This is an Amazon Best Book of February 2019. The book is primarily an expose of the practice of concerts using recordings piped into sound systems and turned-off microphones in presenting music programs. The author was a violinist hired to perform as a musician to a dead mike to fool the audience into believing they were witnessing a live show. The first seventy or so pages go back and forth often to her upbringing in West Virginia and Western Virginia, but the rest of the book mainly focuses on her career performing around the country. The author has a great sense of humor, calling the act “Milli Violini,” for example. “It’s difficult to write a funny, angry book. It’s even harder to write a merciless, empathetic book. But here comes Jessica Hindman, doing the impossible with a funny, angry, merciless, empathetic book that’s not only a hugely entertaining memoir, but an insightful meditation on a time in our nation’s recent history whose strange and ominous influence grows more apparent by the day.”
- Tom Bissell. “An evocative portrait of America’s literal and figurative landscapes, an incisive look at class and gender, and an examination of what authenticity means.”- Justin St. Germain. The author, Jessica Hindman, has degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Creative Nonfiction from Columbia and a PhD in English from North Texas State. She teaches at Northern Kentucky University.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. 250 pages. Hardback in dust jacket