Two savory reviews of biographies in tomorrow's New York Times: A.O. Scott on Zachary Leader's Life of Kingsley Amis and Bob Christgau on Joe Strummer. Christgau gives Chris Salewicz's Redemption Song a formalist thrasing; he's flummoxed by the author's subordinate clauses and inability to grasp the complexity of a figure as titanic as Strummer. Leader's book sounds infinitely more entertaining, not least because of Amis' own aesthetic wanderlust. This is the Amis whose amiably monstrous ego consumes most of son Martin's attentions in the latter's autobiography Experience. Scott:

Suspicious of the exclusionary difficulty of modernism, he was among the first to take a serious critical interest in popular “genre” literature, producing a scholarly study of science fiction (originally delivered as Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton) and two books about James Bond, and insisting to a skeptical Christopher Hitchens that the movie “Beverley Hills Cop” was “a flawless masterpiece.”