On "Street Diva"
Also in the latest New York Review of Books, Arthur Kempton reviews Julia Blackburn's With Billie. The book builds from interviews and "documentary scraps" made by Linda Kuehl, a Billie Holiday fan who committed suicide in 1979. The book sounds great, and Kempton's description of Holiday's life, especially her long friendship with the similarly doomed saxophonist Lester Young, is heartbreaking.
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