Charles Taylor

No other actor of the past 10 to 12 years has come close to Michelle
Pfeiffer for sheer versatility. No two of the performances she has turned out — in
pictures as varied as “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Fabulous Baker Boys,”
“The Russia House,” “Batman Returns,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Love
Field,” “Tequila Sunrise” and the PBS adaptation of John O’Hara’s short
story “Natica Jackson” — are remotely alike. You can see Pfeiffer’s range in the innocuous Alan Alda comedy “Sweet Liberty” (1986), in which she plays a movie star acting in a revolutionary war epic. The first
time we see Pfeiffer she’s preparing to go before the cameras in period
character, all crinolines and hoop skirts and 18th century grace.
Seeing her out of costume two scenes later is an almost Brechtian shock.
Dressed in a baggy work shirt, her hair a cascading tangle, Pfeiffer puffs on a
cigarette while berating her agent over the phone. Everything about her
manner is sharp, abrupt, neurotically modern. Alda exclaims, “It’s like you’re two entirely different people.” Pfeiffer answers, “If all I could be was
two different people, I’d be out of business.”

And yet during the first years she was in movies, it was a crapshoot whether Pfeiffer would get to prove herself at all. She had to overcome the obstacle that all enormously attractive people face: the assumption that somebody that pretty just can’t act. She didn’t get much help from the
window-dressing roles that came her way (after she dropped out of college to
pursue an acting career) in movies like “Grease 2″ and “Into the Night,” or in the short-lived TV shows “Delta House” and “B.A.D. Cats.” It was easy to make the mistake of thinking this was just another pretty SoCal girl.
But there’s a weird reticence to those performances, a way in which Pfeiffer,
sensing the worthlessness of the material, is deliberately holding part of herself back. What’s lacking in her is exactly the thing most starlets are desperate to get across: a willingness to please.

She was window dressing again in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface.” Playing a gangster’s moll, she makes a memorable entrance — dressed in a form-fitting
sequined gown, Pfeiffer slowly descends in a glass elevator. But this time the movie makes a place for her character’s trashy hauteur in the drop-dead
moment that follows: Pfeiffer sits bored in a Miami nightclub, not even bothering to hide her disdain, while her Mr. Big boyfriend (Robert Loggia)
gets indiscriminately drunk with a couple of associates. Having had enough of this boys’ show, Pfeiffer turns to Loggia and, in a voice that could freeze vodka, asks, “So, Frank, ya wanna dance, ya wanna sit there and have a heart
attack?” It’s a great tough-broad delivery, the kind that gets an actress noticed. But nobody could have guessed the range and the delicacy that were
still to come.

They didn’t quite come in the medieval fantasy “Ladyhawke” (1985) or the suburban fantasy “The Witches of Eastwick” (1987). But with 1987′s “Natica Jackson” and the 1-2-3 punch of the following year’s “Married to the Mob,” “Tequila
Sunrise” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” Pfeiffer established the distinctive mix
that has continued to define her performances.

The most characteristic quality of American acting has always been its
straightforwardness, a no-nonsense approach that reflects the slangy, casual,
wisecracking tone of American life. Pfeiffer has embraced that style while adding something it usually doesn’t admit: poeticism. As much as any
actress since Julie Christie or Judy Davis, Pfeiffer is attuned to evanescent shifts of mood. Her emotions seem visible, moving just below the surface of her luminous skin. To say she’s an actress made for movies isn’t merely to
say that her beauty invites the camera but that the camera magnifies the subtle interplay of emotions that, at almost any given moment, are
flickering over her face. That’s why she was so perfectly cast in “Dangerous Liaisons” as a woman whose place in society depends on her ability to
maintain a social mask, yet who is so guileless she can’t hide what she’s feeling. You could say the same thing of her role in Fred Schepisi’s 1990
“The Russia House” (which is looking more and more like one of the decade’s best films) as a Russian publishing assistant who gets involved in
smuggling a document detailing the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability to the West.
Even with Glasnost, Pfeiffer’s Katya is living in a society where she has to
constantly watch herself, maintaining a poker face during surreptitious coded phone conversations with her physicist lover (the
superb Klaus Maria Brandauer), and arresting the dreamy smile that comes over her when she hears a snatch of folk music in a restaurant and realizes
she’s giving something of herself away.

And it’s tenderness that’s present beneath the surface of Pfeiffer’s more
hard-boiled roles. Like nobody else, Pfeiffer can play tough and utterly
vulnerable, as in the role of Susie Diamond, the professional escort
turned lounge singer in “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989). In that film,
Pfeiffer and Jeff Bridges act out the most unyielding love duet imaginable.
They’re two people who are attracted to each other yet refuse to budge
an inch. Each time they settle into the warm bath of seduction, one or both
of them douse the mood in cold water. There’s a sentimental side to “The
Fabulous Baker Boys” that’s in tune with the romantic self-pity of the
standards that underscore the action. But Pfeiffer has a way of cutting
through that, of making the daggers she aims hit their targets. The morning
after she and Bridges first sleep together, she deadpans, “Don’t worry … your high-school graduation ring is safe.” The performance might seem all edges if it weren’t for the way Pfeiffer floods the aftermath of those
moments with regret. The irony of Susie Diamond is that the protective
armor she erects only makes it easier for her to beat herself up.

Perhaps the most impressive duet of Pfeiffer’s career is the one she plays
with Michael Keaton in “Batman Returns” (1992). When director Tim
Burton eschews the folderol that clutters the film and focuses in on these
two, he approaches the level of “The Empire Strikes Back” or “Superman II,” films that offer the peculiarly moving spectacle of seeing comic-book
characters inhabited by human-scale emotions. Certainly, Selina Kyle, the
shy-mouse secretary who finds the second of her nine lives as Catwoman, is
the wildest bit of acting Pfeiffer’s ever done. Using a timid little voice in her
first scenes, and with her hair as scattered as her stray thoughts, Pfeiffer
heads right for caricature while maintaining a keening edge of emotional
desperation beneath. One look at Selina’s pink apartment, cluttered up with
a child’s stuffed animals and doll houses, tells you all you need to know
about the character. When she’s outfitted as the latex avenger Catwoman,
everything in Pfeiffer’s portrayal changes, from the
insinuating, slow-as-molasses stride she employs to the deep
slow-as-molasses voice that might be coming out of Tallulah Bankhead. As
Selina falls in love with Bruce Wayne and their secret identities get in the
way, Pfeiffer’s performance grows even more neurotically lyrical, until she
seems to be skipping along the knife’s edge that separates fantasy from total
emotional disintegration.

