The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll: A Memoir
“Hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring.... Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.” — Michael Pollan
“With sentences that sometimes astonish” (Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft), celebrated cultural critic Mark Edmundson has written a hip and hilarious coming-of-age memoir about one man’s miscues and false starts as he enters the world after college. Through exhilarating adventures, he attempts to answer the timeless question of who he is, while contemplating what role music, love, work, drugs, money, and books will play in his life.
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The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll: A Memoir
“Hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring.... Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.” — Michael Pollan
“With sentences that sometimes astonish” (Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft), celebrated cultural critic Mark Edmundson has written a hip and hilarious coming-of-age memoir about one man’s miscues and false starts as he enters the world after college. Through exhilarating adventures, he attempts to answer the timeless question of who he is, while contemplating what role music, love, work, drugs, money, and books will play in his life.
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The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll: A Memoir
“Hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring.... Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.” — Michael Pollan
“With sentences that sometimes astonish” (Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft), celebrated cultural critic Mark Edmundson has written a hip and hilarious coming-of-age memoir about one man’s miscues and false starts as he enters the world after college. Through exhilarating adventures, he attempts to answer the timeless question of who he is, while contemplating what role music, love, work, drugs, money, and books will play in his life.
Mark Edmundson is a professor at the University of Virginia and the prizewinning author of numerous works of cultural criticism, including Why Read?; Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida; and Teacher. He lives in Batesville, Virginia.
Table of Contents
Beginnings (hot shits) 1
1 The King of Rock and Roll (music) 11
2 Taxi! (money) 37
3 A Moviegoer (jobs) 67
4 Life Drugs, Death Drugs (consciousness) 93
5 How to Leave New York (nature) 117
6 Disco Nights (eros) 141
7 School Days (depression) 165
8 Woodstock II (vocation) 191
acknowledgments 225
What People are Saying About This
Matthew Crawford
“Edmundson doesn’t just chronicle, he channels, the epoch of rock.... He makes us feel its hopes; its confusions; its genuine revelations…. Concert security dude, cabbie, bouncer: these jobs provide him critical lenses on a succession of cultural moments, and on the never-ending task of becoming an adult.”
Michael Pollan
“Everything you want a coming-of-age book to be: hilarious, harrowing, and ultimately inspiring. . . . Brims with sparkling observations about everything from drugs, sex and rock and roll to movies, career, and friendship. Truly, there is something arresting and wonderful on every page.”
Philipp Meyer
“A compelling and accomplished memoir recounting the dissolution of the sixties and the beginning of the modern, more cynical era that followed. . . Candidly describes Mark Edmundson’s journey as a lost twenty-something seeking meaning through sex, drugs, Marxism, rock & roll, and ultimately, teaching.”