Long recognized as America's most brilliant jazz writer, the winner of many major awards--including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award--and author of a highly popular biography of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection , he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume. The range of topics is spellbinding. Writing with insight, humor, and a famously deft touch, he offers sharp-edged perspectives on such diverse subjects as Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Marlon Brando and Groucho Marx, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan, horror and noir, the cartoon version of Animal Farm and the comic book series Classics Illustrated . Giddins brings to criticism an uncommon ability, long demonstrated in his music writing, to address in very few words an entire career, so that we get an in-depth portrait of the artist beyond the film, book, or recording under review. For instance, Giddins offers a stunning reappraisal of Doris Day, who he terms "the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow ballads in film history." He argues eloquently for a reconsideration of the forgotten German-language novelist Soma Morgenstern. In a section on comedy, he offers fresh perspectives on the three great silent film stars--Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd--while resurrecting the legendary Jack Benny and reevaluating the controversial Jerry Lewis. There's also a memorable look at Bing Crosby's film career (he calls Crosby's blockbuster Going My Way "a neglected masterpiece") and a close examination of Marcel Carne's beloved Children of Paradise . Of course, Giddins also supplies excellent commentary on jazz: major and underrated figures, and especially the uses of jazz in film. A wonderful gathering of little-known treasures, Natural Selection will broaden the perception of Gary Giddins as one of our most important cultural critics. Giddins is that rare creature, the deadline-driven journalist with a distinctive voice. This collection also reveals that, while best known for his award-winning writing on jazz, his range is really quite remarkable. Besides jazz, he writes authoritatively about film noir, silent comedy, and contemporary fiction; about Jack Benny and Friedrich Durrenmatt; and, in intelligent, heartfelt reflections on a youth spent reading it, that late but seldom lamented comic-book series, Classics Illustrated. Not every editor has appreciated Giddins' insistence on speaking his mind, and Giddins reveals in the autobiographical introduction that his negative review of Lady Sings the Blues in Hollywood Reporter cost him that particular writing gig. Happily, he has spent most of his career writing for publications like the Village Voice , for which he wrote the jazz-oriented column "Weather Bird" for more than 30 years, and the New York Sun , which appreciates strong writers with strong opinions. Just as happily, Giddins has chosen to corral the best of his elegantly written, exquisitely argued pieces, most of them written in the last 15 years or so, for this eclectic collection, which should please film buffs, jazz fans, and anyone, really, who loves the fine art of literary journalism. Jack Helbig Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "A critic who wears his erudition lightly, writes with an impeccable combination of verve and sobriety and, above all, makes you see (and hear) the objects of his ruminations.... An engaging mind fully engaged with significant cultural objects in which it finds useful, surprising resonances.... We see our culture more clearly because of the force, intelligence and alertness to overlooked detail that Giddins brings to his readings of a past that remains stubbornly, if sometimes only subliminally, present in our own less acute remembrances."-Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times "Just try to read all of 'Natural Selection' without buying at least a few CD's and DVD's; the Criterion Collection should pay Giddins a commission."-- New York Times Book Review "In an age of blogs and the everyman critic, it's reassuring to know people as brilliant as Giddins are still ready to offer insights only a true critic can provide. This is an exceptional addition to a remarkable career.... Nowhere else in his works do we find such a wide range of subjects, which proves his perceptive talents and in-depth knowledge of the mediums of which he writes are unequalled."-- Library Journal (starred review) "Gary Giddins is well known for his sensitive and brilliantly insightful books and articles about jazz, but it turns out he is equally at home, and equally enthralling, writing about the movies (foreign and domestic), TV and radio personalities, fiction, authors of all sorts, and even rock music. The essays that make up this Natural Selection , taken individually,