As Pfeiffer kept racking up one critically acclaimed performance after
another, mostly in films that weren’t hits, she seemed to be in the same
position as the ’30s Hollywood starlet she played in “Natica Jackson.” In one
scene, the studio head complains that Natica “can’t carry a picture by
herself,” while her agent counters, “She walks off with every picture she’s
in and you know it.” The debate about Pfeiffer was whether she had
the star power to “open” a movie without the benefit of a famous male
co-star. (Articles that attempted to address just how big a star Pfeiffer was felt
duty bound to mention that she’d turned down both “The Silence of the
Lambs” and “Thelma and Louise,” as if saying no to those stinkers were
proof of her bad judgment.) The argument wasn’t settled until the
urban-school melodrama “Dangerous Minds” turned out to be a surprise hit
in the summer of 1995. But Pfeiffer continued to turn out astonishing
performances, as she had in 1992′s “Love Field,” a slickly crafted melodrama
about a Dallas housewife who runs away from her husband to take a
Greyhound north for JFK’s funeral. Pfeiffer pulls off an amazing
transformation in the film, showing us how a woman who at first seems as
silly as her peroxided puff of hair emerges from her fantasies to construct a
real life for herself. And as a waitress who surrenders to the persistent
courtship of a short-order cook (a rather creepy Al Pacino) in “Frankie and
Johnny” (1991), Pfeiffer gave what may be her best performance to date.

Her casting in that film set off a brouhaha, however. The material, adapted by Terrence
McNally from his play “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” is
squarely in the pathos-of-the-little-people mode (like Paddy Chayefsky’s
“Marty”). Kathy Bates had played the part onstage, and Pfeiffer’s casting
unleashed the usual blather about the unfair advantage beauty has in the
movies. But if you listened to the complaints, which ran along the lines of
“Michelle Pfeiffer is too beautiful to be a waitress,” you had to question the
assumptions beneath them. Were those people saying that working-class
women are ugly, or were they just falling back on the old canard that actors
can’t believably play ordinary people? As Frankie, Pfeiffer wears little
make-up, has circles under her eyes and lets her hair go slack and dull. But
she isn’t playing the actress’s game of courting praise by drabbing herself
down. Frankie’s weariness comes from the inside, from too many identical
days of slinging hash and too many nights with louses. In a sense, Pfeiffer’s
beauty works so well because, for Frankie, it’s beside the point; she’s too
slugged out by life to take notice of herself. The resistance she puts up to
Pacino’s Johnny may be the spikiest acting Pfeiffer’s done, and it undercuts
the play’s simple-minded premise that heartbreak has caused Frankie
to hide from the adventure of life. Pfeiffer plays Frankie as a woman
stubborn enough to insist on making her own decisions, sick of having to
live up to other people’s expectations. Pfeiffer reverses the power structure
of the play so that by the time she yields to Pacino, it’s entirely on Her terms.
She puts real grit in McNally’s phony symphony of the big city, an edge that
the writer’s well-made play design can’t smooth down.

It’s hard not to feel that, in the last few years, Pfeiffer has been in something
of a holding pattern. Her movie choices seem less fortuitous (“Wolf,” “To Gillian on her 37th Birthday,” “Up Close and Personal,”), and though she’s often been fine in them, they don’t seem to inspire her. It may be that her attention is elsewhere — perhaps in raising her
two children, an adopted daughter and a younger son from her marriage to
producer David E. Kelley (“The Practice,” “Ally McBeal”). Pfeiffer has voiced her reluctance to do
any movies whose production would take her away from her children. And
it may be that she is trying to reflect her experience as a mother with parts
like “One Fine Day,” “A Thousand Acres” and this year’s “The Deep End of the Ocean.” The trouble is that mom roles, by definition, tend toward the
soft and sexless (some of the exceptions being Diane Keaton in “Shoot the
Moon,” Andie McDowell in “Unstrung Heroes” and Allison Steadman in
“Life Is Sweet”), and the roles Pfeiffer is choosing leave no place for either
her toughness or her lyricism.

Critics and feminists have been quick to
complain that in the movies, women past 40 are no longer viewed
sexually. Part of that problem is the virtuous roles that are touted
for actresses past 40, washed-out domestic bits that are supposed to “address
the concerns of real women” or some such thing (and are often from
bestsellers written by women, as in the case of “A Thousand Acres” and
“The Deep End of the Ocean”); overtly sexual roles are considered
demeaning or inappropriate. The luxuriance Pfeiffer brings to the fairy
queen Titania in Michael Hoffman’s mucked-up new film of “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a step in the right direction. But why does
playing your age too often mean drabbing yourself down? And where does
that leave those actresses, like Michelle Pfeiffer, whose sexuality is inseparable from their
intelligence and their excitement?

Both “Raylan” and “Justified” are contemporary westerns, moving the conventions of horse opera to present-day Kentucky. Oxycontin (“hillbilly heroin,” as it’s called in one episode) has supplemented moonshine, but much else is still the same. Raylan is the upright, no-nonsense lawman, and the villains he faces (many of them) are the type of inbred bad news who caused problems for decent, law-abiding folks in pictures like “My Darling Clementine,” “Man of the West,” and “Ride the High Country.” Raylan, like every great western hero, is burdened by his own reputation, which in his case stems from the time he gave a Miami drug kingpin 24 hours to get out of town (and blew the bastard away when he didn’t). That gets Raylan reassigned to the hometown he wanted to escape, back in the same territory with his scheming con man daddy, his ex-wife, and his high school crush, who’s just taken permanent revenge on her abusive husband.

