Prophetic America

"[Lenny] Bruce began doing conventional stand-up but soon broke out and started speaking his mind. He made fun of Catholics, Jews, everyone. Talked about sex. A New York critic called him 'a truthteller, a kind of prophet, the kind that goes right back to Ezekiel.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Rich Cohen reviews Stephen E. Kercher's Revel With a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America.


"At its best, Marcus' work, which takes as much inspiration from Elvis as it does from Alexis de Tocqueville and 20th century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen, has always been ecstatic, channeling the drive and irreverence of rock'n'roll into a mission to illuminate the furthest—and often the most obscure—reaches of American culture, from hillbilly singers to B-movie directors to the likes of Puritan leader John Winthrop, President Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."

And Mark Rozzo reviews Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice.