In the March 19-20, 2016, issue of The Wall Street Journal, Martin Riker reviewed the NYRB Classics edition of Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe's Really the Blues. Read an excerpt below, and the rest of the Riker's review here.
“American counter-culture classic Really the Blues [is] a stylized oral history that anticipates the Beat novel…Really the Blues is part quixotic adventure novel, part inside-scoop…Mezzrow’s voice is funny, impulsive, full of itself and often spectacularly scatological….Listening to “Mezz” is tremendous fun…the book’s true literary inheritance is its style…one of the great, flawed, jubilant, jive-talking characters of American literature.” —Martin Riker, The Wall Street Journal