Leonard’s novels have inspired some fine adaptations, both in movies (“Out of Sight,” “Jackie Brown,” the relatively unseen “Killshot”) and on TV (the late, lamented “Karen Cisco”). “Justified” may be the best anyone has done at capturing the novelist’s mordant, flippant tone. The various brands of mayhem that have turned up on the show are greeted by victims and lawmen alike with a “Well, whadd’re you gonna do?” shrug. As Raylan, Olyphant is what you might have seen if the young Gary Cooper had been a put-on artist. The marshal is a hot pistol who’s had to learn to play it cool. His 10-gallon hat might be the cork that keeps his inner volcano from blowing. Much of the time Olyphant, who moves through each episode in lean, clean strides, seems to be privately amused by the corruption of the fools who mess with him.

As a novel, “Raylan” is a casual endeavor, Leonard having fun with a character who’s gained a measure of popularity. It’s also a pisser. Leonard has come up with some doozies for the plot: the dimwit sons of a backwoods pot grower joining in a scheme to swipe kidneys and then ransom them back for replacement in the victims’ bodies; a female coal company exec who, annoyed with a local’s complaints about the pollution caused by strip mining, picks up a rifle and shoots the old man. The violence here has the swift kick of a good, mean joke. It makes you wince and grin at the same time.

Raylan’s a straight arrow, but he’s not a stick-in-the-mud. He’s not too upright to consider a dalliance with the transplant nurse who’s masterminding the kidney-swiping scheme or that coal company exec, who hires him as her bodyguard. (His common sense wins out — by a hair — over his libido.) The compressed form of the stories is perfect for a writer who long ago learned to pare away every extraneous word.

There’s another reason Leonard’s creation and the TV show it spawned have clicked. A hero who sees the irony in being the tall, true man of the law — and is anyway — may be the only kind of traditional hero we can believe in now. In recent years, “cowboy” has come to be an epithet denoting ill-advised American military adventuring. But what’s denigrated as cowboy behavior is almost always more appropriate to the recklessness of the outlaw that the westerner faces. Raylan keeps his own counsel, considers the consequences before he acts, tells those who oppose him what the consequences are, uses violence when it’s called for but never revels in it and would just as soon avoid it. Among the other pleasures Leonard and his Kentucky lawman provide, they’ve restored the cowboy’s good name.

Further reports on the story are sure to observe that the entire episode might have been plucked from the movies. This is incorrect. Plucked from films, yes. The story is half-ready for the art house. Strip the tale of glamour, remove any potential for excitement and you’ve not only got a greenlight, but guaranteed analysis in Cineaste, and a panel accompanying the New York opening consisting of Naomi Klein, a New York University expert on the Middle East, and any film critic dextrous enough to use “hegemony” in a sentence.

But the movies? Forget it. Hollywood is too besotted with sequels, reboots, animation to stick a toe into the real world. And the supposed change from this routine that the holiday season offers consists usually of adaptations of the kind of novels (usually Booker winners) that are purchased instead of read, or a Nancy Myers comedy in which a 50-ish divorcee (Meryl/Goldie/Diane) who has founded her own successful wrapping-paper company has to decide if her heart lies with her younger lesbian business partner (Debra Messing) or with a rakish older European diplomat (Bernard-Henri Levy).

Opportunities for film viewing in Kabul are understandably sparse. Salon’s sources in the city report that there are only two screens in operation at the city’s sixplex and they are currently offering “Speed Racer” and “Lambada: The Forbidden Dance.” Clearly, it’s time for America to intervene. Despite our massive expenditures in the country, our officials can surely afford a selection of DVDs designed to train Afghan officials on not falling for an impostor.

We suggest:

“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (1967) — We direct Afghan leaders to the suspicion shown by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in the early part of the film toward the doctor their daughter brings home as her fiancé. The audience may consider their fears unreasonable because the doctor is, after all, Sidney Poitier and the young woman could as easily have brought home Eldridge Cleaver or Sonny Liston. But had the Afghans treated the impostor’s moderate proposals with even a smidge of the skepticism Spence and Kate show toward even such a paragon as Poitier, surely this embarrassing situation might have been avoided.

“Brokeback Mountain” (2005) — Was this individual really in close contact with the Taliban? If he had, he surely would have shown some inclination to the rugged, and all too often lonely, life that solitary figures like insurgents or closeted gay cowboys lead. Simply the mention of certain items — Ralph Lauren flannel shirts; beef jerky; a pet mule named Faiza — would have elicited a certain gleam in the eye of the real McCoy.

“Footloose” (1984) — Certainly only as dedicated a zealot as an actual Taliban leader could resist the combined lure of Kevin Bacon’s dancing and Kenny Loggins’ music. Slip the movie on during a break in negotations. Does this alleged mullah tap his feet, or nod his head sternly during John Lithgow’s fire-and-brimstone sermons? For the sake of the money you’ve just shelled out, pray it’s the latter.

“The Passion of the Christ” (2004) Four words: It’s the Jews’ fault. Sure to warm the heart of any true jihadist.

“Sex and the City 2″ (2010): Watch your man as he watches Carrie and the girls live it up in Abu Dhabi. Does he chuckle at their antics or make proclamations about profanations of the infidel harlots? (Note: The film can also be useful for other methods of recognition. See: “Brokeback Mountain.”)

Charles Taylor is a writer in New York.

You could argue that Haynes, being black himself, had a built-in kinship to the black sons and daughters of Lowndes County. But seen from the midst of our current national division, one that’s less dramatic though perhaps just as poisonous as the divisions of the ’60s, it’s hard not to read Haynes’ faith that he could reach his students — not to overwhelm them or argue them down but, in Branch’s exquisitely chosen word, “to harmonize” — as a belief in the transformative power of discourse, a belief that America, both right and left, has largely abandoned.

And if that faith is abandoned, Branch would likely argue, then Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision is a dream that has no hope of being realized.

