Fables of Abundance; A Cultural History of Advertising in America »

Jackson Lears is the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, and the editor (with Richard Fox) of The Culture of Consumption and The Power of Culture. He is professor of history at Rutgers University.

This invaluable biography of trumpeter and jazz-bebop-fusion innovator Miles Davis (1926–1991) includes a substantial new introduction that for the first time details Davis’s turbulent last decade; the drawing and painting that became an additional creative outlet; the musical lows of his final “Freaky Deaky” years; the family warfare that has erupted over his last will and testament; and—in a long-awaited exposé—the truth behind Davis’s so-called Autobiography, the book that “borrowed” gigantic portions from Milestones and passed them off as Davis’s. Jack Chambers breaks his silence to discuss the extent of the “borrowing” and who was responsible. Here is the last word on the music and controversial life of Miles Davis.

New York Review of Books

Lears is one of cultural history's masters of linnking popular moods and ideas with arts, philosophies, industries, and commodities.