The Dustbin of History

by Greil Marcus

Book Overview

"How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?" Robert Palmer wondered in Deep Blues. Greil Marcus answers here: more than we will ever know. It is the history in the riff, in the movie or novel or photograph, in the actor's pose or critic's posturing--in short, the history in cultural happenstance--that Marcus reveals here, exposing along the way the distortions and denials that keep us oblivious if not immune to...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674218582
• ISBN13: 9780674218581
• Release Date: April 1997
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Provocative essays.

Cultural critic Marcus, perhaps best known for his association with Rolling Stone magazine, presents 26 rewritten and re-titled essays on subjects as various as Paleolithic art and John Wayne, doo-wop and The Manchurian Candidate, his widely informed understanding and highly original insights linking seemingly disparate currents "to reveal what seems to lie beneath the surfaces of ordinary history". In his introductory "Sketch", Marcus hopes "some of these stories ... represent ... borders well beyond those within which what we call history is usually situated. All in all, this book means to be about how we situate ourselves in history: how we understand ourselves as creatures of the past and makers of our own present, and our own future - and, by implication, of our own pasts." (The "score" rating is a feature of this page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)