Every year, Dr. King’s birthday brings editorials extolling how far we’ve come from the days of legal segregation (true) or lamenting how far we’ve fallen short of his example (also true). Writers complain that a day devoted to nothing more than shopping is no way to honor his legacy. The far more insidious debasement of King’s legacy can be seen every day in what passes for political engagement in America right now. In 2003, in the left political journal Dissent, Queens College history professor Michael Wreszin inadvertently exemplified that debasement when, responding to co-editor Michael Walzer’s assertion that the left needs to enter a dialogue with the people most set against it, he asked if King should have been expected “to communicate with the average white citizen in racist Mississippi and Cicero, Illinois.” And, of course, the answer is yes. King knew that if he didn’t communicate with those people, there was no hope of eroding racism. That doesn’t mean that he took a gentle line with them, or hesitated to name ignorance and brutality when he encountered it. But King’s approach depended on reaching reasonable people, people who may not have been ready to welcome black people into their homes but who, ashamed by the more repellent racism around them, were finally able to see the legal and moral arguments for admitting blacks to lunch counters and public facilities and, the toughest stretch of all, to their schools and neighborhoods.

That’s a rapprochement Wreszin can’t imagine. He writes from the blinkered depths of a culture war where the most notorious phrase of a despised president, “You’re either with us or you’re against us,” fits the mind-set of both his fiercest adherents and his most vociferous opponents. Just as politics is not possible if you’re not willing to say what people don’t want to hear, it’s not possible if you’re willing to listen only to what you want to hear.

In “At Canaan’s Edge,” which deals with 1965-68 — the years spanning the Selma to Montgomery march to King’s assassination in Memphis — Branch sticks to the facts, following the story (not just of King but of “America in the King Years”) into Vietnam, tracking J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign against King, charting the divide between the civil rights movement and the emerging black power movement, and almost never interpreting. There is a vision that comes through, though, a vision that is an implicit rebuke to the divisiveness of what currently passes for politics.

For Branch, nonviolence represents the highest form of political engagement because it must be employed at the moments when it’s most tempting to abandon the idea that engagement is even possible. Branch wants to demonstrate the political viability of nonviolence as both moral stance and practical strategy — even though he calls nonviolence “an orphan among democratic ideas” that “has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government — the vote — has no other meaning.” What’s been orphaned, in Branch’s view, is an expansive vision of what it means to be a citizen.

“America’s founders centered political responsibility in the citizens themselves, but, nearly two centuries later, no one expected a largely invisible and dependent racial minority to ignite protests of steadfast courage — boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, jail marches — dramatized by stunning forbearance and equilibrium into the jaws of hatred.” In other words, Branch is saying, people who were not even allowed the rights granted them by the Constitution acted, not simply for their own freedom, but as if the very fate of the republic depended on their actions. In order to do that, they had to have faith that the potential and the possibility of America far surpassed the worst of its governance and its people.

Branch does not need to underline the irony that some in the civil rights movement, like J.T. Haynes, were World War II vets, and returned from combat only to face a homegrown fascism. Haynes was in the congregation of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Lowndes County on the night of Feb. 28, 1965, when Klansmen surrounded the church with rifles. (The congregation was able to leave when the Klansmen inexplicably withdrew.) Incidents like this, and the earlier murder of a 26-year-old pulpwood worker named Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot twice in the stomach by police during a night march from Zion’s Chapel Methodist Church, galvanized the response to Rev. James Bevel’s proposal for a 54-mile march from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery. The march would take participants right through the heart of Lowndes County. The violence began before the marchers even made it out of Selma.

The first attempt at a march, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, resulted in the notorious scenes of Gov. George Wallace’s Alabama state troopers and reserves on horseback ramming through marchers as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ABC showed footage of the carnage that night, interrupting its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg.” (At the point ABC cut into the film, a German couple was explaining they knew nothing about the treatment of Jews under Hitler.) A second attempt was made during which King turned back so as not to defy a court order barring the march. Hours later, the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who had come from Boston to join the march, was clubbed outside a cafe and later died of his injuries. The third — and finally successful — march was begun on March 21. The marchers, their ranks victoriously swollen, reached Montgomery on March 24. That night, Viola Liuzzo, a white marcher from Detroit, was shot to death as she began the long drive home to Michigan. (It was later revealed that one of the passengers in the shooter’s car, Gary Thomas Rowe, was an FBI informant who almost certainly had knowledge of what was going to happen.)

The Selma to Montgomery march takes up almost the first 200 pages of “At Canaan’s Edge.” It needs to, because it was the last great march of the civil rights movement. It was also the moment when the coalition formed between church groups like King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and student groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others like the Congress of Racial Equality, began to fray. The deaths of Jackson, Reeb and Liuzzo, the 1964 murders of the Freedom Summer volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, and the constant threats and danger civil rights workers faced in the rural South were starting to grind down the commitment to nonviolent change. To people who had seen their co-workers beaten or had themselves suffered in jails, King’s unwavering insistence on nonviolence came to seem almost suicidal.

Branch understands the almost inhuman effort required of people not to react violently when they live in constant fear for their lives. Reading “At Canaan’s Edge,” you understand exactly why Stokely Carmichael, arrested 27 times during his work with SNCC, finally came to the point where he yelled at a crowd of demonstrators about to be tear-gassed by state troopers, “You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!” You see why Carmichael and movement figures like SNCC’s James Forman came to conclude that nonviolence would not help American blacks. More profoundly, you understand just how foolhardy a conclusion that was.

What is frequently branded radical politics in America is often just romantic fantasy, a childish impatience with anything that produces less than immediate results, mistakenly equating the compromises that politics entails with corruption. One of King’s favorite quotations, often used in his speeches, was the abolitionist Theodore Parker’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” That was not a means of mollifying people who had given and suffered so much — it was a way of honoring that suffering and sacrifice. It would be wrong to discount the sacrifices that the members of SNCC made. It’s not exaggerating to say that attempting to register black voters in the South at that time was an invitation to being murdered. But as SNCC became increasingly radicalized, it, along with the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers — who, with their uniform of leather and sunglasses and proudly displayed weapons, had made themselves the stars of the vigilante movie playing in their heads — came to be certain that working toward equality through the mechanisms of representative democracy was the same thing as making yourself a whipping boy for the Man.

