Primarily a jazz critic, Gary Giddins is also keenly interested in cinema and modern American literature, and this book brings together over thirty of his most perceptive pieces. There are portraits of such music legends as Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Kay Starr, and Dizzy Gillespie, and appreciations of writers of the calibre of Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, Eudora Welty, and Raymond Chandler, and such movie greats as Sam Goldwyn, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, and Myrna Loy.