Shortfall

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of several books including Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, and Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking (The New Press). She lives in Los Angeles.

Praise for Shortfall"A lively and informative treatment in which one man's rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical landscape in all its finely drawn detail."—Kirkus ReviewsPraise for Hot Stuff"In this expertly rendered, wide-ranging history of one of pop’s most exciting social and musical movements, Alice Echols thoroughly recovers the moment in which disco was born and flowered."—Ann Powers, NPR"Echols’s love of music, her acumen about popular culture, and her gifts as a leading cultural historian come together in this remarkable book. . . . Fascinating, carried along by prose that is as sleek and slinky as its subject."—Christine Stansell, University of Chicago"Engrossing . . . scholarly but fun."—The New York Times"Echols aims for—and thoroughly achieves—a range of higher cultural insights. . . . Revelatory."—Publishers WeeklyPraise for Scars of Sweet Paradise"Written with cinematic flair, Scars of Sweet Paradise takes us on a poetic wild ride where we confront Joplin’s demons, her dreams, and her pains. In the process we discover a passageway into the social and cultural history of an entire generation."—Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA"Stunningly original and evocative. . . . No previous writer has identified Joplin’s achievements as successfully as Echols does in this book."—George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa BarbaraPraise for Shaky Ground"Alice Echols is that rarest of breeds: a great historian and a great writer. She captures, as no one else has, the dizzyingly absurd complexity of American culture and cultural politics in our times."—David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst"Alice Echols makes brilliant, fresh, original sense of the contradictory Sixties—the music, the politics, the people. No one has done more to place the era in context—its own and ours."—Katha Pollitt, The Nation