One of the few places in the book where Branch betrays his own impatience is when he writes of SNCC, “They were no longer students or nonviolent. They no longer coordinated sacrifice beyond the wisdom and courage of the nation’s elders, nor operated by egalitarian grassroots committee. Instead, they competed for celebrity attention while reverting to youthful disputes as tawdry as snipes at their clothes.” Having given them the respect they are due, Branch is, I think, saying that finally they did not have the moral courage to live up to the meaning of their sacrifice, and that their rhetoric was less articulate than the unspoken faith shown by others who were confident that the courage they had shown and the violence they had endured would pay off in profound change. Those people understood, as a friend of mine put it, no real revolutionary ever hated his own country.

Lost in the fantasy that the system was so rotten it could not be changed, SNCC ceded the moral high ground to, among others, the president it despised, Lyndon Johnson. In Johnson’s March 1965 address to Congress on the moral necessity of passing the Voting Rights Act — along with Lincoln’s second inaugural address, it remains the greatest of all presidential oratory — Johnson showed both verbal and moral eloquence: “It is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Mayor Joseph Smitherman of Selma said that hearing a white Southern president say those words was like “a dagger in your heart.” James Forman’s response: “That cracker was just talkin’ shit.”

One of the things Branch brings back so vividly is how unfashionable Martin Luther King became in the last years of his life. I choose the adjective deliberately. There were plenty of people willing to groove on the same fantasies of rebellion. Branch records a debate in New York City where Hannah Arendt, who was shortly after to formulate her own response to the revolutionary perfume in the air in “On Violence,” argued that “violence always arises out of impotence.” From the floor Arendt was challenged by Tom Hayden, who claimed democratic means had been exhausted for ending the war in Vietnam and racism at home (especially when you give up on the democratic process), and Susan Sontag, who said that arguments about the nature of violence dodged the question of action, “whether we in this room, and the people we know, are going to be engaged in violence.”

By 1966, Andrew Kopkind, writing in the New York Review of Books, said haughtily of King, “Whites have ceased to believe him, or really to care; the blacks hardly listen.” Shortly after, in the same pages, Kopkind was extolling as the true movement the National Conference for New Politics, at which H. Rap Brown had said, “We should take lessons in violence from the honkies. Lee Harvey Oswald is white. This honky [Richard Speck] who killed the eight nurses is white.”

It’s easy to dismiss Kopkind’s effusions and Hayden’s posturing and Brown’s psychotic babble as the nuttiness that’s in the air at any given time, and that eventually fades out of vogue. But the moment-to-moment style of Branch’s prose suggests the harm that fuzzy thinking can do in its own time, draining energy and thought from the hard work of forging change, and offering escapist fantasy from the sometimes untenable choices of real politics.

Which is not to say that nonviolence doesn’t present its own set of moral problems. When Arendt finally published “On Violence” in 1969 she acknowledged that nonviolent resistance can only be employed against a democratic country. Against a totalitarian country that used violence to force compliance, nonviolence is doomed. “Those who oppose violence with mere power,” she wrote, “will soon find that they are confronted not by men but my men’s artifacts, whose inhumanity and destructive effectiveness increase in proportion to the distance separating the opponents.” And strict adherence to nonviolence can produce its own inhumanity. In his essay “Reflections on Gandhi,” George Orwell noted that Gandhi said the correct pacifist response to the Nazi persecution of Jews was that the Jews should commit mass suicide and thus rouse the world to action.

But Arendt’s arguments provide a hardheaded reply to the charge that King’s nonviolence was merely fuzzy Christian humanism unsuited to the reality of his time. “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that may then follow,” she wrote. “Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What can never grow out of it is power.”

And that, in large part, is why King’s ideas truly deserve to be called radical when the fantasies of those who claimed he was out of touch remain such dangerous nonsense. When praising those who’ve been deemed moral leaders, people tend to overlook their pragmatism as if such common-sense concerns somehow invalidated their aura of saintliness. For King, nonviolence was clearly and primarily a moral principle. But it was also a practical one. He knew that many people who had not been convinced of the need for racial equality would be, understandably, turned off by violence. Which means that, for King, nonviolence was an act of faith that people were capable of change, and that the mechanisms of representative democracy were capable of enshrining those changing attitudes into the law of the land.

With this final volume, “America in the King Years” becomes unsurpassed in the last 50 years of American biography. Which is not to say that Branch has written a perfect book. His syntax is at times unnecessarily twisted, and he can be careless about identifying the figures in the story. The last section of this epic tale is fragmented in the telling, but that is perhaps unavoidable; the story itself is fragmented and thus, not as emotionally satisfying as the stories of the civil rights movement’s earlier triumphs. As King moved his campaign into the Northern ghettos (notably, Chicago), he found problems not given to such clear-cut moral victories. And as he began to speak out against the war in Vietnam, the moral thrust of the civil rights movement began to seem blunted — though with a disproportionate number of blacks fighting the war, and with funding for the war undermining the funding for LBJ’s Great Society programs, protesting Vietnam was a logical step. (Branch is merciless in detailing how the establishment press, particularly the New York Times, said King had no standing to speak on Vietnam. Those Op-Eds were the polite Eastern version of telling King to step to the back of the bus.)

But these are minor reservations about a book that gradually reveals a large-scale vision of democracy as an act of hope thrown down like a gauntlet. If one of the marks of greatness is that a person’s stature continues to grow after he is gone, then King is one of the titans of American history. Next to his example, what passes today for a politics of opposition seems puny, snobbish, a closed circle rather than one ready to expand to allow those willing to enter. It’s heartening to pick up the paper and read of the Georgetown students who protested Attorney General Gonzales’ speech justifying Bush’s domestic spying. A dozen of them simply stood and turned their back to Gonzales while others unfurled a banner that quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” As an act of protest it was simple, elegant and to the point, devoid of the grandstanding, the sheer thoughtlessness, that marks so much political speech.

What no one seems willing to say about the red state-blue state divide is that people on both sides like it because it allows them the dual pleasures of feeling superior and having someone to hate. I don’t doubt that the Bush White House would love to stifle dissent. But there is something skin-deep about arguing for dissent in an atmosphere where the dissenters have adopted the same simplistic moral scheme of those in power. We have become so scared of appearing to be on the incorrect side of an issue, so scared of seeming to give credence to the other side, that we are willing to eliminate inconvenient facts from our rhetoric, ignore ugly echoes. (It’s depressing to hear “sovereignty” cited as a reason against going into Iraq — a war I oppose. It’s the same argument used by segregationists of the ’50s and ’60s as a way of resisting integration. Arguing for the sovereignty of a tyranny is simply a means of legitimizing the oppression of its people.)

