Just one of the reasons I enjoy being at UVM

Thanks to Nancy Welch for pointing out this terrific (and lengthy!) review of our colleague John Gennari’s great new book, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Critical acclaim does not get much better than this:

And so Gennari’s book does for jazz critics what most of them were unable to do for themselves, but with a postmodern twist: The scholar demystifies and historicizes the journalists. The first sustained scholarly book exclusively about jazz criticism–and, not least, about the passions that have driven and surrounded it–Blowin’ Hot and Cool is thorough, absorbing and original, an obsessive study of professional obsessives that will circumvent the need for any other.

I have to add this one to my list of books to read…. Seriously, I could spend an entire year just focusing on all the great books written by people in my department.