"Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music," edited by Nona Willis Aronowitz (University of Minnesota Press: 232 pp., $22.95 paper). Willis — who died in 2006 at age 64 — was a trailblazer, one of the early female rock writers and the first pop music critic at the New Yorker. This collection, which gathers 59 of her pieces, showcases her fierce intelligence and her political and cultural engagement as well as her recognition of the abiding contradictions of the music that she loved.