Against the current certainty on the right and the left that the other side is beneath contempt, not worth talking to — an attitude that leaves no possibility for real change and reduces democracy to majority tyranny, no matter who is in power — we have King’s belief in the ability of people and their country to overcome the worst in themselves. In his vision empathy is not appeasement but the beginning of change. In his introduction, Branch quotes the last words of Mickey Schwerner, spoken to the Klansmen who held a gun to his head: “Sir, I know just how you feel.” That’s the challenge this story throws down to us. How can any less be expected of those of us who don’t have a gun to our heads?

I stopped listening to contemporary country music a few years back. I was tired of the anonymity of the songwriting, of arrangements that sounded like some postmodern representation of country instead of music itself. And the music that sprang up in opposition, alt-country, was usually about as much fun as sitting bare-ass naked on a splintery bench. The alt-country artists sounded as if any expression of pleasure was a sellout. If mainstream country had become the equivalent of a shiny new SUV, alt-country was a dirty window with dead flies littering the sill. A choice between that shopping-mall dominatrix Shania Twain or Lucinda Williams’ wallflower moping was no choice at all.

What does it say that two of the biggest icons in country, Dolly Parton and George Jones, and country’s biggest contemporary female star, Martina McBride, have all turned their backs on contemporary country on their new records? Parton’s “Those Were the Days” is a selection of folk-rock covers from the ’60s and ’70s; George Jones’ “Hits I Missed … And One I Didn’t” consists of songs he turned down that became hits for other artists. The Parton and Jones albums aren’t played on country radio, but for Martina McBride to release “Timeless,” consisting entirely of classic country hits, is, whether she intends it to be or not, a gauntlet thrown at the facelessness of contemporary country. (That “Timeless” entered the country charts at No. 1 — and that Lee Ann Womack’s “There’s More Where That Came From,” which, from the cover art to the sound of the music, harked back to ’70s country, was one of last year’s biggest country albums — suggests that some country fans may be willing to throw down the gauntlet as well.)

Ever since her debut in 1992, Martina McBride has been a perpetual ray of hope in country music. She’s never equaled her first big hit, “Independence Day” — the witness of a true believer delivered as a scorched-earth sermon — which, after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is the greatest single of the ’90s. Her choice of material, her arrangements and production, have been as slick as anything mainstream country has to offer. And some of the songs, most notably those on 1997′s “Evolution,” had a treacly self-actualization subtext (the faux feminism country music adopted as a reaction to what has been so dimwittedly read as the submissiveness of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”).

Why, then, do I still listen to everything McBride does as soon as she does it? Because she has never once sounded defined by the commercial slickness of her material or musicians, has never seemed to be phoning it in, has never not sounded like a real person. Martina McBride possesses one of the truest voices I know, and while I have often wished for her to travel rougher territory, I have never doubted her sincerity or integrity.

Now, when you say someone has a voice, you have to be clear what you mean. The same can be said of every Trivial-Pursuit-answer-in-waiting on “American Idol.” What separates McBride from them and from most of her country and pop contemporaries is that she’s a singer. McBride shuns vocal gymnastics; she never sings four syllables where one will do. Her voice never goes shrill; the bigger it gets, the freer it becomes. Rare among contemporary singers, McBride is emotionally unfettered and yet also has an innate sense of what to hold back, how to suggest.

McBride opens “Timeless” with Hank Williams’ “You Win Again” as if it were a statement of ethics. The utter simplicity of the song, her faith in it and her refusal to embellish become a way of returning not just herself but the entire genre of country back to priorities.

At a generous 18 tracks, “Timeless” is the most satisfying album McBride has made, largely because she’s got great material, and also because of the way the material is presented. Acting as her own producer, McBride and her manager-husband, John (who recorded and mixed “Timeless”), have used mostly analog equipment (no guitars or amps newer than 1965, for example) to give the album a fat, warm sound, the sound you’d hear when most of these songs first hit the radio.

There are covers here of songs by Ray Price, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Ernest Tubb and others. All are good. Two of the songs, Buddy Holly’s string-laden ballad “True Love Ways” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” the Don Gibson song that was a smash for Ray Charles, virtually copy the arrangements of the song’s best-known versions. (“I Can’t Stop Loving You” even has the white-sounding backup singers Ray used.) That’s worth noting because there’s nothing that sounds like mimicry in McBride’s vocals. For a white country singer to cover “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a song that a black R&B master took from another white country singer, and still make her version true, suggests both chutzpah and confidence, the kind of confidence that doesn’t need to boast.

If I had to choose a song to sum up the special poignance country music is capable of, it might well be “Satin Sheets,” Jeanne Pruett’s 1973 song, which she herself promoted all the way to No. 1 after her record company told her it was “too country,” and which McBride tackles on “Timeless.” Pruett discovered it on an unsolicited tape sent to her by its composer, a Minneapolis factory worker named John Volinkaty. It’s a song about someone who’s found a life of unimagined luxury but who still pines for the true love who will give her what money can’t buy. That’s a classic setup for a country weeper, but the authenticity of the song can be summed up by one line — “tailor-mades upon my back.” That’s an example of specificity as instinctive genius. No one used to fine clothing would ever speak of it in that way, and the language reveals, as does the unalloyed carnal longing in McBride’s vocal, country’s simultaneous wish for material comfort and the distrust of it. The satin sheets and tailor-mades are distractions; emotion is the only real thing.

That’s as good a metaphor for what’s true in McBride’s music as anything could be. But the languid soaring she does on the song that closes “Timeless,” Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” sums up the album in another way. When Sammi Smith recorded it in 1971, it had the same impact on country that the Shirelles’ singing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” had on rock ‘n’ roll in 1962. That is, it was an open expression of a sexuality women were not meant to feel, let alone acknowledge. There’s something like a swoon in McBride’s voice in the way she accentuates the verb in “I don’t care what’s right or wrong,” as if she could will herself into the abandon she’s turning to for comfort. She’s holding coldness at bay here; beneath the longing in the singer’s voice is a hardness that says she knows just how temporary the comfort she seeks will be.

