille Paglia, has the guts to say the unspeakable, and to go where few dare to go....I was exposed to his writing via my bohemian older brothers and sister...they were into art, jazz, the Greenwich Village avant garde, the left, the left, and all things Nina Simone and Dick Gregory and Lenny Bruce. Somehow all these issues of The Village Voice wound up in this poor kid's frame of reference. They were stacked at the foot of my bed, what can I say? So, I browsed them not just because they were provocative in many ways, but because I dug the Jules Ffieffer comic strips near the front of each issue.So, one day, I go deeper into the paper and began getting hooked on these great music reviews--jazz, in particular, by Nat Hentoff, by Christeau (? spelling), by our hero Stanley Crouch...Stanley and Nat usually ended up writing other things like of a Noo Yawk political matter, and Stanley left the VV for writing novels, essays, OP-Ed articles in The Daily News, etc, etc, etc...The man is opinionated, that's for sure. He calls Michael Jackson an out of touch narcissist, he criticizes Malcolm X for being no more than a rabble rouser, and conjectures that Monica Lewinsky is one out of 50 million other American women....? (I don't need more negative votes than I can handle--these are some of Crouch's opinions, now!) He's the one who bought the notion that Al Sharpton is probably worse than that characterisation of him in Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and I don't think Spike Lee likes him much, because the two always seem to be feuding about something.But this much is true, Stanley Crouch did say that the rap/hip-hop posturing is sort of minstrel show-like and Stephen Fetchit-like...I wonder how much Spike Lee was influenced by Crouch, afterall, being that his film "Bamboozled" goes deeply into this very notion....Crouch does his best when he is observant of occurances in this great nation. He sees and decries the balkanization of America (that "our group is better than and more important than anyone else's group" feeling in which I call "hubris"--which, I may add, is in no short supply by any strech of the imagination) and wonders if America will ever become like a jazz ensemble. "A democratic music form" in which each player will have to know how to play his instrument, and each player has an unsentimental view of things in life. Sentimentality is another one of America's unresolved issues, according to Crouch. Get over it, says Crouch, be an adult... Anyway, however you take Stanley Crouch, he sure is interesting and thought provoking and this book of his essays from the nineties will have you informed and entertained...

Thoughtful and beautifully written

You may not agree with the temperture of his writing, but you will not soon experience anyone who writes greater force and beauty.

A unique, improvisatorial approach to the art of the essay

In this collection of essays, the subjects of which range from the commercialism of Michael Jackson to the wisdom and insight of Ralph Ellison to sex in the army, Stanley Crouch offers a fresh and engaging perspective on the "blues" that our society faces today. Although he is not always perfectly accurate and consistent in his sociological marksmanship, his application of the jazz idiom to his writing style is unique and, quite often, breathtaking. Crouch has proven himself to be a masterful esasayist and has demonstrated a firm command of the english language.