''Going into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man'' is a 2015 memoir by American music critic

Robert Christgau Robert Thomas Christgau ( ; born April 18, 1942) is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and ...

Content

According to NPR, the memoir "takes the reader through the music that inspired hristgau'scareer, the women who sharpened his work over the years, and a childhood spent in Queens, where he learned from the DJ who gave rock 'n' roll its name." Christgau also pays tribute to the influence of his wife and fellow writer,

Carola Dibbell Carola Dibbell (born April 4, 1945) is an American music journalist and author. Biography Dibbell was born in New York City and grew up in Greenwich Village. She attended Hunter College High School and is a graduate of Radcliffe College. Her sho ...

. "Her aesthetic responsiveness was unending", he wrote. "No one affected my writing like Carola."

Critical reception

Writing for the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'',

Dave Itzkoff David L. Itzkoff (born March 2, 1976) is an American journalist and writer who is a culture reporter for ''The New York Times''. He is the author of ''Cocaine's Son'', a memoir about growing up with his drug-abusing father. Before joining the '' ...

gave the book a favorable review, saying, among other things, that the chapter about Christgau and his wife's difficulties conceiving a child was "surely one of the book’s most touching sections." Henry Hauser of '' Consequence of Sound'' compared the book favorably to Christgau's reviews, saying they were both "dense, tight, and brimming with insight." Writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', Joanna Scutts said that in the book, Christgau "embraces" the challenge of "saying something new and distinctive...with undimming energy."

References

External links

* {{Robert Christgau 2015 non-fiction books Dey Street books American memoirs Books by Robert Christgau