“Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead” is Phil Lesh’s 2005 autobiographical exploration of himself and his decades of playing bass with what is arguably the 20th century’s hardest-working rock band. He especially digs into the Dead’s formative years — the drugs (the band attended Ken Kesey’s [...]

Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” tells of the probably-not-cuckoo Randle Patrick McMurphy, a jokester, card player, womanizer, fighter, criminal, and Korea vet. He ends up in a mental ward after faking a fight to get off a work farm. At the ward, he lives among the Acutes, [...]

Anyone who has called Gainesville home for even the briefest glimpse has likely heard the scattered icons that the city contributed to rock ‘n’ roll. Among the most recognizable: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Eagles guitarists Don Felder and Bernie Leadon, and Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, [...]

Many believe the Groveland Boys were innocent, and today, city and county governments, the Florida Senate and concerned citizens are pushing for the state to apologize, exonerate and pardon the four. In light of that effort, Gilbert King — author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winningDevil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, [...]

On the first day of class, Paula Trepman is skeptical. Before her is Thomas E. Hill’s 1878 painting Palo Alto Spring, depicting a get-together of the affluent Stanford family on its farm, the future site of the university bearing the family’s name. First, Trepman and other students in the class silently [...]

Photo of my copy — I recently wrapped up Stephen King’s 2001 “memoir of the craft” (better late than never, freshman English class.). In On Writing, the horror master offers the inside scoop about himself, how he climbed the ladder to literary stardom, his drug and alcohol addictions, and the 1999 wrestling [...]