“Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night,” by Jason Zinoman (Harper).

Courtesy Harper

Every few months, and even more often during the summer, my mind crowds and I lose my ability to concentrate. It lasts three days, or a week, or, catastrophically, two; my reading stalls out and so, soon after, do my sentences. For years, the remedies were music and comedy specials—they still do the trick, if too slowly—but recently I’ve learned that biographies work, too. That familiar one-thing-after-the-other rhythm comforts me somehow. Maybe a month ago, I picked up Jason Zinoman’s “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night,” which chronicles, with the kind of light, spacious prose that was all I could take at the time, the early years of David Letterman’s career, from his undergraduate radio shows, through the experimentalist NBC “Late Night” years, to the beginning years of his final show, “Late Night,” before slipping into summary toward the end. I liked that the book was essentially about writers. Sure, Zinoman had to draw a detailed sketch of Letterman himself—mostly his steadily accumulating deposit of strange anxieties—but he writes best about Merrill Markoe, the undersung comic genius who shepherded those early shows, creating classic bits like Stupid Pet Tricks along the way. Markoe—whose role in the creation of the Letterman legend has probably suffered, Zinoman notes, because she once dated Letterman—also helped to hire the next generation of Letterman writers, some more obviously talented or sane than others. Lots of those writers, in keeping with the larger trend in comedy, were products of the Harvard Lampoon. Writing for Letterman—who kept withdrawing into himself and, after Markoe’s departure, all but stopped taking ideas from his writers—sounds awful. But I loved reading about it. Sometimes it’s helpful to watch somebody else struggle.

—Vinson Cunningham

“Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z,” edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar (NYU Press).

Courtesy NYU Press

There is an oft-repeated and ill-attributed quote about the utility of music writing—something about dancing; something about buildings—that gets smugly trotted out whenever someone thinks a music critic could use a quick deflating (which is pretty often). Yet “Shake It Up,” a new anthology of rock journalism edited by the novelist Jonathan Lethem and the scholar and critic Kevin Dettmar, makes an irrefutable argument for the strange, lingering beauty of good music criticism—how it can explode the otherwise familiar experience of listening to a pop song. Describing sound in evocative and meaningful ways isn’t easy; “Shake It Up” collects pieces by some of America’s finest practitioners, beginning with Nat Hentoff’s liner notes for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and including essays and reviews by Lester Bangs, Eve Babitz, Ellen Sander, Chuck Eddy, Ann Powers, David Hajdu, Ellen Willis, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Chuck Klosterman, Greg Tate, and many more. Pop criticism is still a fairly new practice—we’re about a half century in now—but it’s nice to be reminded of its wildness and its potency. I’ve been reading and rereading and re-rereading these pieces.

—Amanda Petrusich

“Killings,” by Calvin Trillin (Random House).

Courtesy Random House

I’m touring the country with Calvin Trillin this summer. His legendary book of reportage, “Killings,” which was reissued this spring, is a collection of fifteen years’ worth of a column he used to write for The New Yorker called “U.S. Journal.” He’s described the beat as “writing about America without an emphasis on politics and government.” It turned out that writing about murder was a pretty nifty way to profile people and places. So, every few months, he shuttled to a far-flung town to peer into some madcap saga. The pieces are weird and funny, disturbing and macabre. Unfailingly, they transport you to a specific place, where you’re invited to walk around for a bit.

—Jonathan Blitzer

“Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” by Laura Kipnis (Harper).

Courtesy Harper

I recently read and enjoyed—if that’s the word—“Unwanted Advances,” Laura Kipnis’s critique of contemporary campus feminism. I’ve been an admirer of Kipnis’s work since I reviewed in this magazine a much earlier book, “Against Love,” her arch and energetic polemic against coupledom, published in 2003. (Caveat lector: after the review was published, Kipnis and I were introduced at—of all places—a wedding; we have since become friends.) “Unwanted Advances” grew out of her own disorienting experience of being the object of a Title 9 complaint at Northwestern, where she is a professor of film, and where students marched in protest against an article she had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education that critiqued the institutional policing of student-teacher sexual relations. Kipnis is a feminist and an ironist; her mode is one of analytic inquiry combined with spiky humor. Comparing today’s university with her own art-school past, she writes, “Safety, the watchword of the contemporary campus, would have been a term of derision for us, reserved for a painting that matched the sofa.” As she recounts her own case, and examines in detail the case of a fellow-professor at Northwestern who was obliged to resign after being charged with sexual misconduct, Kipnis adeptly applies the now unfashionable but enduringly illuminating insights of psychoanalysis, with mordantly compelling results, to the actions and motivations of those who have become ensnarled in institutional scrutiny.

