Reviews

Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen

Stephen Osborne

Book best read while standing in the aisle: the Leonard Cohen Must Be Getting Old By Now Memorial Volume. Title: Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen (Muses Company). Photo of Lenny on cover. So who gets to celebrate the celebrated Canadian all Canadians get to celebrate when they're in another country? The answer is available in the present volume and, although we all ought to be in it by default (haven't we all been celebrating L.C. vigorously for decades?), consists predictably of the usual gang of suspects—along with a few token foreigners. An embarrassing book filled with embarrassing stuff; we don't read a book like this one, we peek into it, as we peek into a friend's high school annual, looking for the inept endearments, the ill-considered fondnesses, the failed witticisms, that stand as a memorial to a time that none of us wishes ever to live again.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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