Emotionally, the song is all of a piece, and yet the first line of the chorus, “Yesterday is dead and gone,” is the only untruth on the album. McBride sings each song on “Timeless” not as a part of history, as something dead and gone, but as though each were a living thing, because, for her, these songs are alive. On the best album she’s made, Martina McBride has landed nearly all of contemporary country music in a pickle: How can we be satisfied with country music as it is now when this is its living past?

If the tension between pop and soul doesn’t seem so overt in the case of Sam Cooke, it may be because many people never assumed it was there. While a large portion of the black audience already knew Cooke from his tenure with the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, when his first hit single — that sweet summer breeze of a song “You Send Me” — brought him to national attention, he was seen by a much larger audience as just about the silkiest singer imaginable.

But if the tension seemed less present in the music, it was there in Cooke’s psyche, and the conflict between assimilation and individualism is the strongest overarching theme in Peter Guralnick’s new biography, “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.”

Guralnick had wanted to write a Cooke biography ever since meeting Cooke’s business partner, J.W. Alexander, in 1982. Other books intervened, none more time-consuming than his two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love.” Anyone who’s read the Elvis books knows that Guralnick is a scrupulous and thorough interviewer. The common thread running through all of Guralnick’s work is a commitment to decency. In every interview he does, he allows his subjects the space to present themselves, and trusts his readers to use their intelligence and instincts to make their own judgments.

Still, there’s one problem with “Dream Boogie.” While Guralnick the meticulous researcher and compassionate interviewer is present, the part of him that synthesizes and brings a critic’s eye to the story is absent here. This is particularly disappointing in the long section that comes about a third of the way into the book that covers the time between Cooke’s leaving the Soul Stirrers and his finding his feet in the pop world, alternating great singles like “Twistin’ the Night Away” with brassy albums of standards, and his establishing himself as both a star and a businessman. There’s no denying that business is key to the Sam Cooke story. But there are times when you wish Guralnick would cut through the details of the meetings and negotiations and simply tell us what it meant for Cooke to set up a publishing company, what it meant for him, along with Alexander, to found the SAR record label. (You can get a more concise view of this from the liner notes Guralnick has contributed to the new CD reissues of the Cooke albums “One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club” and “Night Beat.”)

It’s worth persevering, though, because “Dream Boogie” offers ample evidence that the historian-as-storyteller is still kicking around. Guralnick brings the gospel touring circuit of the ’50s and the soul circuit of the ’50s and ’60s to life and gets at how, in the temptations available on each, the sacred held no more sway than the secular. This is where his determination to let the story tell itself really does work. Guarlnick not only calls up a vanished milieu; his vivid portrayal of that scene helps to explain Cooke’s drive to move beyond it.

For all the fondness in Guralnick’s stories of traveling, boozing, womanizing (at one point, three different women gave birth to a child of Cooke’s at virtually the same time), for all the thumbnail vividness in the sketches of the characters and musicians Cooke met both on and off the road (“In mid-November they signed Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, a star on the L.A. R&B scene whose talent was exceeded only by his panache and by his ambivalence about whether he wanted to be a singer or a pimp”), the second-rateness of the chitlin circuit comes through. The performers are forced to stay in lousy hotels because the better ones are segregated, as are the restaurants. As far as the sight of a group of black men driving a new car in the South, forget it. At times it seems obvious that Cooke’s older brother, Charles, who’d had run-ins with the law, was hired as driver as much to keep him out of trouble as for the muscle he could provide.

And there was worse. For Cooke and for every performer on this circuit, there were too many examples of the dangers both within and without. The R&B singer Jesse Belvin died in a car accident caused by slashed tires, and the damage was thought to have been inflicted by white fans angered by Belvin’s refusal to play a segregated show. In the months before Cooke died in December 1964, Frankie Lymon had already been arrested for possessing heroin; he’d die a junkie four years later. The great Little Willie John would be arrested for killing a man in an argument. Ray Charles had been busted for heroin in Boston.

The horrors and humiliations of the road might have been enough to impress themselves on anyone. Cooke’s upbringing ensured they did. Cooke was the son of a conservative preacher, so it might be supposed that Cooke — who gave up sacred music for secular, who loved his women, who enjoyed all the advantages that money and being a truly beautiful-looking man brought him — was a rebel. In truth, he took his father’s advice to heart. “Respect your elders, respect authority,” Guralnick recounts it. “But if you were in the right, don’t back down for anyone, not the police, not the white man, not anyone.” It’s possible that what protected Cooke in some confrontations was the astonishment he provoked in others by being a black man who did not back down. Guralnick tells a story about Cooke’s running out of gas on tour in Memphis. Waiting for Charles to come back from the service station, Cooke was approached by a white cop who told him to move the car, to push it if he had to. “His name was Sam Cooke, and he didn’t push cars,” is what he told the cop, before finally saying, “You push the fucking car. You may not know who I am, but your wife does. Go home and ask your wife about me.” The unmistakable sexual nature of that taunt makes you gasp, as does the fact that Cooke got away with it.

“Dream Boogie” leaves you wishing that Guralnick had more fully explored how Cooke’s career embodied both the desire to integrate and the belief in black self-determination (and also how, if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had lived, how those views might have reconciled themselves). Cooke wanted to find the widespread popularity that Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte had (Belafonte’s “Calypso” LP had spent three years on the charts), which inevitably would have meant moving more toward the middle of the road. But he also seemed adamant that that popularity would give him the freedom to move beyond pop, to meld together all his influences, and to have an audience that was primed to follow him as he did.

Guralnick records several incidents that reveal Cooke was aware of the changes taking place in pop music. He admired the Beatles. Hearing “Blowin’ in the Wind” on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” inspired him to write “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which has rightly been called the greatest soul song of all time. And Guralnick quotes Bobby Womack, whose “It’s All Over Now” was covered and turned into a hit by the Rolling Stones, telling Cooke that this guy — Mick Jagger — couldn’t sing. Womack simply wouldn’t believe it when Cooke told him the Stones represented the future. (In fact, the Stones would soon be represented by Allen Klein, the accountant-turned-agent who managed Cooke during the last year and a half of his life. Not the least important accomplishment of “Dream Boogie” is its portrait of Klein, more complex and nuanced than others that have painted him as one of the principal villains in the breakup of the Beatles.) Could a man with such catholicity of musical taste (matched, from everything Guralnick tells us, by his omnivourous taste in reading) be satisfied with making middle-of-the-road pop?

