StarTribune: Listening

Review of Listening by Jonathan Cott

A wide-ranging collection of interviews and profiles from twenty years of Jonathan Cott’s remarkable writingsThere ought to be a word in English that describes the nearly uncontrollable urge to leap out of a reading chair, race to find a friend, and press the book you are reading urgently into their hands. When they politely agree to take a look, you say no, no, you have to read this right now. Let me hold your coffee.

This is the feeling I get reading “Listening: Interviews, 1970-1989.” Jonathan Cott, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, author of 20 books and writer for the New York Times, the New Yorker and other publications, has collected a series of interviews that span his career. From the point of my reading chair, however, he has collected some of the most important voices of my generation. These are people who have changed my life, and to some degree I believe I know them. These interviews make that vague sense intimate.

 

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