—Rebecca Mead

“Jean Renoir: A Biography,” by Pascal Mérigeau, translated by Bruce Benderson (Running Press).

Courtesy Running Press

Perhaps no great filmmaker lived as turbulent and varied a life as did the French director Jean Renoir, who started on the shoulders of his father, the Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, passed through the freewheeling and politically treacherous Paris of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and left for Hollywood on the eve of the Second World War, never to live in France again. (He died in Beverly Hills in 1979.) He’s most famous for “Grand Illusion” and “The Rules of the Game,” from the late thirties, and Pascal Mérigeau’s ample biography of him (published in collaboration with RatPac Press, founded by the filmmaker Brett Ratner), which I’m in the middle of reading, illuminates Renoir’s wide-ranging artistic energies and inspirations, his teeming private life, and the crucial milieu that informed him. Jean grew up wealthy and playful; nearing thirty, in the nineteen-twenties, he started making movies for kicks and soon got very serious about them. Mérigeau carries Renoir and his passionately artistic ambitions through the hard-nosed business of prewar Paris (where Renoir sympathized with the far left and made friends on the far right) and to Hollywood (that’s the part I’m at now), where he made some great films and travelled in great circles. (Mérigeau comes as close as possible to being a virtual fly on the wall at Renoir’s 1944 dinner with Erich von Stroheim and D. W. Griffith.) The section regarding Renoir’s efforts to maintain relations with France’s Vichy regime—and to protect members of his family living under it—while arranging his own emigration to the United States is a harrowing vision of the moral compromises that political persecution and the desperate quest for refuge often impose. The book is over nine hundred pages long, but a word to readers on the road: it’s a paperback and the paper is thin—not too much of a schlep.

—Richard Brody

“The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy,” by Julia Cooper (Coach House Books).

Courtesy Coach House Books

The summer that Princess Diana died, I requested of my mother mourning skirts. I was five years old. My mother chose to read into my desire to participate in the rituals of public grief—I was never squeamish, only curious, when brought to the coffin of a family member—a sign of maturity. Twenty years later, I am still that morbid child. I am also convinced that summer is our true mourning season. No wonder I lost myself in Julia Cooper’s “The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy.” Cooper, a film critic and the former managing editor of Cléo, the Toronto-based feminist film journal, has an assertively cool touch as she goes through our canonical moments of collective bereavement, scouring them of sentimental gloss. She disliked, for example, the spectacle of Diana’s “fairy tale funeral,” which she argues served as a rehabilitative parade to the fraying concept of Englishness more than as an actual commemoration of Diana’s life as she had chosen to live it. “Diana had migrated from the accepted image of a lily-white fairy-tale princess to that of a wanton woman eager to embrace the foreign other,” she writes. (Funny how that cultivated whiteness made Diana my other.) Cooper’s sharp analyses include those of eulogies we’ve heard in real life, as well as in film and theatre. Holding together her arguments are clear-eyed reflections on her own process of grieving for her mother, who died from cancer in 2004. But “The Last Word” is never just mournful. An especially fun chapter confidently blitzes through too-honest “non-eulogies” given by Cher; Derrida; and John Goodman, as Walter, in “The Big Lebowski.” There are times I don’t agree with her polemics, and that only engages me further. For example, Cooper disdains the trend of grieving for celebrities on social media. (“Online there is a need to be timely in your mournful gesturing—get that content out there and get it circulating, strike while the iron is hot.”) Fans’ imagined connections to their deceased idols represent one of the few instances, to me, in which the Internet has a capacity for sweetness. Perhaps grief is a matter of taste. I am grateful that Cooper is pushing against the eulogy as we hear it, a kind of speech that we fear to admit has degraded to positive-thinking cliché. Critique is a sort of compassion.