Cover of the NYT BR

Patti Smith can now sing “I’m on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.

Well, maybe it doesn’t scan as well, or have the cache of “on the Cover of The Rolling Stone,” but she’s already achieved that milestone.

And, perhaps it doesn’t mean as much as the fact that her book, Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe debuts at #7 on the new NYT nonfiction best seller list, or that holds are heavy in libraries and building fast.

The review says that  Just Kids,

…is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she’s always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed.

The Washington Post was equally laudatory, in a review that makes you regret the book isn’t on your nightstand right now.

As part of her book tour, she appears at the Chicago Public Library on February 21.

Just Kids
Patti Smith
Retail Price: $27.00
Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Ecco – (2010-01-01)
ISBN / EAN: 006621131X / 9780066211312

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