In the mid-1980s, the author dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University and joined a duet as a harmonica player with an older black guitarist named Mister Satan, with whom he toured Europe and recorded three CDs as Satan and Adam. He recalls those days in this memoir, which can be alternately viewed as homage to blues music, a meditation on American race relations, an elegy to a friend lost to cancer, or, in the words of one critic, "an endless, meandering busking session, punctuated by moments of surpassing intensity and stretches of pointless noodling." This is a paperbound edition of a work first published in 1998. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)