Certainly those two recently reissued RCA recordings suggest not. “One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club” hints that Cooke still had some musical integration of his own to accomplish. Recorded at the Saturday night late show in a packed Miami club in 1963, it can stand with “Otis Redding Live in Europe” as one of the greatest live albums ever. This was the show Cooke did on the soul circuit, quite different from the one he’d record the next year before a largely white audience at the Copacabana in New York City (“Sam Cooke at the Copa”), and it took RCA more than 20 years to issue it. It’s a raw show; Cooke’s voice is raspy throughout and the sort of call-and-response interaction between performer and audience marks just how fully Ray Charles and others had succeeded in bringing the fervor of gospel into R&B. The accounts of Cooke’s live performances in “Dream Boogie” suggest that he relied largely on his voice to seduce a crowd instead of the theatrics that were a staple of Jackie Wilson’s act. Whatever his physical presence was that night in Miami, you can hear, just by the vocals, what whips the crowd up, why every song is punctuated by shouts of excitement. By the time Cooke and the band reach the closer, an extended “Having a Party,” you feel as if you could die from sheer happiness, and as if you’re ready to.

“Night Beat,” which might be the only satisfactory studio album Cooke completed in his lifetime, suggests that Cooke was well on his way to merging the direct emotion of soul with the sheen of pop. Obviously taking some inspiration from the “themed” albums Frank Sinatra had made at Capitol in the ’50s, “Night Beat” aims to get the feel of the blues and spirituals (the album opens with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and includes numbers by Willie Dixon and Charles Brown) into a relaxed late-night groove. The album succeeds in creating a sound that is both mellow and deeply emotional, which, of course, is not a contradiction in terms.

The best argument for why Guralnick the critic should be more present in “Dream Boogie” (the title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem) is that Cooke was at his most complex in his music. For much of this book, Sam Cooke comes off as somewhat indistinct. Everyone Guarlnick interviews tells us he was a charmer, highly motivated and ambitious, but they also refer to a veiled side. And while we see the flashes of temper, the ease with which he left groups and labels when he had a chance to further his own career, the callous attitude he had toward women (including his second wife, Barbara, who had fallen in love with him when she was a little girl), he remains something of an enigma — except in the music.

Cooke comes most alive toward the end, when he is both realizing his greatest popularity and suffering as he never has following the drowning death of the infant son who, because of (unfounded) doubts of his siring, he held distant in his affections. And it’s those washes of darkness and turmoil that serve Guralnick so well in the account of Cooke’s death suggesting that some sort of recklessness wasn’t out of the question. Cooke was shot to death by Bertha Lee Franklin, the proprietor of a $3 Los Angeles motel. He had gone to the motel with Erica Boyer, a hooker and, more to the point, a roll artist (someone who picked up men, took them to a hotel and, before any sex had taken place, absconded with their money). What happened there will always be a matter of dispute. Boyer claims she was kidnapped by Cooke and escaped with Cooke’s clothes when he went into the bathroom. Cooke, coming out and finding most of his clothes and money gone, started banging on the motel office, demanding Bertha Lee Franklin produce the girl. They got into a rough scuffle during which Franklin fired a shotgun into him.

Even if, as is likely, the homicide was justifiable, there are questions that have never been answered about whether, also as likely, Cooke was Boyer’s specifically chosen mark for the night. A private investigator hired by Allen Klein was on the verge of finding out, but Klein, fearing the results would damage Cooke’s reputation, dropped the investigation as he was requested to do by Cooke’s widow, Barbara. Inevitably, as with so many pop deaths (Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain), all sorts of conspiracy theories have sprung up about the killing.

It was not uncommon to hear Cooke’s death talked of, bitterly, as the comeuppance that a racist society metes out to black men who got above themselves. Without diminishing Cooke, without denying Erica Boyer’s probable culpability in creating the situation that got Cooke shot, Guralnick understands the death as the sad, stupid waste of life and talent that resulted from Cooke putting himself in a very bad position.

For all the things that keep “Dream Boogie,” a solid, scrupulous, thoughtful biography, from being a truly great book, there’s no doubt that rock ‘n’ roll history, and, hell, American history, needs Peter Guralnick. His magisterial work on Elvis Presley, which can leave you feeling unmoored for days, convinced that you have just read, as Guralnick claims, “the saddest story” he knows, can stand alongside Taylor Branch’s ongoing “America in the King Years” and Robert Dallek’s two-volume life of LBJ as one of the greatest recent accomplishments in American biography. No subject Guralnick approaches in popular music is likely to have that immensity. But there are still pieces of the story of American music that call out for his perspicacity and decency and smarts.

We are in a period where, instead of turning our cultural past into the vast library it promised, technology has, by its pace, accelerated the culture of disposability. The CDs and DVDs available to us may form a library of the past, but the speed of our culture encourages us never to get past the new-releases wall. Rock journalism — God, even that name sounds like a relic — far from being the great enterprise it seemed 30 years ago, has given way to a sort of undifferentiated fandom. There is simply too much music for any critical sensibility to present a clear overview of our pop present. And so the solipsism Lester Bangs envisioned in his obituary for Elvis has, just as he predicted, come to hold all the cards. Too much pop music criticism no longer seems even interested in talking to an audience beyond the small one that will already know what the writer is talking about.

Which is why, even at the risk of seeming a mere archivist or even an old fogy, Guralnick needs to bring his talents to other figures who are in danger of becoming relics of a past that many people no longer believe they should care about. Buddy Holly and Otis Redding are just two of the titanic figures who need solid biographies written about them, as does an artist Guralnick has written about so lovingly in the past, Charlie Rich, still the least acknowledged great American singer of the 20th century. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to work on the scale that Guralnick does. I pray for his stamina. Our past needs the love and respect he continues to show it.