Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

Long recognized as America’s most brilliant jazz writer, winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection, he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume. The range of topics is spellbinding. Writing with insight, humor, and a famously deft touch, he offers sharp-edged perspectives on such diverse subjects as Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Marlon Brando and Groucho Marx, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan, horror and noir, the cartoon version of Animal Farm and the comic book series Classics Illustrated. Throughout, Giddins reveals his uncommon ability to address in very few words an entire career, so that we get an in-depth portrait of the artist beyond the film, book, or recording under review. A wonderful gathering of little-known
treasures, Natural Selection will broaden the perception of Gary Giddins as one of our most important cultural critics.

Gary Giddins wrote the Village Voice’s ’Weather Bird’ column for more than thirty years. His eight books and three documentary films have garnered unparalleled recognition for jazz, including a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, two Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Awards, six ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim, and a Peabody. He lives in New York City.